“The pension’s scheme isn’t based on magic. It is a welfare ambition based on large-scale re-distribution and citizens’ own work. If people think that we can live longer and shorten our work life, then pensions will get lower,” Reinfeldt said to Dagens Nyheter (Today’s News).

With the risk of being completely and utterly dull here – here’s a quick guide to the Swedish pension system and how it works – for anyone who might be interested:
The Swedish pension system consists of three main components – national retirement pension, occupational pension and voluntary pension. The national retirement pension is made up of three elements, income pension, premium pension and guarantee pension. The income pension and the premium pension are completely independent from the national budget. The income pension is financed by employer contributions representing 16% of an employee’s gross annual income. Premium pension is financed through an additional contribution from the employer equal to approximately 2.5% of the employee’s gross annual income. Occupational pension is the pension coverage provided to employees via their employer, as a component of salary, which is also known as collective agreement pension. Voluntary pension consists of private pension insurance based on voluntary savings.

The retirement age is normally 65, but it’s flexible and some people start to work less when they are 61 while some keep on working until they are 67. Of Swedes over 65 years old, 7.8 percent were employed in 2010, according to Statistics Sweden.

So, what about this new suggestion then? Well, apart from us living longer and the higher standard of living in general, the Prime Minister believes that employers would be more willing to hire people over 55 if they knew they would stay for another 20 years instead of 10. And that we might have to consider more than one career during our working life – a quite challenging view for most of us.

As mentioned before, this has not been greeted with open arms and cheers. Debates has been raging in the media and on the social networks, people have been rather… well let’s put it this way, unkind to the Swedish Prime Minister and his new suggestion.

What’s the retirement age in your country? And could you imagine yourself working until you are 75?

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Kids love to help out with baking, wanting to clean the bowl with the “Slickepott” as the rubber scraper/spatula is referred to in everyday Swedish. The Swedish verb for “to lick” is “att slicka” and “pott” derives most likely from a word for a container or bowl of some sort. Meaning that the Slickepott is something that you can wipe the very last from the jar, bowl or saucepan.

Just the same as the Osthyvel, cooking and baking is not the same without this utensil. It feels like a total waste to leave a jar of jam with lots left in it just because the knife or spoon doesn’t fit. However, there is a colorful solution.

Can you think of any utensils which are specifically used in your country that Swedes would appreciate as presents?

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We all know how Madlibs work right? Usually you have a second person reading off certain grammatical forms that you need. A noun here, an adjective there, maybe the name of a person. Of course, we’re online and so we’ll have to improvise. Below you will find a list of 16 blanks to fill in. In Swedish. The prompts are in Swedish, the words you choose should be in Swedish, and finally, the final product will be in Swedish.

Pick your words, and in a couple of days, we will post the remainder of the Madlib for you to fill in. Have fun and be creative!

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As I explained last time, the letter å in writing came to be like so: first as a double-a (aa), then as an a with another, smaller a written over it, and finally a simplified å. But why exactly was there a double-a at all?

The double-a was used to indicate a long a-sound, which eventually, over time, began to sound much like the long o-sound of that time (similar to today’s å); in other words, the long a became orally more closed. And while the long a became more and more like the long o, the long o became itself more closed, becoming closer and closer to the long u-sound of that time. And with that, the long u-sound became even more closed, evolving into a new sound: the Swedish long u we know and love today.

In a more graphical form, the vowel shift looked like this:

And that’s why today’s Swedish vowels are so different from the vowels of many other European languages although they are spellt the same.

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This incident has been on the news, discussed in school classes all round Sweden and has in general upset a lot of people I think. To me, this gives a picture of what Sweden is like. What Swedes (or at least some of them) get worked up about. The fact that this story got a lot of attention on the news indicates something too I think.

Even though IKEA offered the family 20 000 Swedish crowns, the family have declined the offer and are proceeding to sue IKEA because they feel that the girls rights were totally violated and the way they were treated was completely unacceptable.

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