European was shocked by The Longest Word in Swedish

Compounding words is incredibly important for the Swedish language, a single space can actually change the entire meaning of the sentence. My favorite is, and will always be "fryst kycklinglever" versus "fryst kyckling lever". The first one means "frozen chicken liver" and the second one means "frozen chicken is alive". Unfortunately, not all Swedish speakers have grasped this, as that example came from a sign in a super market and there are so many more.😂

Suprised they didn't bring up "Hyponervokustiskadiafragmakontravibrationer".

The space between words is such an important distinction.
Rökfritt and rök fritt are very different in meaning. Rök means smoke and fritt can be translated as free.
Without the space it means no smoking, as in free from smoke. With the space it gives permission to smoke, smoke freely.

Giftorm = Venomous snake/Poisonous snake
Gift orm = Married snake

The funny way I learned this growing up was a joke my father always said: "There's a difference between a 'Brunhårig Sjuksköterska' and a 'Brun Hårig Sjuk Sköterska'. One is a brunette nurse and the other is a brown hairy sick carer."

Like she said in her example "Really good" being put together makes it "Jättebra" where "Jätte" means "Giant" and "bra" means good, which would just make it sound weird if it was "giant good", historically we don't see the giants as being too good.

Brunhårig sjuksköterska = Brunette Nurse.
Brun hårig sjuk sköterska = Bown hairy sick caretaker.


It's kinda like you could say, Brownhaired or Brown Hairy, because the word for Haired / Hairy is the same.

This kind of logic exist in german too, words are often put together to specify what you mean.

That last one is just a made up word: North Baltic Sea coast-artillery airplane-surveillance simulation facility material maintenance monitoring system.

I.e. a system for monitoring the maintenance material of a facility dedicated to an air surveillance simulation installation, used by the coastal defense artillery along the northern Baltic Sea coast.

I promise you, no such system actually exists in reality. It follows all grammatical rules, but it's not an actual word you actually would or could use. It's just trying to compound words together for as long as humanly possible. 😂

7:32 Spelling is actually not that hard. Most words are spelled in a more regular and systematic way than in English.
(And most swedish word are not these long compounds... rather shorter than the English translation in many cases.)

Even the shortest Swedish word ö could have been mentioned. Rather easy for them to pronounce but hard to guess what it means.

The last 100 letter word must be some kind of military inside joke. The "word" appears as nonsense first but it works better if you start from the last part and work backwards. It can kinda be translated as "Discussion forum prep work about a follow-up system on the maintenance of air reconnaissance-site equipment of the North Baltic Sea Coastal Artillery".

As a Swede, it is fun to see reactions to the language in writing. But don't mind when I see the Thai language.

The german girls sometimes sounds like a text-to-voice synthesizer ;-) The french guy is quite good!

Our longest “official” word in the national lexicon is realisationsvinstbeskattning. However since our language works by just combining words together we can grammatically construct words of infinite length.

While not official, we do use long words to describe specific things. Let’s say that I want to talk about a specific profession, but I want to talk about the education leading up to that: I’d just smack -utbildning at the end. This type of long words are very common in spoken language, however not in written language. Our law regulating the language, Språklagen, specifies that the goal while developing Swedish is to make it easy to understand, hence longer words aren’t used that commonly especially not in written language.

Personally I find this a pesky law. We shouldn’t stupify our language. I believe that it’s better to be more precise in wording, why long words are quite nice.

How else would I specify stuff about stuff with long names? 🤪

There is no known longest word in Swedish or any other Germanic language. A word can be how ever long you need it to be given that it is an Indo-European language branch that preserves the "word stem stacking feature" (also actual English = "wordstemstackingfeature" given speech... that "new" word is getting pretty long... I guess it won't need to enter a dictionary since it is selfexplanatory given context... and writing stems apart is after all not expressed in actual speech).

Many languages stack word stems with attachments. But not all languages stack word stem upon word stem. Indo-European did and that is still true for Germanic.
This means there is no theoretical upper limit of how long a new word can be. Having a long word be recorded down doesn't mean it is the longest possible. It simply means...
"it's the longest recorded by academia" due to some particular agreed upon need.

No lingusistic limit but if you want people to understand the meaning of a new word that you created especially on the fly then don't keep it longer than what the vast majority can keep track of. Otherwise you will induce missunderstanding. Simple as that.
German has some ridicoulusly long recorded words but I think you will have to read them twice or more before understanding the true meaning of them. Especially if they aren't used often.

Long Germanic "new words" (so usually comprised of multiple stacked word stems) are created on the fly all the time while usually discarded as quickly. It's only the ones that find a good every day need or usage that tend to stick in every ones mind and then end up recorded in dictionaries.

Modern Germanic languages still stack word stems on top each other at will just like (ancient) Greek in order to create what ever new words and meanings are needed. Be it for a fleeting situation (where it dissapears as a "thing" right after) or permanent use (where it sticks). These things tend to sort themselves out by themselves.

Långavståndssamtalsupplysningsöverföringskapacitetsförståelsemotstånd


...is a word I just made up. It is not likely to ever be recorded as a permanently needed "long word in Swedish" so it will likely not enter a dictionary. But it is a Swedish word complying to Swedish linguistic rules as well as Indo-European ones given its word creation mechanics. And given context it will be pretty selfexplanatory. By itself maybe not since it is getting quite long.

I love the word Bildrulle, which can bil-drulle (a car maniac, someone who is bad at driving a car), or bild-rulle (picture roll).

"endast särbarn, särskriver" 😂

12:02 - Sure, it's a legit word, but arguably no one would ever use it in a sentence. That long of a word is 100% made up for the sole purpose to be long, and since in Swedish you can put together how many specific words you like you can in theory get words like this.

Even the Swedish girl didn't know what it meant and pronounced it wrong, though. It's basically "North Baltic sea coastal artillery flight surveillance simulation facility material maintenance follow-up" (someone might do a better translation of it, but that's the gist of it).

I think the last word is "Preparatory works for a contribution to a discussion about a maintenance monitoring system for aerial reconnaissance simulation facility materiel for Northeast coastal artillery" in English.

Like all Germanic languages, compound nouns are a common feature of Swedish. Contrary to what some think they are not a whole sentence in one word, but rather a single noun. English, also being a Germanic language, allows for this. However the words are generally spelled separately, except for shorter words (e.g. airplane, loanword). The rules for compounding are pretty much the same, with the main noun at the end, which the English woman kind of picked up on.

I notice Jessica can pronounce those Swedish long words with confidence without much difficulty.

A subtle detail that not even some Swedish people notice when speaking is that the letters R and S following each other makes a SH sound. This is seen in the word “Fors” which means stream or rapid, like water. The word is however pronounced more like “Fosh” than “Fors”.