# Swedish vocabulary



## laurent485

Hi, I am learning Swedish now. I find that there are a lot of words borrowed from French and Latin. I am wondering how Swedish vocabulary is made up of: percentage of words of Swedish/Norse origin, of (low) German origin and especially of French & Latin origin. Besides, is it possible to replace words of French and Latin origin by those of Germanic origin? Finally, are there any initiatives of linguistic purism in Sweden? Thanks


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## Wilma_Sweden

laurent485 said:


> Hi, I am learning Swedish now. I find that there are a lot of words borrowed from French and Latin. I am wondering how Swedish vocabulary is made up of: percentage of words of Swedish/Norse origin, of (low) German origin and especially of French & Latin origin. Besides, is it possible to replace words of French and Latin origin by those of Germanic origin? Finally, are there any initiatives of linguistic purism in Sweden? Thanks



I've been unable to find any figures regarding the number of borrowed words. I think it is safe to say, however, that the percentage of Germanic vocabulary is higher than in English, and although some Latinate words can replace Germanic ones (often with a more abstract or formal sense), it is nowhere nere to the same extent as in English, i.e. there are fewer Germanic/Latinate synonym pairs than in English. 

There's no active linguistic purism going on, although nowadays, borrowed words are often adapted to Swedish 'phonetic' spelling. This is particularly notable with English words, for example web site = > webbsajt etc. Foreign words are also adapted to Swedish syntactic morphology, i.e. they get Swedish inflectional suffixes: sajt-en, sajt-er-na. Språkrådet (The Swedish Language Council) recommend doing so, rather than using English plural -s, for example.

This was meant to be a brief answer to a huge question. I'm sure some of the other Swedish-speaking foreros have additional opinions or facts.

/Wilma


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## jonquiliser

I imagine it's difficult to put the matter in figures, as words can often be borrowed back and forth with certain shifts of meaning. Anyway, I don't know much about this issue.

Regarding purism, maybe not in Sweden, but we do have our own version of linguistic purism here in Finland; any sort of "finlandismer" (fennicisms?) is frowned upon in certain circles . As far as I know there are no attempts though to recover a 'lost proto-Swedish". If someone tried, they'd soon enough run out of words for pretty much anything .


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## cocuyo

Particularly in technical fields, most European languages have borrowed or imported a lot. The Nordic languages are no exception. Hence in navigation and seamanship, Dutch and Low German borrowed words prevail, whereas we also have many exports, above all to English. This is of course due to cultural interchange and trade between these countries. 

There are some (rather) new attempts at creating new original words in the technical fields, sometimes fruitful. Hence Swedish is one of the few languages to create an original word for the computer. From first being an _electronic brain_ and _data machine_ which was cumbersome both in speech and writing, the word _dator_ was invented, analogous with motor (about half a century ago).

However, we do not share the mania of the Icelanders of turning every new contraption into our own language form. Many borrowed words also have perfect Swedish equivalents, and the usage of the borrowed form is sometimes scorned at, but may be a social indicator. Particularly in the workplace there is often a propensity for using unnecessary foreign words, and they are often misused; put into the wrong context. It is common that people use foreign words without knowing their proper meaning and also not knowing the proper pronunciation. One example is _understatement_, a word that is generally misunderstood and always erroneously accentuated in Swedish. It has no Swedish equivalent. 

An interesting side-track is the false friends between the Germanic languages. One particularly bothersome case is the English expression _must not_, which has an analogous form with Swedish _måste inte_, but a completely different meaning. This applies also to the other Nordic languages as well as Dutch and German, and the expression is often misused and mistranslated, both from English to another Germanic language and the other way.

A good example of how new technical fields provail when borrowing words and concepts is the different forms used in different European languages for _spark plugs_. German made them _Zündkerzen_, formed from the word for candle. In French it bacame _bougies_, which means candles, and this word was borrowed into Spanish (bujías) and Dutch. In Swedish, we say _tändstift_, disregarding the "candle" usage in other Germanic languages. It is one example where we seem to prefer our own language, and there are several more. The loans in machinery are more common where we cannot find a suitable Swedish expression. 

That said, the Nordic languages do not really have scores of loans in daily usage, and some of the loans are more difficult to track; they are borrowed so far back that anyone has forgotten when, and the expression might even be extinct in the original language where we borrowed it.


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## cocuyo

jonquiliser said:


> Regarding purism, maybe not in Sweden, but we do have our own version of linguistic purism here in Finland; any sort of "finlandismer" (fennicisms?) is frowned upon in certain circles . As far as I know there are no attempts though to recover a 'lost proto-Swedish". If someone tried, they'd soon enough run out of words for pretty much anything .



