Swahili in The Beehive

There is a Red Cross charity shop, The Beehive, in Löttorp and I always make a point of popping in there to stock up with the latest fashion togs. It's only open a few half days at this time of year and I was almost alone in the shop. There was a couple there, a Swedish guy and a black girl, buying children's clothes for their little boy and, being the nosy sod that I am, I eavesdropped when the dad was talking to his son. I couldn't place the language at all, it certainly wasn't Nordic and it didn't sound like Finnish or one of the Baltic languages. So of course, I asked.

He was speaking Swahili, not a language that one hears every day even in a cosmopolitan metropolis like Kärrtorp. Exotic I thought. The dad pointed out to me that it is fact spoken by several million on the African continent, in contrast to the 9 or 10 million people globally who speak Swedish.(Having Wikied my facts here 5 - 10 million have it as a native language but 50 million have it as a lingua franca in teh southern countries of Africa).

I wonder how many words there are for snow in Swahili. They are certainly going to need all of them now!

The snow, incidentally,is a great help for seeing the local wildlife.On the drive back I saw a deer and a pheasant.

Öland! Exotic is the word!