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SWEDISH LANGUAGE

AI-klonad, bubbelhoppa and gargasnipe: the full list of new Swedish words for 2023

It was the year when artificial intelligence began to show its full revolutionary potential, bringing a technological flavour to this year's list of new Swedish words.

AI-klonad, bubbelhoppa and gargasnipe: the full list of new Swedish words for 2023
'Vildgraviditet' or "wild pregnancy", bubbelhoppa, or "bubble-hop", and tantparkour were all among the new Swedish words of 2023. Photo: Swedish Language Council.

ChatGPT, the first of the large language models released to the public, came out in the tail end of 2022, but it was only in 2023 that AI started to be used widely, bringing new words like prompta, AI-klonad, cyberresiliens and streamingfarm, into the annual list of new Swedish words published by the Swedish Language Council. 

“We could have have had ten different AI-words,” Anders Svensseon, managing editor of the council’s Språktidningen magazine, told the TT newswire, adding that artificial intelligence could now create “entirely new content, for example text, pictures and music”. 

This year’s list also includes words related to the gang violence which continued to be a problem in the country in 2023, as well as words related to marketing, culture, and health. 

Here is the full list of new words: 

AI-klonad: An adjective describing  a piece of content, such as a work of art or music, or even just a voice, that has been copied using AI technology. 

Barbenheimer: A portmanteau title combining Barbie and Oppenheimer, two, very different, cinema blockbusters both released on July 21st, is included in the list (despite arguably being a proper noun).  

bubbelhoppa: Literally, to “bubble-hop”. To consciously attempt to escape your media or social media bubble by following people or reading publications with different political viewpoints from your own. 

cyberresiliens: The Swedish word for “cyber resilience”, describing a country or organisation’s ability to withstand IT attacks without losing the ability to fulfil their most important functions. 

deinfluencing: When an ‘influencer’ with a lot of followers on social media encourages their followers not to buy a certain product or service. 

det svenska tillståndet: Translated into English, it’s “the Swedish condition”. This describes the situation Sweden faces where gang criminality has a serious impact on society. 

dna-pass: A card which includes all the most important genetic information about a person, which can be used in healthcare. 

dopaminfasta: This directly translates as “dopamine fast”, and describes deliberately avoiding activities which stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain in order to increase the brain’s sensitivity and so improve concentration. 

dubbelswisha: To pay twice in a row in a massage parlour, with the second payment suspected of being for a sexual service. 

evighetskemikalie: “Forever chemicals”. This describes synthetic substances such as PFAS which cannot be broken down easily in nature and so persist for long periods in the environment. 

exposekonto: Social media accounts created with the intention of publicly shaming individuals in compromising situations. 

gargasnipe: This describes a picture of a person, often middle-aged, which is taken in secret and then posted on social media with the aim of ridiculing the person, who is thought to look strange or stupid. The trend of gargasniping originated in Sweden. 

generativ AI: A form of artificial intelligence which generates text, images, or other media by learning the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generating new data that has similar characteristics. 

grön kolonialism: A phrase which describes the establishment of wind farms or other forms of green industry on land to which indigenous people — in Sweden, almost always the Sami minority — have a claim.

hyschpengar: A translation of “hush money”, describing payments made to someone, usually by a criminal, to stop them devolving sensitive or incriminating information.

ick: A word taken from the English “icky”, which describes behaviour or qualities of a person which another person finds disgusting or offensive. 

insynsprincip: The ‘transparency principle’, which means that private actors in society should give the public some insight into their businesses, although not to the same extent as the freedom of information requirements which apply to public bodies. 

klivare: A person who commits crimes in exchange for payments from a criminal network. 

korankris: This describes the ‘Quran crisis’, a difficult political situation caused by political protests, given permission by the police, which involve the burning of the Quran.  

krigssponsor: Literally a “war sponsor”, this describes companies or individuals who contribute indirectly to a war by operating businesses or buying services from warring nations.  

känslighetsläsare: The Swedish translation of a “sensitivity reader”. This is a person tasked with reviewing texts to remove potentially objectionable content.

longtermism: This ideology, which has the same name in English, describes the ethical view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The ideology has come to prominence after it emerged that Tesla founder Elon Musk is an adherent, among other Silicon Valley figures.  

menstrosa: Literally ‘period knickers’, these describe the newly released type of women’s underwear which has an inbuilt, high-absorption material which can soak up blood released during menstruation. 

multilojal: A marketing term describing customers who are members or regular customers of several competing chains, hoping to get the best prices and take advantage of special discounts. 

nepo baby: This term, which is the same in English, describes a person who is given advantages in their career by their influential parents. 

neurodiversitet: The Swedish translation of “neurodiversity”, describes a new way of seeing psychiatric conditions such as autism and ADHD less as disorders and more as part of a spectrum of diverse neurological types. 

prompta: A new Swedish word based on the English word “to prompt”, which describes the skill of learning how to instruct an artificial intelligence program in order to get the best results. 

relationism: This word, also directly taken from English, along with “positionism”, describes a theory or strategy of football playing which takes as its starting point the ball’s position on the pitch rather than the area which needs to be covered. 

situationship: This word, taken directly from English, describes a long-term relationship somewhere between a romantic one and a friendship. 

snikflation: This is the Swedish translation of “sneakflation”, a portmanteau word describing the impact of companies taking advantage of widespread inflation to increase their profits by increasing prices by more than the increase in their costs. 

