Swedish is interesting for several odd features:

• It has a lot of vowels, some with unusual lip rounding. Long and short pairs differ also by position.
• It has a sound found in no other language (the sj sound) which has several variants
• Words may have two stressed syllables
• It is mutually intelligible with (but not identical to) Danish and Norwegian.

On top of its unusual phonology, Swedish also has odd orthography, the result of phonological processes, historical sound changes and the insufficiencies of the Roman alphabet. This makes it a good candidate for Musa.

Consonants

	pojke		tand				katta
	sparrisknopp		start		bort		skick
	barn		dag		bord		gata
	fader		sand		sjuk		kjol
	vagn		land		Karl		hand
	man		natt		barn		våning
	jord		rang		port		r (Skåna)

The aspirated letters in the top row are used at the beginning of stressed syllables, as in English. The retroflex letters in the third column are used to show that the -r sound combines with a following consonant.

The unusual sj-ljud, IPA ɧ, is written in Musa as , kind of a sh with some weird lip action. But there are many variants, ranging from a velarized labiodental  to a labialized velar . When not at the beginning of a stressed syllable, it's often a retroflex sibilant . Spell it as you say it! Meanwhile, the tj-ljud, IPA ɕ, is written as an alveolo-palatal sibilant.

The initial r also has two different letters. At the beginning of stressed syllables, it's a normal alveolar trill, although in Skåna (the southern part of Sweden, which used to be Danish), it's pronounced as a guttural r like in Danish. Otherwise, it's pronounced as a retroflex approximant and colors the adjacent vowels.

Most of these consonants can be geminated, in which case they're simply written twice.

Vowels

							
sill	sil	syll	syl	full	ful	bott	bot
							
hetta	hel	nött	nöt	begå		moll	mål
					
häll	häl			matt	mat

There are two contrasting front close rounded long vowels, differing mostly in whether the rounding is protruded or compressed. Front y is unusually protruded, which we write with a w offglide. Front u is the normal one, written with a yw offglide which becomes a Long mark. But the short u is lowered without being lax.

The low vowels are lowered when followed by an r or a retroflex consonant, but Musa doesn't write that.

The begå vowel replaces the hetta and hel vowels in unstressed syllables, at least in some dialects. Other vowels may also be reduced when unstressed.

Tones

Like English or German, Swedish distinguishes stressed and unstressed syllables : stressed syllables are pronounced longer, louder and with a pitch fall. Unlike English and German, Swedish and Norwegian have pitch tones on their stressed syllables. There are two tones, acute and grave, but the pitch contours vary by dialect. For Stockholm Swedish, they could be written like this:

	
ánden the duck	àndén the spirit

Swedes all agree on which syllables are stressed, and whether the tone is acute or grave, but they pronounce them differently in different dialects. But the acute tone is always short - it sounds like stressed syllables in English or German, for example. The grave tone is spread out over two (or more) syllables, and sometimes has two peaks: one on the first syllable and another on the second. We take advantage of that to write them in a way that works for all dialects: we write the grave accent with high vowels in BOTH syllables.

	
ánden the duck	àndén the spirit

Sample

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



Envar sin egen lyckas smed