miniprof:

missanthropicprinciple:

whimmy-bam:

la-negra-barbuda:

rootless-but-grounded:

eelhound:

This strange sound can mean ‘yes’ in the Swedish language.

fucking fascinating

merdafatua lingusticals and such

Out of anything I could have expected or anticipated, this was no where close.

*shoop*

This is called an ingressive and it’s not really unique to Swedish specifically — by which I mean that similar things can be found in other Scandinavian languages with the same function. 

In Icelandic, it’s common to show agreement by saying “já” (the word for “yes”) ingressively, i.e. sucking in air as shown above. It’s not really just to say “yes,” it’s more like the sort of little feedback sounds that you might make mid-conversation, “yeah”/”mm-hmm”/”uh-huh” to indicate that you are listening and participating in the conversation while the speaker is talking.

One of my favorite favorite things, though, is that this isn’t really learned as a language-specific thing so much as a general conversational strategy, at least in the Icelandic case; so I have a lot of friends who are native speakers of Icelandic but have spent some time living in the US, and they definitely find it really hard not to do this kind of ingressive with, say, “yeah,” during conversations in English. They sound … startled