How to use the dash in Swedish
The dash (tankstreck) is a punctuation mark I have mixed feelings about. I like it where it actually adds something, and dislike it when it's used carelessly, or written as a hyphen where it should be a dash. (Its siblings the colon and semicolon get their own post.) It's my own summary of the rules as laid out in Siv Strömquist's Skiljeteckensboken.
What it does
The dash marks a break or a deliberate pause, and it emphasizes whatever comes next — a quiet "hold on, here's the point":
Han öppnade dörren och såg – ingenting.
It can replace a comma in front of an addition, a reservation or a summary, and it can mark a trailing modifier on its own:
Bättre möten – en handbok för chefer.
Two dashes wrap a parenthetical insertion. This is especially handy when the sentence already has commas doing other jobs, because the dashes keep the insertion from drowning:
Mina favoritverktyg – penna, sax och tejp – ligger alltid framme.
Spacing
As a punctuation mark — a break, a pause, an insertion — the dash always takes a space on each side: text – text, never text–text. The one exception is ranges, below, where it takes no spaces at all.
Dialogue (talstreck)
A dash can introduce direct speech; then it's called talstreck, replikstreck or pratminus. Each new line of dialogue starts with one, indented and followed by a space:
– Hann du med tåget?
– Nej, det gick precis framför näsan på mig.
You may tidy spoken forms into written ones (dom → de/dem), but you can't change the wording or the meaning. When you re-quote something that has already appeared in print, switch the talstreck for quotation marks. And thoughts get no dash at all:
Hon tänkte: Det här fixar jag.
Ranges (från–till, mellan–och)
A dash also expresses a span — a period, a distance, a relation:
Öppet 10–18.
Konferensen pågår 3–5 juni.
AIK–Djurgården slutade 2–1.
förhållandet arbetsgivare–anställd
In this function the dash takes no spaces around it — which, together with its length, is what sets it apart from the hyphen.
Dash or hyphen?
The dash (tankstreck, "–", U+2013) and the hyphen (bindestreck, "-", U+002D) look almost the same — the dash is just a little longer — but they do opposite jobs. The example that finally made it stick for me:
Tåget Uppsala–Stockholm var fullsatt. — dash
en svensk-engelsk ordbok — hyphen
The hyphen joins parts into a single word. svensk-engelsk is one adjective: a dictionary that is Swedish and English. The two halves fuse into a single concept, so they get a hyphen, with no spaces.
The dash links two independent units and marks the relation between them — "from X to Y", "between X and Y". Uppsala–Stockholm is the route between two separate cities; they never merge into one word, and the dash reads as "to". So it gets a dash, also without spaces in this function.
So the test is: does it build one word or one concept (→ hyphen), or does it span or relate two things that stay independent (→ dash)?
The two can even meet in the same term. In Cauchy–Schwarz-olikheten, the dash sits between the two independent names — the relation between Cauchy and Schwarz — while the hyphen attaches that pair to the noun it builds.
An aside on AI
Since 2025 the dash has had a reputation problem: heavy dash use became a tell for AI-generated text. Strömquist's own take is that people who genuinely like the dash shouldn't have to give it up — and that the tools will probably dial it back to an average level soon enough. For what it's worth, this post was written with an AI, and I've tried to reach for the dash only where the rules above actually call for it.