Swedish osmosis

Finland is officially bilingual, and this fact is especially visible in parts of the country with a sizeable Swedish-speaking minority. Turku is one of those places and all of our street signs (and lots of other signage) are in both Finnish and Swedish. And then official-y things like food labels and instruction manuals are in both languages, too.

When we first moved here and I spoke no Finnish - but a bit of German - I found that the Swedish signs were much easier to understand. It was so helpful, to be honest! I really relied on it at first to get around and go grocery shopping. At some point, my Finnish got good enough that I didn’t have to look at the Swedish anymore, but when I sit down and think about it, I’ve learned a lot of Swedish words purely through a weird kind of osmosis. I don’t know how to pronounce it, I can’t speak it or explain a stitch of its grammar, but dadgummit, if I look at a sign in Swedish, I can probably figure out what it says!

Here are Swedish words I have never made a conscious effort to learn, but which have seeped into my brain (I didn’t double-check any of these so there may be small errors):

utan (tillsat) sockeri - no (added) sugar

gamla - old

gatan - street

vägen - road

skogs - forest

backa - hill

sjukhus - hospital

centrum - city center

tider - hours

sval - swallow (bird)

tall - pine

skydsrum - bomb shelter

hvud - main

hamn - port/harbor

barn - child

fartyget - exit, I think?

havre - oat

fullkorn - wholegrain

flingor - flakes

hallon - raspberry

kvinna - woman

One last thing about Swedish - I am a Finnish citizen now (as of April!) and I recently used my Finnish passport to travel. In Sweden when the border guard checked it, he started speaking to me in Swedish because he assumed I spoke the language (Finnish people learn Swedish in school as a second national language). But of course I don’t speak Swedish so I had to tell him that, in English. It was kind of an awkward moment because it’s possible he thought I was making some kind of value judgment about Swedish but I wasn’t! I just didn’t grow up here so I didn’t learn it as a kid. Oh well.