Swenglish

This is the first of a few introductory, explanatory posts that I plan on making. It's a warning about how, if you read this blog often, you will likely encounter a lot of Swenglish.

I moved to Sweden in 2002, when I was 24 years old. Up until that point the only language I could speak was (American) English. I'd studied two years of French in high school, but done an exemplary job of forgetting it all. I'd also studied ancient Greek to get my language points for graduation from St. Olaf, and you can probably never really say that you "speak" ancient Greek. We mostly read and translated Plato and the Bible, and even that at the rate of about two sentences per hour. It did, however, leave me with a sick level of understanding for the complexities of grammar and a thankfulness that I didn't speak a language with severely declined nouns and both imperfect and aorist verb forms.

That might be why I had a pretty easy time learning Swedish. For the first year I lived here, I tried to learn the language on my own, and it didn't go so well. I had learned lots of food words, since my main occupation was buying groceries, but otherwise I wasn't prepared to have more than a very simple conversation. If I tried to practice speaking Swedish, people would hear that I stumbled and had an accent, so they started excitedly speaking English to me, in order to show off and/or practice their own English skills. It became clear to me that I wasn't going to get a job here unless I learned the language and bowed to their view that Swedish degrees are oh-so-much better than foreign ones, so I got myself into a program at the university that both taught me the language and turned my American degree into a Swedish teaching license.

My Swedish teachers were, well, brutal. We had two language and grammar teachers, one pronunciation teacher, a history teacher and a civics teacher. We had class 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, from the beginning of August until the end of May. We had mountains of homework every night. We didn't have school breaks when the rest of the university students did, except for something like one week at Christmas. Every time we made a mistake -- typically with word order i subclauses, for all you other non-native Swedish-speaking grammar freaks out there! -- the teachers snapped their fingers and made us say it over again. It was all about creating good habits and nipping the bad habits in the bud. By Christmas, I was suddenly a fluent reader and writer and could understand the news anchors on TV; by May I could speak fluently about just about anything. After our final test, which essentially gave us a Swedish high school diploma, there was much drinking, smoking, and swearing (in English, let's be honest). We got kicked out of a pub and our Australian classmate broke his nose after an impressive drunken flying bike incident. Good times.

However, no matter how much I wanted to learn Swedish or how well I speak it now, we still speak English at home, Fredrik and I. Some people have a hard time understanding this, not least of whom the head teacher in our Swedish course. She felt I would learn even faster if we spoke English at home. I felt, on the contrary, that either Fredrik or I would end up strangling the other and I'd be packing my bags for the U.S., which is the definition of shooting oneself in the foot. I learned Swedish well enough that people are now shocked that I'm not a native Swede when I tell them, and our relationship and patterns at home, a life very much built around the English language, are happily intact.

But something happens when you live one life in one language and another life in another. I not only spend much of my outward social life and work life in Swedish, but I got my teaching degree here, so there are words and concepts that I never spoke about until I spoke about them in Swedish. Some words about the educational system or the welfare system or mortgages or fertility or stock markets or things that are peculiarly Swedish -- I never spoke about them in English, so my mind doesn't find the English words for them. It happens that I need to run to a dictionary in order to translate something from Swedish into English -- and now, keep in mind, I'm not just a native-speaking grammatical-freak type English speaker; I'm now a Master degreed licensed teacher in the stuff. So this mental block is, to say the least, a little sad.

But this is where Swenglish comes in. Or svengelska, as it is called in Swedish. It's difficult to hear a conversation in Swedish today that isn't peppered with English words. The whole of Sweden is suffering from the same disease I am -- an inability to speak in their own language without throwing in words from another, because English so permeates every aspect of this society. My coworkers look at me a little funny when I say "mjukvarupaket" instead of "software package" and if I pronounce "integration" in the Swedish manner instead of in English. So it's not so terrible that I speak in English of having a faluröd house with vita knutar (a red house with white trim, part of the Swedish equivalent of the American dream) or if I have a conversation with my husband about paying our "fastigshetskatt" because my mind is a split-second too slow in providing the word "property tax," or, even more subtly, if I say that these blueberries are awful because they "don't taste anything" instead of saying "they have no flavor".

It's tough to fight it but, hey, I think I'm in good company. Henrik Schyffert is Packed on the Jobb.