Swedish surnames are the surnames which are held by individuals hailing from Sweden in Scandinavia and also people within the Swedish diaspora, many of whom live in the north of the American Midwest in states like the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Swedish surnames are overwhelming derived from medieval patronymics and are identifiable in that they end in ‘sson’. For instance, Johansson, the most common Swedish surname of all, means ‘son of Johan’.
History of Swedish surnames and naming conventions
Zlatan Ibrahimović, widely considered the greatest Swedish football player of all time, is an example of the New Swedes, individuals of Swedish birth who do not have traditional Swedish surnames
Sweden was something of a late bloomer when it comes to the development of surnames in Europe. While surnames began to emerge in countries like England, France, Italy and Spain between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries as a way of describing a person’s occupation, a famous ancestor, where they were from or some physical characteristic they had like the color of their hair, this did not occur for the most part in Sweden. Instead patronymics, whereby a person was identified as the son or daughter of a parent, prevailed until well into the early modern era. It was only in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that surnames were fully adopted across Sweden and when they were the overwhelming tendency was to simply formalize the use of the patronymic. Thus, surnames like Johansson (son of Johan), Eriksson (son of Erik), and so on and so forth, were adopted as surnames. These are still overwhelmingly prevalent across Sweden today.[1]
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a person would scarcely come across a surname in Sweden that wasn’t a Swedish patronymic or some habitational or occupational surname of some kind derived from Old German. But the surname landscape of Sweden has begun to change considerably over the last half a century as there has been significant migration to Sweden from other parts of the world. For instance, in the 1990s Sweden took in many political refugees and asylum seekers from the Balkans during the height of the Yugoslav Wars.[2] Similarly, Sweden took in upwards of 150,000 Syrians and Afghans at the height of the European Migrant Crisis in the mid-2010s. This has resulted in a more varied surname landscape across Sweden today.[3]
Most popular Swedish surnames and their origins
The most popular Swedish surnames tend to be as follows:[4]
Johansson – The most common surname in Sweden, held by a quarter of a million of the country’s ten and a half million people, or one in forty-two people, it is a traditional patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Johan’.
Andersson – Like Johansson this is a standard patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Ander’. It is the second most common surname in Sweden, with nearly a quarter of a million people bearing it as well.
Karlsson – The third most common surname in Sweden, Karlsson means ‘son of Karl’, with Karl being the Swedish equivalent of Charles. Upwards of 190,000 people in Sweden today are Karlssons.[5]
Lindberg – This is only just amongst the twenty most common surnames in Sweden today, but it notable as the only one amongst the twenty most common which does not end in ‘sson’. Instead Linberg is a toponymic descriptor originally deployed to describe somebody who lived near a forest of linden trees on an elevated hill or mountain.
Geographical spread of Swedish surnames
There is little geographical variation or spread when it comes to Swedish surnames across the country today. For many centuries Sweden was a relatively insular country that experienced little foreign influence or inward migration and so Swedish surnames remained fairly evenly distributed across all parts of the country. This has changed slightly in recent years in so far as the arrival of people of different ethnic backgrounds, whether from Syria, the Balkans or elsewhere, has primarily been to the cities like Stockholm, Malmo and Gotthenburg. One is unlikely to come across people of different surnames in more rural areas and particularly in the thinly populated and more remote north of Sweden.
Swedish surnames were broadly confined to Scandinavia for much of early modern history, despite abortive efforts by the Swedish state to establish a colony on the east coast of North America in the seventeenth century (known as New Sweden in the region around the state of Delaware today). However, as with many other European nations, industrialization in the nineteenth century led to hundreds of thousands of Swedes leaving their country to immigrate to countries like the United States. In total, in the century from 1830 to 1930 over 1.2 million Swedish people left Scandinavia and headed to North America. In the process they transplanted Swedish surnames en masse to the United States and in particular parts of the north of the Midwest around the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wyoming which became large centers of migration from Scandinavia and Germany during this period. Consequently, one will find Swedish surnames in significant numbers in this part of the United States today.[6]
Famous people with Swedish surnames
Ingrid Bergman, one of Sweden’s great actresses who won three Academy Awards. Her surname indicates that an ancestor was a ‘mountain man’ or perhaps a ‘miner’Ingrid Bergman – One of the most acclaimed actresses of the twentieth century who won three Academy Awards. Her surname developed as a way of indicating that an individual was a ‘mountain man’, ‘berg’ being the Old German for ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’. The name was often applied to miners in the late medieval period.
Sven Goran Eriksson – A well-known football manager who experienced considerable success in Italy in the 1990s and coached the English national team between 2001 and 2006. His surname is a common one in Sweden and a patronymic surname literally meaning ‘son of Erik’.[7]
Stellan Skarsgard – An accomplished Swedish actor who has starred in many award-winning films such as Good Will Hunting. The origins of the Skarsgard surname is disputed, but it most likely is a toponymic or habitational name derived from the village of Skarlov in Kalmar County in southern Sweden.[8]
Gustavus Adolphus – A seventeenth-century King of Sweden who is famed for leading Sweden’s armies during the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany from 1629 onwards. Adolphus is derived from the Old German words for ‘noble wolf’.[9]
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