Norwegian. During the second half of the 19th century, the use of a standardised written language increased with each new method of communication and transportation. It was, however, only in the 1960s that the major demographic situation of Sweden had changed from a quite rural and agrarian society to today's highly-urbanized society, when the spoken varieties converged towards unified dialects whose vocabulary and grammatical rules adhered to that of the written Standard Swedish. The different phonologies, particularly the different realizations of the tonal word accents, have remained more varied. With respect to other aspects of the spoken language, there are developments towards a unification that is not always the effect of standardisation or convergence. For instance, the fricatives in Central Standard Swedish have undergone a change in recent decades toward those of Southern Swedish, than those of Northern Sweden and Finland. Finland The creation of the autonomous Russian Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809 drastically decreased communication between Sweden and Finland, but Swedish remained the language of administration and higher education until Finnish was given equal status in the late 19th century. The position of Swedish gradually eroded in the 20th century, as population shifts from industrialisation and war increasingly caused many ethnic Finns to move to the traditional coastal and urban Swedish enclaves. In reaction, Swedish-speaking Finns renewed their cultural and linguistic connections with Sweden and a Högsvenska, based on the current variety spoken by educated mainland Swedes, emerged. However, alienation between the two countries by the lack of tangible support from Sweden during both world wars, the Finnish Civil War, and the Åland crisis gradually led to Högsvenska being seen as the prestige dialect of Finland Swedish. In the second half of the 20th century, tensions between the centre and the periphery in Finland made the concept of a spoken standard variety less popular, and the spoken Swedish in Ostrobothnia again oriented towards Sweden, particularly when switching to more elevated registers. That resulted in a relation between Standard Swedish as spoken in Western Finland aa opposed to Southern Finland, which mainly echoed the relation between Standard Swedish as spoken in Central Sweden, as opposed to Southern Sweden. See also Swedish phonology Swedish Language Council Notes References Bolander, Maria (2002) Funktionell svensk grammatik Engstrand, Olle (2004) Fonetikens grunder Definition of the goals of the Swedish Language Council External links The official website of the Swedish Language Council (mostly in