"Filmen var inte alls lika dålig som du sa."

Translation: The movie was not at all as bad as you said.

[JANBOEVINK]

I wrote -sade- though I heard -sa- and was surprised DL rejected it, even more surprised after reading the comments of the three moderators. If I hear -dom- I write -de-, so what is different here?

[devalanteriel]

They're both generally accepted, but the "type what you hear" exercises have a bug which causes only one of them to work. Since sade is rapidly approaching formality if not obsoleteness, we use sa as the default.

[JANBOEVINK]

Thanks for your trouble, devalanteriel!

[fl1cka]

But "sade" is the actually correct grammatical form and is not accepted.

[devalanteriel]

Both forms are grammatically correct, and sade is accepted except for "type what you hear" exercises.

[axzwell]

Sa and Sade, more accurate to say Sade??

[Zmrzlina]

Nobody says "sade", but in written Swedish both "sade" and "sa" are perfectly fine, even in formal contexts.

[devalanteriel]

I disagree, I don't think sa would be generally accepted by an editor in most formal contexts. For less formal writing it's obviously perfectly fine, like you say.

[Lundgren8]

I did a small corpus study, and the trend seems to be that literature uses sa more than sade whereas sade is more common in newspapers. In blogs sa is overwhelmingly more common. I tried doing a search for more formal texts like texts from administrative authorities, but the verb isn’t used much in those texts so it yielded few results.

LITERATURE:

• Literature from 1999: 8199 sa vs. 3958 sade (2.07 sa on every sade)
• Literature from 1981-2: 10190 sa vs. 2669 sade (3.08 sa on every sade)
• Literature from 1976-77: 18822 sa vs. 11601 sade (1.62 sa on every sade)
• Literature from 1830-1942: 2984 sa vs. 12164 sade (0.24 sa on every sade)
• Finland-Swedish literature from 2000-2013: 2474 sa vs. 913 sade (2.70 sa on every sade)

NEWSPAPERS:

• Dagens Nyheter 1987: 1072 sa vs. 2054 sade (0.52 sa on every sade)
• Göteborgsposten 1994: 4894 sa vs. 9838 sade (0.49 sa on every sade)
• Göteborgsposten 2013: 4008 sa vs. 6139 sade (0.65 sa on every sade)
• Webbnyheter 2010-13: 13507 sa vs. 82408 sade (0.16 sa on every sade)
• Finland-Swedish newspapers 1998-2013: 3314 sa vs. 43661 sade (0.07 sa on every sade)

BLOGS:

• Bloggmix 1998-2013: 184194 sa vs. 16113 sade (11.43 sa on every sade)

[devalanteriel]

Nice digging. :)