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Municipal flags (Sweden)

Last modified: 2021-08-25 by christopher oehler
Keywords: sweden | heraldry | municipal flags | banner of arms |
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A general note on regional and municipal flags

All Swedish municipalities, provinces (landskap) and counties (län) have official flags derived directly from their arms, in the form of banners-of-arms, if they have arms (which most of them have). The flag is a square representation of the shield of the arms.

(Aside from this, many regions and provinces have their own, unofficial flags. Municipalities are not always aware of what their official flag should look like, and are often using other flags, often as a white flag with the arms upon.)

Elias Granqvist 13 August 1999

Municipalities (kommuner)

Sweden has municipalities. The ordinary municipality is called kommun. Before the beginning of the 1970's, there were three types of municipalities in Sweden, stad ( = town or city; pl. städer), köping and landskommun ("country municipality"), but now there is only one type, even if some of the municipalities previously known as towns are using the term town for themselves. The territory of a municipality never crosses the border of a county (län).

These municipalities, the communes, are "primary municipalities". There are a couple of them in most counties. There are also "secondary municipalities" (landsting). The landsting usually do not have arms or flags, they only use logotypes. Just as in other municipalities, the highest political body in a landsting is elected in direct popular elections. A landsting has in most cases exactly the same borders as a county.

Elias Granqvist, 3 July 2003

Flags of the municipalities

Note: Since Flags of the World is written in English, the Swedish municipalities are also ordered according to the English alphabet here, thus disregarding the Swedish order of having å, ä and ö as the last three letters of the alphabet. Endonyms (local names) are set within brackets when they differ from the English name.

Landsting and Regions

Now we have another type of subdivision in Sweden, the region. The name is influenced by regions set up in other member states of the European Union. In Sweden, a region has de facto come to be the same thing as a landsting but with some more questions to decide about, which have before been decided by the county. There are two such regions, one in each of the two new counties set up in the 1990's by merging a couple of older counties - i.e. there is one region in Scania and one in Western Gotaland.

Elias Granqvist, 3 July 2003

Editor's note: These regions, as are the landsting, are legally a form of municipality, so if there are flags for them they will be presented at pages linked from this page.