Keys Corner

While I was at University, I had the chance to work in Umeå in northern Sweden for 13 weeks, which was long enough to get a taste for learning about a different culture and to find learning a foreign language actually useful. Although I did pick up enough Swedish to get by, it has been dormant for about 35 years now and I had never realized there is a system to how many of IKEA’s products are named – for example:

• Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö)
• Chairs and desks are Swedish men’s names (Roger, Joel)
• Beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway (Tromsö, Hopen)
• Carpets after places in Denmark (Egeby)

For a little more information on the naming system and how it came about, visit today’s Guardian.

And the heading for this post? It means “Do you speak IKEA?”.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 16:02:47 and is filed under Language / Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.