Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish).
- "bra" means "good" in Swedish.
- Swedish has the slang word "moppe", which should not be translated to "mop" despite the first half of the word sounding very similar; it actually means motorbike.
- Brad Pitt has been the butt of a few jokes involving his last name being spelled the same way as a crude word for dick in Swedish. (The pronunciation is off enough that phrases involving just the word "pit" don't get the same treatment, though.)
- "The End" in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish is "Slut" (pronounced "sloot"). Tourists are usually fairly amused by the fact that the end of the train line in Swedish is marked by a giant sign that reads "Slutstation". The word is also the most common phrase used on film ending cards, inadvertently sending off international audiences with a swear.
- In Danish "fag" means "topic, subject". Combine this with the previous example, and libraries in Denmark label their shelves with "fag slut" to mark, for example, where the books on physics end and the books on geography begin.
- "Service elevator" is "Godselevator" in Danish. And when the Godselevator is in motion, a sign will light up reading "I Fart" (in speed/transit).
- "Speed" (of vehicles) and "transit" is "Fart" in Danish, leading to words like "Fartplan" (transit timetable) and "Fartkontrol" (speed control).
- Similarly, in Swedish "farthinder" means "speed bump".
- In Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, the word "gift" means both 'poison' and 'married' (the former as a noun, the latter as an adjective).
- The old joke of the Swede that goes into a cab in Denmark asking to be taken to a fun place (ett roligt ställe), just to be transported to a graveyard (In Swedish "ett roligt ställe" = "somewhere fun", but in Danish "et roligt ställe"= "somewhere calm"). This also plays off stereotypes that Swedes and Danes have of one another (cautious and fun-loving, respectively).
- Swedish and Danish are prone to this, as the two languages are very similar, with some amusing exceptions. For instance, the Swedish verb for "play ball" (bolla) sounds like the Danish verb for "have sex" (bolle) and the Danish word for "leek" (porre) sounds like the Swedish word for "porn" (porr).
- In Swedish, "kock" means "chef". It's a cognate of English "cook" and German "Koch".
- The Norwegian word for "cook" is "kokk". And "cook" in English sounds like Norwegian "kukk", meaning "cock"...
- Someone in Honda discovered that "fitta" means female genitals in Norwegian and Swedish. Fortunately for Honda, this was before Honda's new hatchback subcompact car went on the market, and Honda had time to rename it to "Fit" or "Jazz" depending on the market.
- "Gift" means poison in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and German (Modern German usage derives from the word 'gift'-as-in-present being used as euphemism for poison in the Middle Ages). Make of that what you will.
- The Swedish word svalka means 'coolness' and has pleasant connotations, so Ikea named a series of drinking glasses Svalka. Unfortunately, Ikea also operates in Russia, and in Russian сва́лка (svalka) means 'garbage dump'. The Russian Ikea renamed the glasses to Свальк (svalk), resorting to using a soft l in order to make the words look different.
- "Kaka" means "cake" in Swedish. (The first A is pronounced more like an "O" sound.) To German ears it sounds like a child's word for "poo".
- While not in dictionaries, Mensa can be interpreted as the verb menstruate in Swedishnote ; the contextual overlap is nonexistent but will produce a snicker or two should the club be brought up in an elementary school.
- This Swedish children's picture book
◊ raised a few eyebrows when the now-defunct Sweden twitter account brought it to the internet's attention. In Swedish, it's completely innocuous, showing the words for "goat" and "kid" (as in young goat, not human child). To the eyes of English-speakers, the goats appear to be urging the reader to "get killing"...note - English has a habit of taking Swedish words and making them mean the opposite of what they originally were. Semester does not mean a period of time you’re in school for, but a holiday/vacation.
- In English-speaking countries, Knepper is a more or less innocuous-sounding surname, but in Danish, "knepper" is an inflected form of the verb "kneppe" which means "to fuck". The "k" is not silent in Danish, though. Inevitably, a lot of Danes can't read or talk about Robert Knepper while keeping a straight face.
- A Danish physician of the 16th and 17th centuries had the hilarious name of Ole Worm (pronounced something like "o-leh vorm").
- Odd and Randi are perfectly normal Norwegian names. Randy is a normal name in the US too, but it'll raise some eyebrows (or cause fits of uncontrollable sniggering) in the UK.
- There's the Norwegian football team Fotballaget Fart. Based in Vang, no less...
- "Hell" means "Luck" in Norwegian.
- "legen" means "the doctor" in Norwegian and "to lay; to set down" in German.
- "tak" means "yes" in Polish and "thank you" in Danish.
- The adverb "yet" is how Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish pronounce the word "jet", and also sounds closely to Thai word for "fuck".
