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A major problem for students of Swedish is what can be perceived as a lack of standardization of pronunciation:
STANDARD PRONUNCIATION Contrary to the situation with Danish , or Finnish there can't be said to exist any completely uniform nation-wide spoken Standard Swedish . Instead there are (at least) three regional standard varieties ( Acrolects or Prestige Dialect s), i.e. the most intelligible or prestigious forms of spoken Swedish, each within their area. The three main varieties are:
These may in turn be further divided, the varieties of major urban centers such as Gothenburg or Malmö may in some contexts be added to the list, and border areas may show mixed characteristics. Central Standard Swedish is the most widely spoken and the most dominant of these. The differences in the Phonetics of these various forms of Standard Swedish can be quite considerable, although as a rule less marked than between more localized Register s, including major differences in: The differences may be compared with those of General American , Australian English , and the British Received Pronunciation . In Swedish, the Central Swedish variety may go under the name of ''rikssvenska'' ("National Swedish"), but which can be used by linguists as a term comprising all types of Standard Swedish spoken in Sweden contrary to the Finland-Swedish. Similarly, Finland-Swedish may go under the name of ''högsvenska'' ("High Swedish") that however has become a controversial and emotionally loaded term that also has changed meaning in the course of the 20th century. Most Swedes consider all other varieties of Swedish than the standardized Central Swedish Standard as used in formal circumstances as Dialect s. Dialectologists, reserve the term for genuine rural dialects that have kept grammatical and phonetic structures that are much more distinctive from the Standard Language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects from the second half of the 19th Century . The most significant difference between the way people speak Standard Swedish is Prosodic . There are however also some marked differences with regard to the realization of particular phonemes and assimilations:
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