An important event in Sweden during the past two years was the Government decision to appoint a committee for the Swedish language. Its mission was to investigate the situation of the Swedish language and to present an action programme that could protect and strengthen the position of Swedish. Why the need for such a committee? Well, the language situation in Sweden has changed a lot in the last few decades.

Sweden has changed into a more multilingual society, primarily because of immigration (there are between 150 and 200 immigrant languages, spoken by together almost 1 million people) but also as a result of the elevation some years ago of five languages to the status of national minority languages: Finnish, Saami, Torne Valley Finnish, Rom and Yiddish.

Furthermore, English has won an increasingly strong position internationally, thereby also becoming a more and more important language in certain domains, such as science, higher education and industrial and commercial life.

The Committee has put forward a number of suggestions to promote the use of Swedish in various fields. It also recommends that a special act be introduced that establishes the status of Swedish as the official language of Sweden. Moreover, the Committee suggests that a new Language Authority is set up, beefing up the organized language work with additional resources.

In the suggestions of the committee regarding plain language activities they also pay close attention to questions related to the work within the EU, and they stress the importance of plain language efforts within the various bodies of the union, e.g. the "Fight the fog" campaign at the Commission.

The Comprehensibility Evaluation
Evaluation of comprehensibility
Last year, an evaluation of the comprehensibility in texts from public authorities was carried out by the Swedish Agency for Administrative Development. The evaluation focused on three different kinds of text: brochures, reports and administrative decisions. For each of these kinds of text, a questionnaire was designed in order to identify comprehensibility problems as well as features that facilitate understanding. These questionnaires were applied to nine different, highly representative, texts written by employees of different public authorities, who regularly write these kinds of text. Linguists, with experience in plain language work, also commented upon the texts scrutinized.

Authority texts have changed
The results of this two-step evaluation show that texts from public authorities actually have changed during the last decades. Above all, there has been great improvement as to vocabulary. Complicated and old-fashioned words traditionally used in bureaucratic texts have become less frequent. One explanation of this improvement might be that these words have been "blacklisted" by the Plain Swedish Group for some time. This effort seems to have paid off.