Wow! Scandinavia is beautiful ! – you might say this after seeing this picture, but do you know how to react in Swedish?

Something that makes the foreign language learning more idiomatic is the use of so called interjections. There is of course a whole bunch of them but I would like to introduce some of the most common and interesting ones for you.

Interjections have an aim to express strong feelings, sentiments and reactions to things. It is funny to mention that they used to called ejaculations (you might use the interjections Hoppsan! Ojoj! or Hm in Swedish after hearing this) but it is no longer in use. They fill either pauses in a sentence or sentence starters. The isolated usage of an interjection does not represent a complete sentence neither in conventional English nor Swedish oral or writing traditions. They are rather incorporated into larger sentences but also can followed by punctuation i.e. (?) question mark, (!) exclamation mark or (.) dot. There are also phrases and expressions, even shorter sentences that we can consider as interjection.

Interjections derived from human and animal noises. There are various categorization of interjections but mostly we can talk about primary and secondary interjections. The primary interjections encompass so called Onomatopoeic words ( a word that phonetically imitates sounds of nature, animals etc.) for example Oops, Yuck and so on. The secondary interjections express mental attitudes like; Damn! Wow! etc. As you understand swear-words can also be also included within the category.

Examples: