Filling Up Your Years

Hourglass image

One way to say that you have a birthday in Swedish is to use the verb fylla (to fill up, load, pack). For example:

– Jag fyller i april = My birthday is in April*
– Du fyller år i morgen = Tomorrow is your birthday
– Han fyller nämligen år i dag = It’s his birthday today
– Hon fyllde 40 år i går = She was 40 years old yesterday

Birthday in Swedish is födelsedag [ˈføːdɛlsɛˌdɑːɡ /ˈfœlsɛˌdɑː(ɡ)], and Happy Birthday is Grattis på födelsedagen. Födelsedag comes from födelse (birth) and dag (day). Födelse comes from föda (to feed, give birth), which is related to the English words food and feed; and -else (a suffix that makes verbs into nouns).

*Could you also say Min födelsedag är i april (My birthday is in April)?

When asking how old someone is in Swedish, could you ask many years they’ve filled?

Is it polite to ask someone’s age in Sweden?

Are there interesting ways to refer to birthdays in other languages?

Sources: bab.la, Wiktionary

3 thoughts on “Filling Up Your Years

  1. “Could you also say Min födelsedag är i april (My birthday is in April)?”
    – Yes, and you could also say Jag har födelsedag i april.

    “When asking how old someone is in Swedish, could you ask many years they’ve filled?”
    – No, not generally. Only if the topic of conversation is a birthday. Like so: Det var min födelsedag igår. Jaha, hur mycket fyllde du?

    “Is it polite to ask someone’s age in Sweden?”
    -Well, it’s not particularly impolite.

    “Are there interesting ways to refer to birthdays in other languages?”
    – “Filling” years is also quite common in the Scandinavian languages and in Finnish.

  2. It’s interesting that in the ” Song of ice and fire” / “game of thrones”, birthdays are called “name days”, while for many Christians a birthday and a name day are different.

  3. It seem rather parallel in Spanish, where “Happy Birthday” is “Feliz Cumpleaños”, My guess is that the verb cumplir is cognate with English “compile”, and Wiktionary gives its meanings as “fulfill” and “complete”, along with the more specific meaning relating to reaching a particular age.

    And if we dig deeper the root of cumplir come from the Latin root pleo, meaning “full”, just like fylla!

    Indo-European is so much fun because you keep bumping into distant cousins you never knew you had.

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