At the beginning of the year, Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and his return to the White House immediately sparked linguistic creativity.
The Language Council and the Language Newspaper's list of new words includes, for example, "trade bazooka" and "retaliatory tariffs," words linked to the US's aggressive trade policy. A "Trump whisperer" has the president's ear, while the "most casual friend" Elon Musk is a "broligarch" - extremely rich and power-hungry.
Didn't understand anything
In contrast, a couple of contributions from the younger TikTok generation are "six seven" and "skibidi." Adults didn't understand anything and "what is six seven?" became one of the most common Google searches of the year.
I think it's interesting that the words have nevertheless found their way into the media language. You could say that the adult world has picked up the language of the kids and I think that says something about our time. We need something to laugh about, and we do that with such ridiculous words as "six seven" and "skibidi" - which don't mean anything, says Linnea Hanell, language curator at the Language Council.
It is not common to borrow or translate words from languages other than English. But this year, two words are taken from German, both connected to green electricity.
One is a "balcony power plant," a small solar cell system on the balcony that supplies electricity to your household. Popular in Germany where electricity prices are high. The other is "dunkelflaute" (roughly "dark silence"), when it is calm and overcast and neither solar nor wind power generates electricity.
Sausage made of down
However, the concept of a mother's sausage is entirely Swedish - the long down coat that helps many women survive the winter months.
The word "brain rot" also sounds Swedish - the result of excessive consumption of meaningless things on social media. But the phenomenon is global - brain rot was named word of the year 2024 by the Oxford English Dictionary.
It remains to be seen which of this year's words will stick. But it is usually less than half of the new words that end up in dictionaries.
We would like some words from the new word list to remain in Swedish for a long time. But there is a point in that some words would have fallen out of the collective memory if they had not been picked up on the list. It becomes a reminder - "that's right, that was the year everyone was talking about (the toy, editor's note) Tamagotchi", says Linnea Hanell.
