Brian
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Post by Brian on Dec 22, 2017 19:05:06 GMT
I was thinking that Frida must at least know three (Norwegian, Swedish, and English), but perhaps she knows more. Bjorn and Benny obviously know Swedish and English, and Agnetha obviously Swedish and some English. Does anyone know what they're all fluent in?
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Post by abbafan456 on Dec 22, 2017 19:15:27 GMT
Bjorn can speak French
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Agnetha and Bjorn seem to be able to speak German pretty well.
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Post by shoshin on Dec 23, 2017 15:57:09 GMT
I was thinking that Frida must at least know three (Norwegian, Swedish, and English).. I wonder if it would be accurate to say that Frida speaks Norwegian? I recently hosted a workshop session in Finland, attended by a Swedish and a Norwegian delegate. Neither formally spoke the other's language, but they chatted together with relative ease. Their linguistic roots are so closely intertwined that, with a little accommodation on both sides, they could understand each other very well. This is a difficult concept for an English person. If two people can understand each other, we would tend to say that the difference is one of dialect rather than language.
Frida moved to Sweden very early in life and considers herself Swedish. Given that she would have little difficulty in understanding a Norwegian speaker anyway, would she go to the trouble of learning her birth tongue more or less from scratch? We may have an answer available, if Jensj2 or Contro is reading this 
Frida has appeared on Skavlan, a Norwegian chat show that takes advantage of the proximity of spoken Norwegian and Swedish that I mentioned above. The show is broadcast in both countries, because Swedish guests can understand the Norwegian interviewer and reply in Swedish. So the question for our Swedes would be, is Frida replying only in Swedish here? Or does she appear able to converse directly in the host's native tongue?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2017 16:32:48 GMT
Frida replies only in Swedish in this interview.
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Post by shoshin on Dec 24, 2017 2:35:25 GMT
Bjorn can speak French... Frida also speaks a little French in that clip, and Benny appears to understand it too (although the questions may have been known in advance). Agnetha was not there because she was resting with their newborn. Bjorn conversing in Spanish: |
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Post by shoshin on Dec 24, 2017 3:03:29 GMT
Agnetha and Bjorn seem to be able to speak German pretty well... In the clip below, both Agnetha and Frida speak German well, albeit that the jokes seem to be rehearsed. Agnetha lived in Germany for a year or two pre-ABBA. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 25, 2017 8:29:06 GMT
I was thinking that Frida must at least know three (Norwegian, Swedish, and English).. ...If two people can understand each other, we would tend to say that the difference is one of dialect rather than language...
As somebody once said, a language is a dialect with its own army and navy... No, I don't think Frida speaks Norwegian anymore than any Swede would, because we don't have to. As you can see in the Skavlan clip we understand each other just fine anyway! I saw recently a clip from Swiss TV where she was interviewed in her hometown of Zermatt, conducted in English, which surprised me a little. She should be able to speak German after over a quarter century, I would have thought: but maybe she felt too self-conscious. |
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Post by shoshin on Jan 7, 2018 1:24:40 GMT
The first clip is a 1976 interview in English, but for the German tv show Musikladen. After confirming that the group do not all live together in the same house, Agnetha says 'thank God' in German, apparently spontaneously. The second clip is from 2013. Agnetha still speaks a little German with a good accent.
