Silly Linguistics

When I was growing up, words just seemed random. That was a dog, this was a cat and I just got on with life. It was only much later that I began to notice that the words in other languages seemed strangely familiar. If a word in another language is similar, how did it get like that? Did they take our word? Did we take their word? Or is there another explanation for what’s going on?

Have you ever watched a really old movie? Like a movie from the 30’s or 40’s? Everyone talks differently. Not differently enough that you can’t understand them, but the difference is definitely noticable. Now think about how people spoke in Shakespeares time. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Each word is a bit different than you might expect. “Wherefore” is not a fancy way of saying “where”. It actually means “why”. Juliet is asking why Romeo is the way that he is. Why did her love have to be in the family and situation he is in. You can analyse the word as meaning “what is it for”, like “What is this thing for”.

By Camille Masson

When one thinks of the French language, they typically think of Paris, France, and fine food. However, there are many other places where French is used, namely in the Canadian province of Québec. However, there are important differences between Québécois French and European French that can be found in their idioms, phonetic inventory, and grammatical structures. For example, in Québécois spoken French can differ greatly from written French, as written French tends to be more “standard” and will usually follow the guidelines emitted by “L’Académie Française”.

Unfortunately, it is quite frequent for language learners to be unaware of these differences, and this can lead to confusion when the time comes for those learners to practice their French in Québec!

This year, I had the chance to meet one exchange student who was learning French, and a few exchange students from France. Through meeting these students, I realized I needed to adapt my French for both the French learner, and for the students from France even though we both spoke the same language. This experience sparked my interest in sharing a few differences between Québécois French and European French. The differences I will write about here are only a few examples and may vary depending on the context of use. After all, people usually do not speak to their boss the same way they would speak to their friends!

I taught myself German and it was a long arduous process. With Swedish I wanted to take it easy and do things a bit differently. So I just watched music videos of Disney songs I knew, watched Swedish vloggers (even if I didn’t understand much) and read Swedish memes. I am still far from fluent but I am starting to get a solid foundation and can read a lot of simple texts in Swedish now. I am having a lot of fun with it.

With this article I wanted to show you some of the things I have found on my Swedish language learning journey that I think will make your Swedish learning experience a bit more fun and you can also take these ideas and apply them to other languages you are learning.