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 fairly easy to translate. And then there are words like lagom. It is often translated as “just right”, “not too much, not too little”, “in moderation” or “the right amount”. All of those are roughly correct. But none of them quite captures the full feeling. Because lagom is not just an amount. Sometimes it is a temperature, a tone, a way of dressing, a way of speaking, a way of taking up space in a room without knocking over the lamp. In short: lagom

Some Swedish words are so small they almost slip past unnoticed. They sit quietly in the middle of a sentence, often unstressed, rarely explained, and almost impossible to translate neatly. And yet they can change everything. Three of these words are väl, nog and ju.