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Post by chelseacharger on Jan 7, 2018 13:54:02 GMT
Yes, that interview in Zermatt was a bit odd. I actually think she likely speaks Swiss German which is quite different to High German. There was also a interview with Nelly Furtado on the same programme conducted in English so maybe it was meant for a wider audience. Growing up in a household with her grandmother, I guess they spoke to each other in Norwegian or a meshed together dialect. |
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Post by shoshin on Jan 7, 2018 23:32:52 GMT
^^ Whereas Norwegian and Swedish are two separate languages that can nevertheless be mutually intelligible, the Swiss German spoken in Zermatt is apparently the opposite: a dialect rather than a language, but Germans cannot understand it and require subtitles! Kids learn something else called 'Swiss Standard German' too, as if French, Italian and English isn't enough of a handful already. My German is very rusty, but even I can pick up too much of the Zermatt 2017 interviewer's questions for it to be Swiss German. I can't understand the guy with Frida, but he may nevertheless also be speaking German with a strong local accent, rather than Swiss German. Do we have any native German or Swiss ABBAchatters? When he first greets Frida, I can't make out whether she replies in German or English; the 'hallo' would work in both languages and I can't hear what else she says. She appears to understand his first question in German, although there is an edit just before it, so he may have prepared her. In all of her many Zermatt YouTube clips for German/Swiss tv, including this most recent one, I can't find any in which she doesn't speak English throughout. The German prince that Frida married had a Swedish mother and was educated in Sweden. Also, his first wife was Norwegian. So Frida may not have needed to speak much German, and may not even want to, given the parental history thing. As for the Swiss German dialect spoken where she lives, it could only really be used with a few thousand people, so it may not be worth her time and effort to learn it. English is very widely spoken in Zermatt, according to a travel site that I just checked. Here's the 2017 clip. Check out Frida's ABBAchronistic mistake at 1 minute 30 secs |
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Post by WATERLOO on Jan 18, 2018 19:10:58 GMT
Frida says "Hallo, dankeschön" when the interviewer approaches her. She has quite an accent when she says that. Björn is very fluent in German, even today. And I'm pretty sure that Agnetha used to be pretty fluent in German as she lived in Germany, was engaged to a German and also recorded in German. But I also think she lost most of it over the years as the last time she might have used the language actively was during the ABBA-days when they went to Germany to do promotion. She did a German ad for A, though, in 2013. And while the sentence she says sounds very rehearsed, the masters the difficult German ch-sound perfectly. Beware, tough, the male voice over pronounces her name horribly. It sounds like Ak-neta which is not only wrong but also sounds a bit like the German pronunciation of acne. |
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Post by shoshin on Jan 18, 2018 21:14:00 GMT
Frida says "Hallo, dankeschön" when the interviewer approaches her. She has quite an accent when she says that...
You're German yourself, aren't you Waterloo? Do you mean that Frida has a good German accent, or that her German accent sounds foreign?
Can you pick up what she says to Thomas on the way towards the interviewer, just before the voiceover starts? I have somehow managed to convince myself that it's 'La vie, c'est courte', but that's pretty unlikely! The reason I'm interested in what she says to Thomas is that in other YouTube videos it is clear that he actually speaks English very well. So the language that she chooses to speak directly to him may be significant. English? German? Swiss German? Er.. French? I can't hear English in her words, but then again I can't hear them very well at all.
Also, does Thomas have a particularly awkward German accent? I speak some German and can understand the interviewer, but from Thomas I can barely catch a few words. |
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Post by agness on Feb 18, 2018 19:53:15 GMT
Bjorn speaks German very well!
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Post by WATERLOO on Feb 24, 2018 15:31:51 GMT
You're German yourself, aren't you Waterloo? Do you mean that Frida has a good German accent, or that her German accent sounds foreign?
Can you pick up what she says to Thomas on the way towards the interviewer, just before the voiceover starts? I have somehow managed to convince myself that it's 'La vie, c'est courte', but that's pretty unlikely! The reason I'm interested in what she says to Thomas is that in other YouTube videos it is clear that he actually speaks English very well. So the language that she chooses to speak directly to him may be significant. English? German? Swiss German? Er.. French? I can't hear English in her words, but then again I can't hear them very well at all.
Also, does Thomas have a particularly awkward German accent? I speak some German and can understand the interviewer, but from Thomas I can barely catch a few words. Yes, I'm German myself (not Swiss, though). And yeah, Frida has a very strong foreign accent when saying these two words. I cannot make out what she's saying during the bit you were referring to. Thomas doesn't have an awkward German accent, he sounds pretty normal for a Swiss person who speak quite a different version of German. People from the German part of Switzerland are fluent in both standard German and the Swiss dialect, though. |
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Post by gamleman on Jun 12, 2020 16:42:47 GMT
I know this is an old thread, but I would just like to follow up on Frida speaking Norwegian and German.
