Socken

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may , discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (January 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Ekers socken in Närke on a map of Örebro hundred

Socken is the name used for a part of a county in Sweden. In Denmark similar areas are known as sogn, in Norway sokn or sogn and in Finland pitäjä/socken. A socken is a country-side area that was formed around a church, typically in the Middle Ages. A socken originally served as a parish. Later it also served as a civil parish or an administrative parish, and became a predecessor to today's municipalities of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Today it is a traditional area with frozen borders, in Sweden typically identical to those of the early 20th century country-side parishes. The socken also served as a registration unit for buildings, in Sweden recently replaced by identical districts as registration unit. A socken consists of several villages and industry localities (company towns), and is typically named after the main village and the original church.

Sweden[]

History[]

Socken, in old Swedish sokn (compare: Danish and bokmål sogn, nynorsk sokn) is an archaic name for the original country church parishes, kyrksocken. It also describes a secular area, a sockenkommun ("rural area locality") or a taxation area, a jordbokssocken.^[1][2] In the Nordic countries a socken was an administrative area consisting of several villages or localities in much the same way as the civil parishes in England, but the concept is not used in reference to towns. A socken had a socken church, it was governed by a socken council and it was the predecessor to modern municipalities^[3][4]

In 1862, the kyrksockens ("church socken") and the sockenkommuns ("rural area locality") in Sweden were abolished as administrative areas during municipality reforms. The jordbrukssocken ("taxation area") remained in use until the Fastighetsdatareformen ("Reform for registration of real property") 1976–1995 was complete.^[5] No further alterations to the sockens was made after this.

On 1 January 2016, a new administrative division and area for statistics, registration districts or simply districts, was introduced in Sweden. Geographically, the districts correspond with the parishes of the Church of Sweden as of 31 December 1999. About 85% of the old sockens corresponds with the new districts.^[6][7][8]

Even though the term socken is no longer used administratively in Sweden, it is still used for cataloging and registering historical archives (Swedish National Heritage Board), botany, dialect research, toponymy and by local historical societies. Socken is a convenient parameter for these purposes since it does not change with time.^[9]

Lists of sockens[]

Skåne, a place where socken is in use

Gotland, a place where socken is in use

Dalarna, a place where socken is in use

• List of sockens in Sweden on Swedish Wikipedia, sv:Kategori:Socknar i Sverige

See also[]

• Administrative divisions of Sweden
• Civil parishes in England
• Historical region
• Hundred (county division)
• Municipalities of Sweden
• Parish (Denmark)
• Parishes of the Church of Sweden
• Soke (legal)
• Swedish municipal reforms of 1862
• Townships of the People's Republic of China

References[]

Further reading[]

• Almquist, Johan Axel (1917–1923). Den civila lokalförvaltningen i Sverige 1523–1630: med särskild hänsyn till den kamerala indelningen. Meddelanden från svenska Riksarkivet, 99-0506720-5; 6 (in Swedish). Stockholm: Norstedt. Retrieved 16 June 2014.

• Lagerstedt, Torsten (1973). Den civila lokalförvaltningens gränser 1630–1952: kameral redovisning, areell beteckning och gränsförändring. Meddelanden från Kulturgeografiska institutionen vid Stockholms universitet, 0585-3508; B 24 (in Swedish). Stockholm. Retrieved 16 June 2014.

• Litzen, veikko (1977). "Om socken". Historisk Tidskrift för Finland. Helsingfors: 331–335.

• Svensson, Patric (1999). Peter Aronsson & Lennart Johansson (ed.). "Att skapa ordning och reda: administrativa förändringar på landsbygden omkring 1870–1940". Stationssamhällen. Växjö : Univ., 1999: 146–154. Retrieved 16 June 2014.

External links[]

• Swedish Tax Agency, Parishes in Sweden, historical–current.(in Swedish)
• Swedish National Heritage Board, List of towns and sockens.(in Swedish)

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (June 2014) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Swedish article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 825 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Socken]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|sv|Socken}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.