We’re twelve years into raising our bilingual Swedish-British children and the outcome remains uncertain.

My ten-year-old son speaks with an almost comically English accent, like a diminutive Hugh Grant, while my twelve-year-old girl has absorbed an American twang, adopting the YouTube English used by her the rest of her girl gang.

Both still occasionally trip up on phrasal verbs, which often take different prepositions in Swedish from what they do in English : they might “look on the TV”, for instance. When they were younger, they would create hybrid words, such as mixing the English “milk” and the Swedish “mjölk” into “myilk”.   

But of the children I know living in Sweden with one British and one Swedish parent, my own probably closest to passing for British.

This is entirely by accident.

When our eldest was born, I was 37 and had only been in Sweden six months, so could barely speak a word of the language, and like many people who start learning a language in middle age, I’m still far from fluent. My Swedish wife, on the other hand, attended American and international schools between the ages of six and seventeen, so for her speaking English comes as naturally as Swedish.

As a result, English has been our main language: in the home, when we’re out and about and very often, when we’re socialising, as we’ve made friends with other families with one English-speaking parent. 

My wife usually speaks Swedish with the children when she’s alone with them, but not always, and if I’m in the room, she’ll often switch subconsciously to English. When the children speak alone with one another, I’m not sure if they have a preference, but if anything English is slightly dominant. 

The only person who suffers from the amount of English spoken at home is me. I’ve tried to switch our evening meals to Swedish to help improve my fluency, but it’s never stuck. 

School and society

My wife’s parents had to work hard to stop her and her brother speaking English at home when they were growing up in Africa, so she sometimes feels guilty that English is so dominant for us. 

She needn’t worry, though, as no Swede talking to our children would ever suspect them of being anything other than Swedish. She insisted on their going to the local municipal school, rather than to an international school, so school and after-school – where they spend roughly half their waking lives – has been almost entirely in Swedish.

I say “almost entirely” as my daughter, in particular, speaks English with her friends, who have parents from Ghana and Cameroon. Sweden’s system of mother-tongue tuition also means that all the English-speaking children in the school gather once a week for a lesson. I’m not sure how much the teaching helps their English reading and writing, but it certainly helps bring them together. 

More recently, I’ve been surprised to discover that even my children’s schoolfriends with two Swedish parents are starting to speak English when they hang out. Indeed, the level of English spoken by my children’s classmates is rapidly catching up with their own.

For Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, English is so dominant, almost everyone absorbs it in the end. 

Passing for British

That’s why for me, it’s not really enough for my children to be bilingual, as that more or less goes for practically everyone their age growing up in Sweden. I want people from the UK who meet them to think of them as British. 

It came as a shock when I first realised this might not happen.

My daughter was still a toddler, and I was interviewing an Australian in Sweden about taking parental leave for an Australian newspaper. When I spoke to his children, then seven and nine, their English was heavily accented and quite limited. I then discovered that a couple of our adult Swedish friends, both of whom spoke English with a definite Swedish accent, had grown up with a British father.  

I was surprised how upset it made me that my daughter started speaking with an American accent, just as I’ve been surprised at how important it is to me that they like Marmite, the bitter salty yeast spread beloved of Brits. I tried to laugh the accent off when we returned to the UK to meet my family and my daughter, understandably, took this badly. A couple of years later, she still resents me for it.

The main thing I’ve done to try and make them pass for British is to return to the UK and stay with my brother and his three similarly aged daughters over Easter and Christmas as often as I can. They are quite close to their cousins, and for me it’s an important link to home.  

From the start, I’ve tried to expand their vocabulary by reading them English children’s books every night, and a few years ago, we started ordering The Beano, a British children’s comic which has been going since 1938. It’s been a surprise hit. For the last two years, they have competed weekly over who gets the first chance to read it. Both read it from cover to cover. 

What to do next? 

For my children to pass as British or even to feel British, will, I suspect, require an extended stay in the UK in their teens or early 20s: a term at a sixth-form college, a semester or more at university, or, like so many of their Swedish colleagues, a few months working in a shop or pub somewhere in the UK. 

It might not work. I’ve heard of half-British children who have gone to the UK to study or work and felt very far from home.

If that happens, if they come back feeling less British than they did before they went, will it matter?

Right now, I feel it will. I will feel like I’ve failed to pass on something important, that they’ve lost a part of their identity I wanted them to have. But with any luck if it does, by that time, I will myself have become too Swedish to care. 

What’s your experience raising a bilingual child in Sweden? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.