What is the difference between the verbs växa and växa?

Well, växa means ‘to grow’ and växa means ‘to grow’.

Okay, then you might be wondering why I’m asking for a difference between the two. Well, there is a slight nuance between them, and that is that växa means ‘to grow’ in a human or animal sense, while växa applies when you’re talking about plants and other inanimate things.

But considering that they’re the same word, what was the point of bringing up that it can apply to living things or non-living things? The answer is that, although these words really truly were the same word at one time, they have grown apart slightly, namely in their conjugations:

(For those of you who are unaware, ‘animate’ means ‘living’ and ‘inanimate’ means ‘non-living’.)

Now, here we’re talking formal, standardized Swedish, otherwise known as rikssvenska. In reality, though, most Swedes don’t actually make the distinction. Some people or dialects use vuxit in the perfect tense for both meanings of the word, while others use only växt.

Languages have a tendency to lose their original conjugations and take on simpler ones – a process that one could call weakening, in which strong conjugations (where inner parts of the word are replaced, such as in vuxit) tend to be ‘weakened’ to weak conjugations (where something is added to the beginning or end of the word instead of changing the inner parts of the word, such as in växte) over time. This does not always happen, but it is very common in the world of linguistics. But the fact that it only occurred in one nuance of växa, at least in rikssvenska, remains a mystery.

Words can also be strengthened, where common strong conjugations are applied to words that originally have weak conjugations. For example, trycka, ‘to push’, is conjugated in rikssvenska like so: trycker, tryckte, tryckt, tryck!. However, many people in Uppland, a region on the border to Stockholm, say tröck instead of tryckte. They may have adopted this pattern from a pattern of strong verbs whose y changes to ö in the preterite, or it may be a surviving feature of an older form of Swedish that has disappeared in most of Sweden, in which case it would not be strengthened but rather unchanged while it has changed everywhere else.

So in reality, växa and växa really are the same word, but the ‘correctness’ of rikssvenska attempts to claim that they are two words with similar meanings that are conjugated in different ways. Whether or not they are different words, most people stick to one conjugation and no one will comment if you use one or the other. So pick the conjugation you like and stick with it, or challenge yourself to distinguish every time! It’s all up to you.