I think that generally, Swedish in Finland when compared to _vatusvenska_ (Swedish from Sweden), has fewer loans of foreign words of other origin than Finnish. Swedish in Finland also retains old meanings and words that are forgotten or lost in Sweden, a notable example is _ohägn_. In Sweden, the original meaning is lost, and the word is generally not correctly understood by Swedish people, but in Finland it is alive and kicking. The meaning is to cross boundaries, to step over the fence. But there are scores of Finnish expressions in daily usage; one example is _roskisen_ for the waste basket. It might be noted that when such loans occur, the Swedish grammar is used. Hence it gets its definite form with a Swedish suffix; in Finnish there are no indefinite and definite forms. In Sweden, the most known Finnish loan is _pojke_. I think it's amazing how little we borrowed from our closest neighbours, but there seems to have been a strong line drawn between Swedish and Finnish for a very long time, also where both languages are used.


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## Wilma_Sweden

cocuyo said:


> I think it's amazing how little we borrowed from our closest neighbours, but there seems to have been a strong line drawn between Swedish and Finnish for a very long time, also where both languages are used.


It's also possible that there are more old Swedish borrowings into Finnish than the other way around from the time when Finland belonged to Sweden. In such situations, it's usually the language of the culturally or politically dominating people that influences that of the dominated, not the other way round. 

Today, of course, Swedish speakers in Finland are a minority, so the situation gets reversed, and borrowings go in the other direction.

/Wilma


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## Alxmrphi

One thing that I noted recently was the translation of Easter between Nordic languages and the Romance languages...

Icelandic: páska
Faroese: páskir
Swedish: påsk
Danish: påske
Norwegian: påske
Italian: pasqua
French: pâques
Spanish: pascuas!

English: Easter

So... that puzzed me at first, the linkup between all those languages... also after doing an all-language search I found out that similar translations are:

Esperanto: paskon
Indonesian: paskah (probably taken from dutch?)
Swahili: pasaka

etc etc, English, from what I know takes from Romance languages and Germanic languages.... and this seems a bit of an oddity.


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## hanne

But:
German: Oster
[/ot]


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## Wilma_Sweden

Alex_Murphy said:


> English, from what I know takes from Romance languages and Germanic languages.... and this seems a bit of an oddity.


Certainly! According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Easter comes from O.E. Eastre, a goddess of fertility and sunrise whose feast was celebrated at the spring equinox, and Anglo-Saxon Christians adopted her name and many of the celebratory practices.

With Christmas, it's the other way round: Yule (from its Scandinavian cognates) was an Old Norse pagan winter feast whose name got transferred to the Christian holiday. Apparently, in Scotland and northern England, Yule is still used (according to the Oxford English dictionary).

/Wilma


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## cocuyo

And it should not be a surprise, that a genuinely pagan holiday, as _jul_ will not have a foreign moniker imported, while the Christian holiday _påsk_ in a way retains its origin. Maybe the Yule tradition was not widespread in the British Isles until after Christianity?


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## Alxmrphi

Wilma_Sweden said:


> in Scotland and northern England, Yule is still used (according to the Oxford English dictionary).
> 
> /Wilma



Yes it is, a few things related to Christmas still have it in the name, for example Yule log....



> And it should not be a surprise, that a genuinely pagan holiday, as _jul_ will not have a* foreign moniker* imported



Sorry I don't understand, can you tell me what this means?


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## Wilma_Sweden

cocuyo said:


> Maybe the Yule tradition was not widespread in the British Isles until after Christianity?


Yule as a pagan feast would have been widespread in the areas where the Vikings dominated at the time, and then transferred to the Christian holiday in those areas, while the Anglo-Saxons elsewhere did not have a major winter feast until Christ came along and changed that.  Instead, the Anglo-Saxons had their pagan spring feast to the Easter goddess, cognate with German Oster, no doubt (brought in by the Saxons?).

Feasts and holidays seem to be universal: the reasons may change, as do the monikers, but when all is said and done, all we need is a good excuse to throw a party! 

/Wilma


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## cocuyo

Alex_Murphy said:


> Yes it is, a few things related to Christmas still have it in the name, for example Yule log....
> 
> 
> 
> Sorry I don't understand, can you tell me what this means?



I meant to say, that in the Nordic countries, the Yule was celebrated before it was adopted into the Christian tradition, and we retain the old name for it, while in many other countries it is celebrated as the birth of Christ and thus named after Christ.


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