For more on adjectives, check out beginner lesson #9 and our grammar post on adjectives.

Comparison

Swedish adjectives work like in English and other Germanic languages. We have comparative and superlative. On this site we’ll call them stage 1 and stage 2 to make it easier for you. The basic form is called positive. Adjectives get the ending -are in the first stage and -ast in the second stage.

Words already ending on -el, -er and -en only get -re and -st when compared:

Some adjectives change their stem vowel: u > y, o > ö and å > ä.

There are of course some adjectives that are totally irregular. They change their whole stem in stage 1 and stage 2.

Most Swedish adjectives are compared by adding endings to them but some are compared by using mer and mest, so it’s not completely different from English. This is for instance true for all words ending on -isk:

Other than this, there are no real rules for which adjectives are compared in the first or second way. You should note, however, that most long adjectives seem to use the second way like spännande (mer spännande – mest spännande) and intressant (mer intressant – mest intressant). In addition this is true for concatenated words meningslös (mer meningslös – mest meningslös). Generally you’ll have to learn which is the most commonly used way.

If you compare two things, like two countries, we use the Swedish conjunction än (than).
Example: Tyskland är mindre än Sverige. Germany is smaller than Sweden.

Europäiska länder / European countries