Swedish has several ways to say that someone is in a bad mood. You can be a little irriterad because someone is chewing too loudly. Sur because the coffee has run out. Arg because the train has been cancelled. And förbannad when the train has been cancelled, the coffee has run out and someone is still chewing too loudly. The words are related, but they do not feel the same. They sit at different points on the mood scale, from a slight crease between the eyebrows to the

Swedish has plenty of ways to talk about plans. We plan dinners, meetings, trips, workouts, phone calls and small, ambitious projects that begin with the words “det vore kul att” (“it would be nice to…”). Then life happens. Someone gets ill. The train is delayed. It starts raining sideways. Nobody books a table. Everyone is tired. One person writes “vi hörs sen” (“speak later”), and suddenly three months have gone by. That is when Swedish particle verbs come to the r

Some Swedish words are so short they almost look like sounds. Nja. Tja. Jaha. They may seem unimportant, almost too small to bother explaining. But in everyday Swedish, they do a lot. They can show hesitation, lack of enthusiasm, surprise, acceptance, scepticism, or simply change the whole tone of a conversation. The tricky thing is that they do not just mean one thing. Their meaning often depends on tone of voice, facial expression and situation. The same word can soun

Swedish has always borrowed words from other languages: German, French, Latin, Greek and, these days, very often English. Sometimes words enter Swedish looking rather formal, like implementera (“implement”), digitalisering (“digitalisation”) and strategi (“strategy”). Other times, they stroll straight into everyday life in trainers and say: mejla, dejta and streama. The interesting thing is not just that these words come from English. The interesting thing is what happens n