Tricia Anderson, age 14, of Carson City, Nev., for her question:

HOW DID THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE DEVELOP?

The Swedish language, which is the language of Sweden and of Swedish settlers in other parts of the world, belongs to the northern or Scandinavian branch of the Germanic languages. It is a subfamily of Indo European languages.

The Swedish language is an eastern development of the language known as "Donsk tunga" or "Danish tongue," spoken not only in Denmark but in all of Scandinavia even before the early Middle Ages.

The Swedish branch of this common tongue developed into a separate language during the period 900 and 1500 and is called Old Swedish. Until after 1200, the only records of the language are runic inscriptions, cut primarily on tombstones and memorial stones.

The Latin alphabet was introduced to the language in the 13th Century. The written language, based on two of the most widely spoken dialects, was made uniform throughout all of Sweden in the 14th Century.

The main body of the Swedish vocabulary is of old Germanic stock. The principal foreign ingredients are Latin and Greek words that came in with Christianity.