Entering
the Nordic market

A member of the Finno-Ugric language family, Finnish is not related to any of the Scandinavian languages. Its best-known relatives are Estonian and, more distantly, Hungarian. It’s official in both Finland and Sweden, where it enjoys minority status.

Unlike many of its neighbouring languages, Finnish does not distinguish gender. A single pronoun – hän – is used for everyone, regardless of their gender. The language is famed for its apparent complexity, with dozens of suffixes used to express relationships between different parts of speech.

On the other hand, learning to read Finnish is relatively easy due to its orthographic spelling system – everything is written more or less as it’s pronounced. The pronunciation itself is another matter: Finnish has 18 diphthongs (combinations of two vowel sounds) that can be tricky to master.

Icelandic stands out as the most conservative Nordic language in some ways, and the most innovative in others. Its morphology (grammatical endings) hasn’t changed significantly over the past 1,000 years – unlike Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, which have all undergone massive simplification of their endings.

Its vocabulary is special too – mostly derived from Old Norse, Icelandic has very few loanwords. Instead of borrowing from other languages, Icelandic creates its own words for new concepts, e.g. tölva “computer”, from tala “number” and völa “seeress”.

This means Icelanders have little trouble reading ancient sagas (known as Íslendingasögur).

Norwegian is characterised by its internal diversity. There are myriad dialects spoken across the country, in part preserved by its mountainous geography. Attempts to standardise Norwegian have been met with limited success – instead Norwegians have consciously chosen to promote their regional dialects.

The language also has two competing written standards: bokmål and nynorsk. Bokmål is based on the Danish written standard that was used until 1907, whereas nynorsk was created in the 1850s as a way to honour Norwegian’s Old Norse heritage.

Written Norwegian is comprehensible to most speakers of Danish, although Norwegian does have a tendency to adapt foreign words to its own spelling system. One extreme example is “chauffeur”, which becomes sjåfør.

By number of speakers, Swedish is by far the largest of the Scandinavian languages. It’s spoken across Sweden and by the Swedish minority in Finland, where the local variety is known as finlandssvenska.

There are many dialects of Swedish, which are normally divided into six groups. In the south, the R sound is guttural like that in French or Danish, whereas in the rest of Sweden it has a more “rolled” pronunciation. The dialects are gradually becoming less distinctive, however.

Swedish is exported the world over in the form of IKEA product names, which sometimes are surprisingly literal (e.g. a HYLLIS shelving unit is a “little shelf”).