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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Alphabet soup: Sweden’s many languages

Learning Swedish is a noble pursuit. When in Rome and all that. But mastering the majority mother tongue is only the beginning, as many more languages loom large on the horizon, writes Alec Forss.

Alphabet soup: Sweden’s many languages

If you thought Swedish was the only language of Sweden, then think again. Not including English and languages such as Kurdish and Serbian that have grown in prominence with immigration over recent decades, there are in fact some fifteen languages and over a hundred dialects considered “native” to Sweden.

Some of these languages are healthy with tens of thousands of speakers, while others are more marginal and count among the world’s most endangered. Among Sweden’s “other languages”, the Swedish government today recognizes five minority languages: Sami, Yiddish, Romani, Tornedalen Finnish, and Finnish.

Tornedalen Finnish, for example, is spoken by over 80,000 people in the north of the country along the border with Finland, and although closely related to Finnish, it is different enough that speakers can have difficulties in understanding one another. Romani, meanwhile, spoken among a smaller number of persons by the country’s Roma population, has been present in Sweden for over four hundred years.

Sami – the language of Sweden’s indigenous population in the north – is in fact is made up of several languages that are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Of these, South Sami is considered a “seriously endangered language” with less than three hundred speakers left in Sweden. “It will likely disappear”, says Louise Bäckman, one of the few remaining native speakers. Ume Sami, meanwhile, with less than twenty speakers, is already heading for extinction. On a more optimistic note, North Sami displays a cleaner bill of health counting some 5,000-6,000 speakers in Sweden and many more in Norway.

Considered to be a dialect rather than a separate language, arguably the most well-known – and famous for its rolling r’s – is Skånska spoken by up to one million people in Sweden’s southern province of Skåne. Jämtska is another, which is spoken by some 50,000 people in the north-western province of Jämtland.

More of an oddity is Älvdalska from the northwest reaches of Dalarna, which some claim to be a separate language; largely unintelligible to most Swedes, there have been efforts to accord it official minority language status.

Sweden’s mosaic of languages and dialects can in large part be traced to geography. While proximity to Denmark, Norway and Finland has influenced speech in the south, to the west and north-east of the country, river valleys and waterways have historically served to spread the currents of dialect. For instance, “it is more likely that one speaks the same dialect as a person further downstream than someone from a closer village that is not on a river or lake,” says Bert Edström, formerly from Vilhelmina in Västerbotten.

Immigration and “ghettoisation” is having a greater impact, too. Known as Förortssvenska, or suburb Swedish, various dialects of Swedish – or more accurately, sociolects – are spoken in suburbs such as Rinkeby in Stockholm or Rosengård in Malmö by immigrant populations.

In spite of the diversity, “dialects are getting weaker and weaker as older speakers die”, says Laura Enflo, a researcher on Swedish dialects at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Television and migration to larger cities are also serving to homogenise the way people speak.

Then there is a language that no one actually speaks, and yet some 8,000 people in Sweden claim it as their first language. It is Swedish sign language, of course, which just like any other spoken language varies from one country to another.

And what about the future of Swedish itself? Peculiarly enough, it has up until now not been deemed necessary to designate Swedish as an official language in Sweden. But with some people now advocating that classes be taught through the medium of English in schools, could it be that Swedish becomes a minority language in the future? Or that Swenglish becomes an official language in its own right?

Finally, while mastering Swedish may seem daunting enough, why not take up the cause of learning Ume Sami or one of the other endangered languages or dialects – you could be helping to preserve the country’s multilingual heritage.

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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Le Havre rules: How to talk about French towns beginning with Le, La or Les

If you're into car racing, French politics or visits to seaside resorts you are likely at some point to need to talk about French towns with a 'Le' in the title. But how you talk about these places involves a slightly unexpected French grammar rule. Here's how it works.

An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre.
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre. It can be difficult to know what prepositions to use for places like this - so we have explained it for you. (Photo by AFP)

If you’re listening to French chat about any of those topics, at some point you’re likely to hear the names of Mans, Havre and Touquet bandied about.

And this is because French towns that have a ‘Le’ ‘La’ or ‘Les’ in the title lose them when you begin constructing sentences. 

As a general rule, French town, commune and city names do not carry a gender. 

So if you wanted to describe Paris as beautiful, you could write: Paris est belle or Paris est beau. It doesn’t matter what adjectival agreement you use. 

For most towns and cities, you would use à to evoke movement to the place or explain that you are already there, and de to explain that you come from/are coming from that location:

Je vais à Marseille – I am going to Marseille

Je suis à Marseille – I am in Marseille 

Je viens de Marseille – I come from Marseille 

But a select few settlements in France do carry a ‘Le’, a ‘La’ or a ‘Les’ as part of their name. 

In this case the preposition disappears when you begin formulating most sentences, and you structure the sentence as you would any other phrase with a ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’ in it.

Masculine

Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)

A good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. 

Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition

Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.

Because Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris). 

For place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this:

Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet

Je suis au Touquet – I am in Le Touquet 

Je viens du Touquet – I am from Le Touquet 

Je parle du Touquet – I am talking about Le Touquet

Le Traité du Touquet – the Le Touquet Treaty

Feminine

Some towns carry ‘La’ as part of their name. La Rochelle, the scenic town on the west coast of France known for its great seafood and rugby team, is one such example.

In French ‘à la‘ or ‘de la‘ is allowed, while ‘à le‘ becomes au and ‘de le’ becomes du. So for ‘feminine’ towns such as this, you should use the following prepositions:

Je vais à La Rochelle – I am going to La Rochelle

Je viens de La Rochelle – I am coming from La Rochelle 

Plural

And some places have ‘Les’ in front of their name, like Les Lilas, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. The name of this commune literally translates as ‘The Lilacs’ and was made famous by Serge Gainsbourg’s song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a ticket puncher at the Metro station there. 

When talking about a place with ‘Les’ as part of the name, you must use a plural preposition like so:

Je suis le poinçonneur des Lilas – I am the ticket puncher of Lilas 

Je vais aux Lilas – I am going to Les Lilas

Il est né aux Lilas – He was born in Les Lilas  

Islands 

Islands follow more complicated rules. 

If you are talking about going to one island in particular, you would use à or en. This has nothing to do with gender and is entirely randomised. For example:

Je vais à La Réunion – I am going to La Réunion 

Je vais en Corse – I am going to Corsica 

Generally speaking, when talking about one of the en islands, you would use the following structure to suggest movement from the place: 

Je viens de Corse – I am coming from Corsica 

For the à Islands, you would say:

Je viens de La Réunion – I am coming from La Réunion 

When talking about territories composed of multiple islands, you should use aux.

Je vais aux Maldives – I am going to the Maldives. 

No preposition needed 

There are some phrases in French which don’t require any a preposition at all. This doesn’t change when dealing with ‘Le’ places, such as Le Mans – which is famous for its car-racing track and Motorcycle Grand Prix. Phrases that don’t need a preposition include: 

Je visite Le Mans – I am visiting Le Mans

J’aime Le Mans – I like Le Mans

But for a preposition phrase, the town becomes simply Mans, as in Je vais au Mans.

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