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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Why I’m convinced Skånska is hands down the best Swedish accent

From The Local's archive: After eight years living in Malmö, The Local's southern Sweden correspondent Richard Orange is convinced that the local Skånska dialect is the best type of Swedish. Read further to find out why.

Published: 13 May 2019 15:27 CEST
Updated: 30 July 2020 15:08 CEST
Why I'm convinced Skånska is hands down the best Swedish accent
No other Swedish accent measures up against southern Sweden's Skånska, argues The Local's writer. Photo: Måns Fornander/imagebank.sweden.se
To the uninitiated, Skånska or Scanian resembles a cat seeking attention while trying to dislodge a troublesome hairball.  
 
But after eight years living among the intriguing people of southern Sweden, I have learned to appreciate this much maligned dialect as a thing of beauty. 
 
Indeed, with its lengthy catalogue of denigrating expressions, freedom from the sing-song rhythm that restricts other forms of Swedish, and its sheer energy, I think Skånska is hands down Sweden's best dialect.
 
At the very least, all those dipthongs and guttural Rs force speakers to change their facial expressions once in a while (a phenomenon rarely seen among other Swedes).
 
 
When I first heard talk of Skånska, it was couched in dread. My wife feared that our newborn daughter, growing up in Malmö, might end up speaking a Swedish with a shameful Skånsk tinge (and lo it has come to pass). 
 
From her perspective, with her Uppsala-bred Rikssvenska (Standard Swedish), Skånska is the second most ridiculous of the Swedish dialects (the keening, plaintive Örebro accent comes top, with my wife maintaining that it makes speakers sound as if they have something stuck in their bottoms.) 
 
But when I first heard Skånska actually spoken, probably when I took my daughter to a drop-in kindergarten, I found it thrilling. I was tickled to hear each vowel bent violently to make sounds that probably existed in some English dialect somewhere, but never in such florid combination. 
 
 
Take the Skånsk Hallo (hello). It ends with a vowel combination that in English is associated with being almost parodically upper class, but which in southern Sweden issues from the mouths of electricians and farmers. The cognitive clash this produces is amusing. 
 
In the video below you can see dialect researcher Mathias Strandberg demonstrate how in the southern half of Skåne, every single vowel is bent into a dipthong. 
 

 
In Sweden, having a regional accent doesn't have the same class connotations as it does back home in England. 
 
But it still tickles me to interview someone like Sweden's Justice Minister Morgan Johansson, or former Green Party leader Gustav Fridolin, both of whom have excellent standard English, and then later hear them rattling away in Skånska. 
 
My real love of the dialect, however, came when I started to understand the culture underpinning it.
 
As the Skånsk comedian and commentator Kalle Lind wrote in his brilliant encomium to the dialect in regional newspaper Sydsvenskan, it has a “particularly expressive” idiom, and this is notably the case when it comes to those which describe the idiocy or other annoying qualities of another. 
 
To anyone who can read Swedish, I highly recommend Sydsvenskan's På Ren Skånska ('in pure Skånska'), the series of articles celebrating the dialect which Lind's essay is part of. 
 
Ditt jävla ålarens (you bloody eel offal), Lind asserts, beats out Standard Swedish's din förbaskade korkskalle (you darn cork head). Glyttapanna beats barnrumpa (child-bottom). Din satans klydderöv, he continues, before realizing that there is no Standard Swedish expression for klydderöv, which describes someone who does things badly and makes a mess.  
 
Then of course, there's the all-round favourite ålahue, which means literally “eel head”. 
 

 
My wife complains that Lind is simply ignorant of the amusing and creative expressions that exist in her own Uppsala Swedish. 
 
But I suspect she is deluding herself. There's a revelry in being gently offensive among Skånings, something they share with the Danes and the British but not with more northerly Swedes, that lends itself to developing these expressions. 
 
My big frustration is that Skånings seem to be above teaching Swedish to foreigners like me, so my Swedish accent (well, to be honest it's more of a British accent) doesn't have the slightest hint of Skåne in it. 
 
I can only listen in jealousy when I hear TV gardener John Taylor speak in his perfect Skånska, lightly dusted with his Yorkshire upbringing, as he presents on SVT's Trädgårdstider (Garden Seasons) show.

Member comments

  1. I worked at Handelsbanken’s HO in Stockholm for 10 years. My colleagues admired my command of Swedish, but commented that an English accent was always detectable. Then a guy from Malmö joined the team, and I started imitating his broad accent. Then my colleagues admitted that they could no longer tell I was British.

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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.

Published: 30 November 2021 13:04 CET
Updated: 4 December 2021 17:47 CET
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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