Swedish The Language

There's an interesting linguistic theory about the relationship between the language we speak and our thought processes. According to this theory, a native English speaker, for example, would think about certain concepts very differently than, say, a native Hopi speaker. You can read a brief but interesting account of this phenomenon in this article. For the linguistic buffs out there, here is a link that goes rather more in-depth.


So with that stellar introduction, it is now my turn to take you down the path of my own personal observations of Swedish. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Imagine the world without my Completely Unqualified linguistic commentary. Scary, isn't it? You're welcome.

One of the most important things I've noticed about the Swedish language is how similar it is to the English language. I am far from a lingual expert, but I have studied French, German, and Swedish all to at least a passing degree of familiarity, and I can say that grammatically and vocabularily (is that a word?), Swedish is much closer to English than either French or German. In addition to the obvious vocabulary similarities (book is "livre", "Buch", and "bok" in French, German, and Swedish, respectively), the grammatical structure is very similar to English. Unlike German, Swedish nouns do not undergo any nasty declensions (eg. "The dog ran" and "I hugged the dog" would use the same word for "the dog"). Unlike French, the word order mostly makes sense (eg. "I love you", directly translated, is "I love you", instead of this "I you love" silliness).


There are a few minorish differences, though. One is the gender system. Swedish and the other Scandinavian languages are, as far as I can tell, unique in their gender system. Swedish has two genders, but unlike the classical "masculine" and "feminine" distinction, Swedish nouns are "common" and "neuter". There are rather more common nouns than neuter nouns, and the main distinction that I can find is that neuter nouns are less likely to be people or other living things. There are, however, exceptions to this – "barn" is Swedish for "child" or "baby", and is a neuter noun.



Swedish is also a fairly synthetic language. This makes it reasonably easy for a someone (read: me) who doesn't speak the language to understand a lot of vocabulary that I don't actually know. For example, dictionary is "ordbok" (Word+Book), future is "framtid" (Forward+Time), Toast is Rostbröd (Roasted+Bread), and so on and so forth.



Another interesting anachronism is "I'm sorry". First of all, Swedes are not big on apologies in the first place, so if a Swede apologizes to you, brace yourself for some seriously bad news. On the scale of "You didn't REALLY like your laptop, did you?" or "Whoops, I thought the safety was on that gun".
So how, exactly, do Swedes apologize? They say "Förlåt mig", which directly translates to "forgive me". This always throws me off a little… shouldn't I get to decide whether or not I forgive someone? It feels a bit strange to me that a Swedes way of apologizing is to demand forgiveness, but… Swedes can be a bit brusque that way.


Similarly, Swedes are not big on saying "How are you?" as a common greeting. There is an equivalent – "Hur mår du?" – but I get the feeling that it is used more when there is a genuine desire for an information transfer – eg. "You just returned to work from minor surgery. Hur mår du?" – rather than "Good morning, I haven't seen you since yesterday at five o'clock. Hur mår du?" Except they would actually never say that much, because they consider excess verbosity to be a sign of weakness*.


*Case in point: Many Swedes will take you by the shoulders and physically move you if you are in their way in a public place rather than say "excuse me"


The most informative glimpse into the Swedish lingual psyche, though? I would have to say it is the Swedish word "gift", which means both "married" and "poison".


So if a Swede proposes, before you make a rostbröd to your framtid, get out the ordbok and make sure you really know what they're talking about.


And if they follow their proposal with "förlåt mig", just start running.