streamingfarm: A collection of computers all signed up with free accounts at a streaming service such as Spotify, which are automated to repeatedly stream certain songs in order to maximise revenues for the song’s creators and make them seem more popular than they are. 

tantparkour: This word combines the word “tant”, slang for a middle-aged woman, and parkour, the sport which uses urban architecture for feats of gymnastics. There was a light-hearted social media trend in Sweden in 2023 posting images of middle-aged women clambering over obstacles.  

toxisk positivitet: Again, a near direct translation of the English “toxic positivity”, this describes situations where positive thinking leads to a harmful suppression of all negative feelings. 

vild graviditet: Literally a “wild pregnancy”, this describes a trend, popular among alternative health practitioners in Sweden, when someone who is pregnant opts not to get into contact with the mainstream healthcare system, preferring a more ‘natural’ approach. 

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LEARNING SWEDISH

How positive are Swedes towards foreign accents?

Swedes respond most positively to people speaking Swedish with English, Finnish and German accents, according to a new study from Sweden's Institute for Language and Folklore that took an in-depth look at a dozen foreign accents.

How positive are Swedes towards foreign accents?

The study asked Swedes to identify the accents of 12 different people speaking Swedish, before rating the speakers on their trustworthiness, friendliness, ambition, confidence, appeal and whether they were ordentlig, a Swedish word which describes something similar to being “proper” or an upstanding citizen. 

These qualities were then ranked from one (not at all) to six (a lot), before being combined into a total score for each speaker.

Respondents were not told if they had guessed the accent of a speaker correctly or incorrectly before ranking them.

Speakers of Swedish with an English accent had the highest score on this scale: 3.86, although this is still low considering that the highest possible score was six. The English speaker spoke British English and has lived in Sweden for 41 years.

Finns came just behind on 3.85, with Germans coming third with a score of 3.79.

These three accents were also considered to be the easiest to understand, no matter how strong or weak the accents were considered to be.

In fourth place with a score of 3.62 was a female speaker with a förortsaccent, which is not an accent at all but rather a dialect of Swedish spoken in the often immigrant-heavy suburbs (förorter) of large cities. Although some aspects of förortssvenska have been influenced by languages spoken by people who have immigrated to these parts of Sweden from abroad, many speakers of förortssvenska were born in Sweden and have lived their entire lives here.

Next up were Somali, Arabic and Turkish accents, with scores of 3.32, 3.29 and 3.24 respectively. Polish, Persian and Spanish accents followed with scores of 3.23, 3.21 and 3.15, with a Bosnian accent the lowest placing foreign accent at 3.06.

The lowest result in the study overall was for a male speaker with a förortsaccent, with a score of just 2.95.

Women ranked more highly than men

Interestingly, female speakers made up four of the top five, although the most positively rated accent (English) was a male speaker. There was also only one woman in the bottom five (the Spanish speaker) suggesting that Swedes are more positive towards women with foreign accents than men.

The respondents were also asked to guess what level of education the speakers had, where they could choose between junior high school or equivalent (grundskola), senior high school or equivalent (gymnasium), post-secondary school education that was not university-level, and university-level studies.

Accents from closer countries scored more highly

As a general rule, Swedes assumed that people from countries which are closer geographically had a higher level of education than those who were from further away. English came top again, followed by German and Finnish, while a male speaker of förortssvenska came last, with the speaker with a Bosnian accent coming second to last.

In general, speakers of the accents which scored highly in terms of positive associations were also assumed to have a higher level of education, and the same can be said for the accents which had the most negative ratings.

There is a caveat, however. The positively-rated accents – English, Finnish and German – were those which speakers were best at identifying. Almost 90 percent of Swedes in the study recognised an Finnish accent, with just under 85 percent recognising an English accent and slightly under 70 percent recognising a German one.

This means that in these cases, respondents were judging these specific accents, and may have been influenced by prior contact with speakers of Swedish from these countries such as friends, coworkers or public figures, or commonly held assumptions about them.

That was also the case for the male förortsaccent, which was the fourth-most recognised accent – just over 40 percent of listeners identified it correctly.

For the other accents, listeners were unsure of their guesses, even those who guessed correctly. Only one in twenty listeners could recognise the Turkish accent, for example.

This means that assumptions made about speakers with less easily identified accents may be due to other factors than their nationality, such as the strength of their accent and their gender.

Indeed, the most common incorrect guess when a listener could not identify an accent was Arabic, often bringing with it negative ratings in the other categories.

Political views also make a difference

The study also looked at whether certain traits or beliefs in the listening Swedes affected how they ranked each speaker.

Men rated each speaker more negatively than the average score given by all listeners, while women rated them more positively.

There were also clear differences when it comes to politics, with right-wing voters more likely to have a negative opinion of foreign accents.

Listeners who identified as Sweden Democrats or Moderates rated almost all accents significantly lower than the average (Sweden Democrats rated English and Finnish roughly the same as average listeners, and Moderates rated German accents roughly the same as the average).

Christian Democrats and Liberals rated the accents similar to the average result for all listeners, while left-bloc voters belonging to the Centre Party, Social Democrats, Green Party and Left Party rated almost all accents significantly higher than the average. 

The groups with the most positive attitude towards people speaking Swedish with an accent were women, the highly educated, voters in the left-wing bloc and, to a lesser extent, older people and people who earn less than 25,000 kronor a month.

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