Is Your Name Swedish?

Everyone has heard of Sweden, right? Swedes are those people with really goofy accents, with large muscular viking girls, and their Ikeas, and not to mention their mountains of meatballs. We've heard of these things, but then no one really knows where it's located. And they speak Swiss, don't they? Actually it's Swedish :P But what people really may not realize as well is that many of us have Swedish ancestry, and Swedish names. Is your name Swedish? How can can you tell? While it may be difficult at times here are some very common surnames in Sweden.

The most common follow the patronymic system. Surnames weren't that common in earlier times, and people would be refereed to by their fathers name. If you were a boy, you'd be referred to as your father's first name, plus "Son", for son. Same goes for daughter, but instead of son it'd be "Dotter", for daughter. That's why we hear a lot of Larssons and Johanssons. Because they were Lars son, or Johans son. If your last name ends with son then it's Swedish.

Sometimes Swedes were referred to by the place they lived. If you were a farmer people might now you by the name of your farm. Maybe your famous for something you did in the military, and they gave you a name based on location. Swedes eventually got to the point were too many had the same name, half the place was Larsson. So it was common that the government or military gave you a new name. But these can be very difficult to track down, as they are named after places around the world.

But more commonly again is simple Swedish words in names. A list of common words you'll see in surnames may be

gren:branch
berg:mountain
strom:stream
felt:field
svard:sword

My surname is Tangren. I'm from the branch of tan. Actually tan doesn't mean anything, I'm still researching into that. But "gren" throws up a flag indicating that it's Swedish.

There are many many more names that can be identified as Swedish, but this serves as a good example on how names sometimes tended to work in Sweden!