Do you know that Swedish is mostly very informal language nowadays?🇸🇪
In the past, Swedish made frequent use of honorifics such as herr, fru and fröken (similar to words like “Mr”, “Mrs” and “Miss” in English) when people addressed each other formally. Furthermore, Swedish also made a distinction between a formal “you” (Ni) and a familiar “you” (du) when addressing another person. This distinction no longer exists in English, but those who speak German or French are probably somewhat familiar with the German Sie and du, and the French vous and tu.
In Sweden, this usage changed during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the so called du-reformen (“the you reform”) began. This change saw the Swedish speakers gradually moving away from the formal words and honorifics and beginning using the familiar du (“you”) in almost every situation, regardless of the speakers’ relationship, profession, social status, age, gender, etc.
This change spread not only within the Swedish language, but also within Swedish society itself, eventually leading to a significant reduction in the number of formality registers, even for government officials.
The you reform has led to an interesting effect within the field of professional translation into Swedish. Clients often give long and detailed instructions on the formal register they want their texts to have in the target language. While this is a major concern for many of the world’s languages, it’s no big issue for us Swedish translators – there are barely any registers at all in Swedish! Sometimes, clients want us to update past jobs as the instructions they originally gave us used the wrong register. We always tell them they can keep the original Swedish translation – it works for any register!
It should however be noted that this “you reform” was never as prominent for the Swedish spoken in Finland as it was for the Swedish spoken in Sweden. Although Swedish speakers in Finland were aware of the you reform in Sweden, the habit of addressing every person with “du” regardless of social status never established itself to the same extent in Finland. Although some people began addressing others with “du”, addressing people with “Ni” was common and well accepted for many decades, even well into the new millennium. In fact, Finnish government agencies didn’t abolish the use of “Ni” in official documents until 2014!
