Landsting

Landsting may refer to:

Landsting (Denmark)

The Landsting was a house of the Rigsdag in Denmark from 1849 until 1953, when the bicameral system was abolished. The house had powers equal to the Folketing, which made the two houses of parliament hard to distinguish.

Originally membership and the electorate was restricted, and the members were largely conservatives. Membership of the house was then restricted to certain sectors of society: only males with a certain net worth could hold a seat. In 1915, these restrictions were removed, and a few new members were appointed by the existing members.

History

Under the Constitution of 1849, the requirements for the right to vote was the same for the two houses, however the requirements for electability was stricter for the Landsting; candidates were limited to those of age 40 and above and they were required to have a substantial income. The house originally had 51 members, all elected indirectly. The voters elected a group of electors for each constituency, and the electors elected the members of the house. The members were elected for a term of eight years; however, half of the seats were up for election every four years.

Swedish language

Swedish ( svenska  [ˈsvɛnːˈska]) is a North Germanic language, spoken natively by about 9 million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish (see the section "Classification"). Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by number of speakers.

Standard Swedish, spoken by most Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized.

The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, which means that the finite verb appears in second position of a declarative main clause. Swedish morphology is similar to English; that is, words have comparatively few inflections. There are two genders, no grammatical cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Older analyses posit the cases nominative and genitive and there are some remains of distinct accusative and dative forms as well. Adjectives are compared as in English, and are also inflected according to gender, number and definiteness. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes (endings), complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles. The prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a highly variable consonant phoneme.