 The traditional definition of a Swedish dialect has been a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by the standard language and that can trace a separate development all the way back to Old Norse . Many of the genuine rural dialects , such as those of Orsa in Dalarna or Närpes in Österbotten , have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features , such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections . These dialects can be near @-@ incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes , and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish . The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål ( lit . " parish speech " ) . They are generally separated into six major groups , with common characteristics of prosody , grammar and vocabulary . One or several examples from each group are given here . Though each example is intended to be also representative of the nearby dialects , the actual number of dialects is several hundred if each individual community is considered separately . 
