When I moved to Umeå with my Swedish husband, our two-year-old understood Swedish but spoke only in English. After a month of preschool in Sweden, that flipped – long before I could follow along, writes The Local's Mandy Pipher.
Across Sweden, children are starting or returning to school after the summer holidays. Here are the crucial pieces of Swedish vocabulary that will help international families navigate the school year.
Swedish-Finnish humour trio KAJ's 'Bara Bada Bastu' has emerged as an unexpected favourite to win the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. The Local has done a line-by-line translation of the lyrics, so that you know what you're singing about when it's stuck in your head.
Like English speakers, Swedes absolutely love to use fake swear words – and you should too, as they sound gloriously quaint coming from the mouth of a foreigner.
Sweden's government has ordered the country's statistics agency to develop methods for assessing immigrants' skills in listening, speaking and reading, and then to carry out a multi-year investigation into reading skills between now and 2029.
Sweden's festive season is a time when even the most well-integrated foreigner can feel like an outsider, miles from home with a set of traditions, recipes, and songs familiar to everyone but you.
Does your personality really change when speaking another language? Are people more comfortable expressing emotions in certain languages and can understanding the emotional shift actually help with language learning? Language professors Mari Mar Boillos Pereira and Ana Blanco Canales explore the latest research.
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.
They say that the further north you get, the more words you need to describe snow. We've picked out our favourite seven words to talk about the cold weather in Swedish.
The unusual way some northern Swedes say 'yes' often surprises those unfamiliar with the dialect: a cross between a gasp and a slurp, it's a curious linguistic phenomenon. The Local explores where it comes from and what exactly it means.
