I have always wanted to speak my grandfathers’ language. That’s not a mistakenly placed apostrophe. I have two Swedish grandfathers, my farfar (father’s dad) and my morfar (mother’s dad). Farfar was from a village not far from the large industrial southern town, Malmö near Denmark and Copenhagen, in the Swedish province of Skåne. The morfar is from a remote rural village near Härnösand, which is on the Bothnian coast. It’s so interesting having family from two very different parts of Sweden.
My morfar was banned from speaking Swedish in the home, as his parents were worried he wouldn’t fit in, in America. His father had emigrated from Skåne, the eldest son of a farming family, who left for America, leaving his brother- 2nd son of 10 children- to inherit. These are the relatives I visited, Ingrid and Östin. My mother and I had been corresponding with Ingrid for quite some time, as she had done tons of genealogical research. I visited in January 2009 to a snow-less Skåne, and proceeded to speak Swinglish with her and Östin for a few days. I was very charmed by Sweden, which fueled my desire to learn the language even more, stateside.
While Ingrid spoke English very well, many times I was with my cousin who spoke almost no English. He taught me, on a train ride to Copenhagen, the vowels of Swedish, along with some phrases. As you may or may not known, Skånan Swedish has very distinct vowel differences, as well as some consonants. I admit that while I am personally interested in learning this dialect, the commonly taught Swedish accent is from speakers in Stockholm. I was teased pretty heavily by a Stockholm friend when I attempted pronouncing some words. We’re thinking of adding a few vocabulary boards by a Stockholm speaker so you can see the dialectal variation between regions. That’s another blog post, ha.
One of the hardest things for me, in learning Swedish, is how it can tease you with cognates. I felt like I was constantly getting the gist of a conversation, when in reality, I couldn’t translate one word. English and Swedish are so similar, yet that can make it harder to learn. There were periods where I listen to Swedish and actually convince myself I understand. It’s a hard area to negotiate- picking out the words and realizing that they are truly foreign. It’s almost like a dialect of English that you can lure yourself into thinking you know.
My favorite language lessons while in Sweden:
- We had horseradish soup for dinner, and that was a very difficult word to decipher. Mostly because it’s never sold in America in its raw form. The resulting word is : pepper soup, pepparrot soppa, pepper + root. Our word, of course, makes no sense horse + radish, ha.
- Looking out onto a beautiful winter lake, and squirrels are running around the trees. My cousin tries to find the English word for squirrel, we look it up, and it’s a cute word- oak + black grouse (ekorre)
More blog posts I’ve written about Sweden, mostly about food:
- Split-pea Soup Thursdays
- Fish Salad & Horseradish (also a photo of my Dad who is Swedish-American, of the Northern people)
Language Requirement 