We had some friends around for dinner last night. One of them is going to Sweden for a work exchange in a few weeks time and she kindly asked me to teach her something typically Swedish. Of course, I took my task seriously and I decided to teach her  how to drink aquavit Swedish style, drinking songs included… An excellent idea at the time, but now, after several hours of staring blankly into the computer screen, I might regret being so generous with my knowledge and my Aquavit.

Anyhow, because of the reason mentioned above, I haven’t been overly productive today. But I came across something brilliant when browsing the net earlier that I want to share with you Swedenlovers. Swedia is an excellent webpage where you can read and listen to over 100 different Swedish dialects, from far north to way down south. You simply just click on a region, chose if you want to listen to a man/woman/elderly/youth and then you can read along with the transcript. You even get some info about the region and some lovely pictures  as well! It’s easy as pie, very useful and lot’s of fun. I have decided (the only decision made today…) that my favourite Swedish dialect is spoken on the island Gotland and this is probably a quite common opinion. People from Gotland sounds awfully kind and trustworthy, you often here it spoken in commercials and rumours has it  that telephone sales companies are quite eager to hire people with a Gotland accent…

To illustradte some serious gotlänska, click here for a clip from a brilliant Swedish tv-series called Solsidan (The sunny side) where Anna is struggling to understand her midwife. Do you?

Ha en härlig helg alla!

PS: Want to learn how to drink the aquavit? I found this cute video, you get a very sweet explaination to the “lyrics” aswell.  SKÅL!