The French influence on Swedish

Its not just the Swedish Royal Family (thanks Sarah!) who are devolved from the French. There are actually a lot of Swedish words which are heavily influenced by the French.

I read that a lot of words came in at the start of the Bernadotte rule in 1818. Though a lot of previous rulers and aristocracy from the 1600′s spoke French and used it as the court language.

So how come a there is a French royal line?

Basically, the Swedes lost Finland and it sent the Swedish state into turmoil. The locals revolted and put Charles XIII on the throne. The snag here is that he remained childless. The Swedes then put a Dane on the throne (they must have been desperate! Charles August died the same year. The Swedes were not having much regal luck.

Napoleon was ruling much of contintental Europe at that stage so the Swedes wanted to pick a King who would be acceptable to him. So they decided on Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte who was then Marshall of France and he managed to stick around long enough to have heirs and the present King and his family are his descendants.

Thats the short version anyway!

But I digress. This new King had a big effect on the language as he did not both learning Swedish and many of the Swedish aristocracy either learnt or knew French. Swedish is heavily Germanic but there was certainly a shift and many of the ‘loan’ words came from French rather then low German. Military words in particular took on a very Gallic slant.

I am reminded of this by two words which have been prevalent this week.

Paraply for instance is Swedish for umbrella, very similar to the French word for it parapluie.

Påsk – Swedish for Easter is very similar to Pâques the French word for Easter. In the same way that Easter is very close to the Germanic word for it Ostern. Isnt language fascinating!

Any more French influenced Swedish words you can think of?

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