 A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the late 1960s , with the so @-@ called du @-@ reformen , " the you @-@ reform " . Previously , the proper way to address people of the same or higher social status had been by title and surname . The use of herr ( " Mr " or " Sir " ) , fru ( " Mrs " or " Ma 'am " ) or fröken ( " Miss " ) was considered the only acceptable mode of initiating conversation with strangers of unknown occupation , academic title or military rank . The fact that the listener should preferably be referred to in the third person tended to further complicate spoken communication between members of society . In the early 20th century , an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni ( the standard second person plural pronoun ) , analogous to the French Vous . ( Cf . T @-@ V distinction . ) Ni ( plural second person pronoun ) wound up being used as a slightly less familiar form of du ( singular second person pronoun ) used to address people of lower social status . With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s , these previously significant distinctions of class became less important , and du became the standard , even in formal and official contexts . Though the reform was not an act of any centralized political decrees , but rather a sweeping change in social attitudes , it was completed in just a few years from the late 1960s to early 1970s . The use of ni as a polite form of address is occasionally encountered today in both the written and spoken language , particularly among younger speakers . 
