<doc.id=2045.a2>
<title> Airbag vs. Krock-kudde </title>
I am probably not the first one to notice that Swedish is not what it used to be. Most people would agree that English has affected speakers of Swedish. What I am wondering is if people really have understood the extenuating effect the growing Anglicism have had on the Swedish language. In the last decades Sweden has experienced an invasion of the English language through music, television, film and the new information technology. In this paper I am going to draw your attention to what this invasion has done to the Swedish language. I will start with a few examples to support my following thesis about the risks I see. 

My first example of Anglicized features in Swedish has to do with morphology. In the Swedish language compound words are written together as one single word as opposed to English where they are usually written separately. Take for example the word, or rather the expression, standard language in English. A correct translation into Swedish would be, standardspråk. However, in many cases you find "standard språk" (two separate words instead of one compound). This might seem like a minor problem because in this particular case it doesn't really change the meaning, it is more a question of orthography. However, there are cases where it does change the meaning of a word. For instance, one time I ran across stark öl1 written on a sign outside a restaurant. The natural way to interpret that is that stark (strong) is a modifier of the noun öl (beer) and not that it is the compound noun starköl

Another linguistic field in which we also find evidence of a growing Anglicism is the syntax. I am thinking about the English apostrophe genitive. In both Swedish and English adding the letter s to the word forms the genitive. One important difference between the two languages that seems to have escaped a lot of Swedes is the fact that only English uses an apostrophe before adding s. As a result I often run across the English apostrophe variant in the Swedish language. This phenomenon is common in the naming of shops and restaurants for example, Åsa's Salong och Berra's Sportfiske2.

The third example shows that also the Swedish lexicon has been affected. This trend probably started with the innocent occurrence of borrowing an English word in order to express some nonexistent term in the Swedish language. The growing computer language is an example of that. Swedish linguists have come up with translations to most of these terms but it has not resulted successful, since people don't use them. This phenomenon is not what is upsetting. After all, loan words are a very common feature in most languages. I am talking about the growing tendency of replacing useful Swedish words with English equivalences. There are tons of examples but I will just mention a few. The Swedish word Kafé is nowadays often replaced by the English corresponding word coffee shop and you don't hear anybody saying that they are going away to a kurort, instead it's spa nowadays. Another example is the English word airbag, which totally has replaced the Swedish equivalent Krock-kudde. In this case I even claim that the Swedish word is better, semantically speaking. Airbag is definitely more arbitrary than Krock-kudde3, which as oppose to airbag tells you exactly what it is. 

.Now that I have provided you with the evidence it is time to take a look at the risks with linguistic Anglicism. Naturally one could argue that changes like these are inevitable since languages are dynamical, but the danger I see is that Swedish seems to have lost the potential to develop independently from English. If we take a look at the last of the above examples we can draw the conclusion that speakers of Swedish has lost an important quality, namely creativity. To simply adapt new English words and ignore the possibility of a Swedish translation or an already existing Swedish equivalent word seems both lazy and negligent. The appalling result of this growing trend is that people nowadays state that Swedish is a poor language and that it hasn't got a large enough vocabulary. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. The Swedish vocabulary is not poorer than the average languages'; instead I would say that Swedish speakers that claim this have a poor knowledge of their own language. They simply aren't aware of the possibilities in Swedish. 

Doubtlessly Sweden lives in the shadow of our model English speaking countries. Not only do we copy the American lifestyle and share the weather with The British Isles, we are also abandoning our own language for their more prestigious one. Isn't it time we stop to think about the consequences of the growing usage of English? The native tongue could be said to be the soul of a people's national identity, if we eliminate that our nationality becomes crippled. Let us turn the attention towards the enormous potential the Swedish language possesses! Under the surface of anglicized words, expressions and structure lies a rich and useful idiom that suffers of undeserved poor reputation. 

1 Strong beer or alcoholic beer
2 sport fishing utilities
3 Colliding pillow
</doc>