Riiiiing! It’s back to school season in most countries and whether or not you are currently a student, now’s a great time to add some school themed vocabulary in a Nordic language of your choice: Danish, Elfdalian, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Pite Sami or Swedish.
These particular lists turned out to be even more challenging to create than I expected. Part of that is that even core school subjects vary somewhat in name and scope. For example, driver’s ed in high school itself seems to be mainly an American thing. Now, I am just basing this on what I’ve discovered throughout the research I did for each list – feel free to tell me about how this and other school subjects are offered in your country 😁. However, I wanted the lists to be comprehensive enough, so for most of the languages, I included the translation for those who would like to speak about the school subject in their target language, even though in those countries driver’s ed is essentially a seperate offering outside the school. In addition, for endangered languages such as Elfdalian and Pite Sami, it was a challenge finding the closest available word to describe each school subject. But I spent several hours each day for about a week trying to be as thorough as possible in order to create a quality product. That meant using official dictionaries and other highly regarded dictionaries, such as svenska.se, ordbokene.no, dalsk.ordbok.gratis and bahkogirrje.oahpa.no. I’ve also spoken with various friends who are native speakers of some of these languages to ensure the most authentic terms were used.
Last, but not least, I put a great deal of effort into choosing fun, accurate illustrations for the vocabulary so that these words will stick better in your mind. That being said, please feel free to share your thoughts on both the design and the content itself as I’m always looking for ways to improve.
Now it’s time to start learning new vocabulary, so pick a list below and enjoy!
Polyglot in Progress 