WHAT IS THE CLOCK?
THE CLOCK IS 8 !
One of the stranger things about learning Swedish as an English speaker is the uncanny sense that Swedes—these reticent, good-humoured, unpretentiously civilized people—are secretly barking at you like Vikings.
The prosaic act of asking for the time, for example, becomes, in Swedish,
“Vad är klockan?”
In English, this translates literally to,
"WHAT IS THE CLOCK?1"
—to which the response is,
“THE CLOCK IS 8!”
To be clear, they don’t yell this—or anything else really; speaking in broad cultural terms, modern Swedes are probably the least likely people to yell anything. But the Swedish language has, of course, been around much longer than 21st century Swedish society. At one point it was, according to historical linguists, the same language as English—that is, both Swedish and English are assumed to descend from a presumed common ancestor language, which linguists call either Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic.
It is this distant linguistic family relationship which makes the Swedish phrase vad är klockan? in its literal English translation sound to me, as a native English speaker, like these quiet, urbane people, with their clean streets and globally successful home-organization systems, are somehow channelling dark age Germanic chieftains in the middle of a raid—like they are shouting their requests to know the time like the words themselves have their own unruly beards.
For this I blame the Normans.
When they conquered The Land of the Angles (i.e. England) in 1066, Norman French became the language of law and governance—of political and social power—while the Germanic language of the “natives” (themselves conquerors from about 600 years earlier) became correspondingly socially devalued. In short, to sit on a “stool” and eat from a “board” (to use the modern English equivalent words) was to be seen as a primitive (Germanic) native, while to sit on une chaiere and to eat at une table meant that one was associated with the ruling elite.
While Swedish, like all European languages, has been fairly heavily influenced by Latin and its descendant languages, particularly French, Scandinavia was never conquered and occupied by a Latinate elite; in other words, their ruling class, and therefore the vocabulary and structure of their language, has remained fundamentally Germanic in a way English has not.2
And so here am I, in 2024, one of the gazillion mongrel descendants of the linguistic history of England, bringing a snobby Norman attitude to my new life in Sweden. Because of course Vad är klockan? is not any more ‘primitive’ than What time is it? (an equally Germanic phrase, by the way); it just sounds that way thanks to old-ass bullshit associations. But then, what is language if not that?
And so I remain,
yours in old-ass bullshit associations,
Mandy-in-Sweden
Because Swedish and English are related Germanic languages with a lot of vocabulary in common, it should be pretty easy for me to Mandysplain “vad är klockan” to you in English, even if the only time you’ve ever seen Swedish is at IKEA.
First up: vad. As you’ve likely guessed, this is closely related to the English word “what,” and means basically the same thing.
Second: är. While the diacritics (those little dots) on the ‘a’ may make this word seem pleasantly (or frighteningly, depending on your disposition) foreign, it’s closely related to the English word “are” and means the same thing. The only difference is that Swedish developed to use that particular present-tense form of the verb “to be” for all persons and numbers, whereas in English we currently use three forms—namely am and is in addition to are.
Third: klockan. It’s not hard to see that this is essentially the same word as English “clock,” and that is indeed what it means in Swedish too: if you have a clock on your wall or on your desk or even on your wrist, Swedes call it en klocka (a clock). What’s different from English here—and what makes the Swedish phrase What is the clock? three words instead of four—is that in order to say “the clock” (as opposed to “a clock,”) in Swedish, you put “the” at the end of the word you’re using it with. So:
en klocka = a clock
klockan = the clock
In other words, the “n” at the end of “klockan” means “the.”
Like all/any two-tiny-paragraph summaries of vast and complex historical forces, this account is highly simplified and no doubt could raise many substantial quibbles from people who know a great deal more about this stuff than I do. But if you wanted to read an academic text about this subject you’d be doing that (and if I wanted to write one, I’d have stayed in that PhD program I left back in 2017).