To all the mothers out there
Happy Mother's Day! In the United States we celebrate our mothers on the second Sunday of May, while in Sweden its on the last Sunday of May. As a native Swede living in Chicago I keep track of both; I get my special day with the family first, and then a couple of weeks later we honor the mothers of the family in Sweden. Since I teach Swedish in my online lessons at Learn Swedish Now I wanted to use today’s blog to give you a brief language lesson and also talk a bit about Mother’s Day in Sweden.
First of all let’s talk about the Swedish word for “mother”. In Sweden Mother’s Day is called “Mors Dag”, where mor is an older word for mother and dag is Swedish for day. In the modern Swedish language it is more common to call your mother “mamma”, but mor is still used. You might notice that there is no apostrophe before the “s” in “mors”. That is because the genitive case in Swedish is formed by simply putting an “s” at the end of the word, without the apostrophe.
Now you know how to say mother in Swedish. So how about grandmother? In Swedish we actually have two words for grandmother, one for maternal grandmother and another for paternal grandmother. For your maternal grandmother you say “mormor”, which literally means mother’s mother. And, correspondingly, we call our paternal grandmother “farmor”, which literally means “father’s mother”. The word “far” means father, but is also a bit old fashioned and often replaced by “pappa” in modern Swedish. The Swedish words for grandfather are “farfar” for paternal grandfather and “morfar” for maternal grandfather. At this point you might wonder how to say great grandmother; that simple: your maternal great grandmother is “mormors mor”, literally mother’s mother’s mother!
But how did Mother’s Day come about in the first place? It actually has its origins right here in the United States. A West Virginia native, Anna Jarvis, allegedly found her inspiration for Mother’s day while listening to her mother, Ann Jarvis, teach Sunday school. After her mother passed away the first official Mother’s day was observed in 1908. The custom slowly spread to other parts of the world, and eventually reached Sweden. It was an author, Cecilia Bååth-Holmberg, that advocated for celebrating the day in Sweden and in 1920 released a set of instructions for how to observe Mother’s Day. Most importantly, children should spend the day with their mother. Household tasks would be supported, flags should be raised in honor of the day, and mothers served morning coffee and cake in bed. This is perhaps the only Swedish holiday where the original instructions for how to celebrate are still around!
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