It seems a reasonable assumption that Frida's grandmother spoke Norwegian to her during her up-bringing, so I imagine she is comfortable in hearing and understanding Norwegian, even if she may not not speak it herself. I've actually wondered how she conversed with her German father when she met him. I suppose it's quite possible that he spoke English. Or perhaps he spoke Norwegian, having been stationed in Norway - I guess he must have communicated with her mother somehow.
More recently, I have seen evidence that she did at least attempt to learn German when she moved to Switzerland. When I attended her charity auction in Switzerland, in addition to the auction there was a shop selling a lot of Frida's non-ABBA stuff (clothes, household items, records). In the shop, I saw a Linguaphone German course (books and cassettes) with English as the base language. I should have bought it.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 12, 2020 18:37:43 GMT
...I've actually wondered how she conversed with her German father when she met him. I suppose it's quite possible that he spoke English. Or perhaps he spoke Norwegian, having been stationed in Norway - I guess he must have communicated with her mother somehow. They didn't have a common language. German-born Hansi Schwarz, Björn's fellow Hootenanny Singers member, served as an interpreter. |
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Post by gamleman on Jun 12, 2020 19:14:48 GMT
...I've actually wondered how she conversed with her German father when she met him. I suppose it's quite possible that he spoke English. Or perhaps he spoke Norwegian, having been stationed in Norway - I guess he must have communicated with her mother somehow. They didn't have a common language. German-born Hansi Schwarz, Björn's fellow Hootenanny Singers member, served as an interpreter. Oh, I didn't know that. I remember photos of the two of them walking arm-in-arm under an umbrella. It looked like they were talking. |
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Post by lilyoconn27 on Oct 18, 2021 21:57:15 GMT
Seeing as Frida spent a lot of time in Norway as a child, coming from a large family of people who most likely couldnt speak Swedish, and being raised by her grandmother, who its said couldnt speak Swedish when they first moved there, Frida most likely can speak Norwegian. She obviously prefers using Swedish tho!
I've also seen an article on a Reddit forum claim that Frida's mother was actually a Norwegian Sámi, and the Lyngstads were from a region with a big Sámi population, so maybe there's a possibilty she has a small understanding of a Sámi language? I have no idea how true that claim is though!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 14, 2022 16:47:56 GMT
Here's a clip from an interview from Norwegian television where she explicitly states that she doesn't speak Norwegian:
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Post by Deleted on Jul 15, 2022 12:29:25 GMT
Bjorn speaks pretty good German
He was interviewed in Germany, around the time of Voyage's release and it was all in German.
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Post by tuoneudaina on Aug 4, 2024 16:52:46 GMT
Björn used to have conversational Spanish at least up to the mid-80s. I guess he lost it or maybe he no longer feels confident enough to have a conversation in Spanish. Nowadays whenever he’s approached by Spanish-speaking media he always speaks in English.
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Brian
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Post by Brian on Sept 12, 2024 17:49:15 GMT
I was thinking that Frida must at least know three (Norwegian, Swedish, and English).. I wonder if it would be accurate to say that Frida speaks Norwegian? I recently hosted a workshop session in Finland, attended by a Swedish and a Norwegian delegate. Neither formally spoke the other's language, but they chatted together with relative ease. Their linguistic roots are so closely intertwined that, with a little accommodation on both sides, they could understand each other very well. This is a difficult concept for an English person. If two people can understand each other, we would tend to say that the difference is one of dialect rather than language.
Frida moved to Sweden very early in life and considers herself Swedish. Given that she would have little difficulty in understanding a Norwegian speaker anyway, would she go to the trouble of learning her birth tongue more or less from scratch? We may have an answer available, if Jensj2 or Contro is reading this
Frida has appeared on Skavlan, a Norwegian chat show that takes advantage of the proximity of spoken Norwegian and Swedish that I mentioned above. The show is broadcast in both countries, because Swedish guests can understand the Norwegian interviewer and reply in Swedish. So the question for our Swedes would be, is Frida replying only in Swedish here? Or does she appear able to converse directly in the host's native tongue?
Years ago I watched two young men experiment with this on Youtube. One's first language was Norwegian and the other's was Swedish, and they both spoke English as a second language. Some words they could guess the meaning, many if not most they could not. It was not as easy as I thought it would be.
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