Alumnus of the Year: Fredrik Lindström is a popular educator on several fronts

Lindström is pleased to receive the Alumnus of the Year award.

“It is a great honour and joy. After all, I’m kind of a free spirit who has devoted a lot of time to academic studies but who has also done a lot of other things. So it’s really great to get this kind of recognition.”

He is a well-known cultural personality with three different platforms: the stage, television and books. Many people recognise him as the host of the TV show På spåret, as the author of books on the Swedish language, and also as a travelling comedian – most recently with a show on dialects.

Most of his material has been about language, but just as much is about human behaviour in general and Sweden in particular.

Interest in spreading knowledge

The citation emphasises that he is a popular educator and that his interest in spreading knowledge began when he was a student.

“I know that when I studied Nordic languages in Uppsala in 1985, I thought: ‘Is this how language history has been – that the development of language is the result of decisions by the majority and human usage, not of any board of grammar or teachers? It would be great to share this knowledge.’ I know I thought about that a lot, so that was a small part of my plan.”

While at Uppsala University, he only studied what he was interested in and had no clear career plan.

“I was led to a very large extent by interest. I studied language history and literature; just things that I thought were fun. I also studied aesthetics.”

Involved in the theatre group

He was active in tons of projects right from when he started studying. Alongside his studies, he was involved in the Humanist Forum association and in Snerike nation’s theatre group, where he staged a musical play about the 17th century poet Lasse Lucidor.

At times it was difficult to keep up with everything, but he remembers it as a creative period.

“I had a few too many irons in the fire and had a bit of a stress breakdown in the spring of 1986. At the time, I was taking two full-time courses and one half-time course while writing for Ergo magazine and participating in the Humanist Forum alongside a lot of other things. I calmed down a bit after that.”

He continued with doctoral education and researched the connections between the dialects of Mälardalen and standard Swedish. After a few years, however, humour and media jobs intervened and life took a different turn.

“Working as a doctoral student was quite lonely. Initially I used to sit and read at Carolina Rediviva, and after moving to Stockholm in 1991 I sat at the National Library of Sweden. When I was offered a job on the radio, it was very nice in a social sense to get outside the strict world of research.”

Summer speaker on languages

For a few years he followed some completely different paths, for example working as a prank caller on the Hassan radio programme, but later on his language skills came in handy again.

When he served as one of Swedish Radio’s summer speakers in 1999, he chose to talk about language development. He had reacted to the fact that so many people, not least in academia, see the history of language as separate from contemporary language development. They could be negative about contemporary languages while talking about sound laws and language transitions in history.

“It struck me that there is something paradoxical in the fact that what we call carelessness today would have been called sound laws instead if it had taken place in the 19th century. We lack history in this way and do not understand that language is in a state of continuous evolution. If we decide that this is the correct Swedish and that now people should adapt to it, then we will also kill the language. So I became interested in these larger questions surrounding the philosophy of language.”

Books, TV and performances

Since his stint as a summer speaker, he has continued to reflect on the evolution of language in books such as Världens dåligaste språk (“The World's Baddest Language”) and Jordens smartaste ord (“The Smartest Words in the World”), alongside TV programmes such as Värsta språket (“The Worst Language”). Most recently he has been on tour in Sweden with Stora dialektshowen (“The Great Dialect Show”).

His main interest is languages and history, but from a broad perspective.

“I’m very interested in human behaviour, the human worldview and how the brain works. I have picked up even more scientific interests along the way. But language and people are at the heart of what I’m interested in, because that includes mentality, behaviour and culture.”

Annica Hulth