Nyår or Nytt År? How to talk about the holidays in Swedish
The holidays are coming up, so we thought a post about holiday grammar was in order. Swedish holiday vocabulary looks simple on the surface, jul (Christmas) and nyår (New Year), but the prepositions and articles behave differently from everyday nouns. Native speakers use them almost like time adverbs, which is why the usual grammar patterns don’t always apply.
Is it vid jul? i jul? över jul? på julafton? Actually, all of those are correct! But they mean different things.
Read on as we unwrap Swedish holiday grammar! For more on Swedish prepositions, check out unit 6 of the A2 Swedish course on Scriva!
Christmas
Holiday names are treated as fixed time points, which means they take the preposition på. In other words, we say:
på julafton
på juldagen
på annandag jul
when referring to the specific day. Eg, Tomten kommer på julafton.
But there are loads of other ways to speak about or around the actual holiday, and these all take different prepositions. First let’s go through i jul. I jul is surprising because it is an unusual construction. Namely, it doesn’t really exist for any other holiday in standard Swedish. You won’t hear “i midsommar”. What does i jul mean? This Christmas period. For example, “hur blir vädret i jul?” or, “vad ska du göra i jul?”. Here i jul refers to the upcoming holiday period as a whole rather than a specific day.
While i jul is unusual in the context of holidays, it is actually completely natural in the context of time expressions. For example, you will also hear:
i sommar (this summer)
i år (this year)
Över jul and runt jul are somewhat similar to the above, but less time specific. Över jul and runt jul mean something akin to “around Christmastime”.
Lastly, till jul places Christmas as something of a deadline, and means “for Christmas”. For example:
vi pyntar till jul = we are decorating for Christmas
det ska vara klart till jul = it will be done for Christmas
New Year’s
Nyår is largely the same as jul, but with two quirks. 1) There is no i nyår like jul.
på nyårsafton (on New Year’s eve)
på nyårsdagen (on New Year’s day)
vid/runt nyår (around New Year’s)
över nyår (over New Year’s)
The second quirk - we say nyår instead of nytt år!
To be clear, when greeting others you say “gott nytt år!”, or the even more casual, “gott nytt!”. But the holiday is nyår, not nytt år. For those that have started to learn adjective congruence, this will seem strange. And the reason is quite simply that it is just a quirk of the language. Nyår was originally nytt år as you would expect, but over time became contracted to a single term, nyår. When these contractions happen in Swedish, the adjective typically gets shortened to a stem form, so agreement disappears. Here are some other examples:
höghus (högt hus -> höghus): high-rise/tall building but not a skyscraper, which is skyskrapa
kallvatten (kallt vatten -> kallvatten): cold water
storspel (stort spel -> storspel): a great performance. Note that this is more idiomatic, it means when a player plays really well, not that the game itself was large in size.
snabbspår (snabbt spår -> snabbspår): fast track
A bit of grammar to help navigate the holiday season. God Jul, Gott Nytt År, och God Fortsättning!
