English vs. Swedish 1-0

English vs. Swedish 1-0

  • Submitted By: Thorssa
  • Date Submitted: 10/28/2008 2:46 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 677
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 376

English have been a big part of different areas in Swedish society since the technological globalization started. In Swedish schools it’s an important subject, in fact mandatory until ninth grade. The typical Swede is also exposed to the English language pretty much on a daily basis through television, music, computers (games/internet) and literature. In the example of television, only children’s programmes are generally dubbed into Swedish, while basically all other programmes are kept with their original language, and only translated through subtitles for the viewer. Same goes for most computer games, though there we usually never even find any subtitles. In professional life English are most commonly used by air-traffic, large international companies and some part of the military.

On a more social level, speaking from my own experiences is that we (I say “we” as in me and basically all people I know of my age) tend to use the English language more and more, to describe things, when we can’t find a suitable word in Swedish, often since it just doesn’t exist any word of equal meaning. And in extreme instances also take regular English words, put Swedish endings to them, to make them more suitable to our speech.
A typical example for me is the word “random-s”, a word which I and most of the people around me use with a couple of different meanings in Swedish. It can for us mean something or someone of no real importance to the context. i.e. “And when the party was in full bloom, we even had randoms dancing in the kitchen” in a degrading context, where the subject you dislike is someone or something you don’t know “some damn random stole my pen!” and of course with it’s original meaning, since it just sounds better then the Swedish equivalence. It simply becomes some sort of slang.

Something which I find quite interesting though, is the way the progression of the two languages have developed through time, Nordic languages have been a part of the development...

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