What is Your Nationality?

Learn how to ask about someone's nationality

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Lesson Transcript

Hej, jag heter Elin. Hi everybody! I’m Elin.

Welcome to SwedishPod101.com’s “Svenska på tre minuter”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Swedish.

In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verb “to be” in Swedish, att vara.

We will also discuss how to talk about your nationality.

When you meet a new person in Sweden, they might ask you Var är du ifrån? which is the equivalent of "Where are you from?"

Var means “where”, and you’re familiar with du, the word for "you."

är is a conjugated form of the “to be” verb att vara.

ifrån means "from?"

All together it's Var är du ifrån?

[slowly] Var är du ifrån?

Answering this question is very easy! You just say jag är, which means "I am", then your nationality.

For example - jag är amerikanare

[slowly] jag är amerikanare.

Just replace “amerikanare” with your own nationality.

"I am German" is jag är tysk.

"I am Italian" is jag är italienare.

"I am Brazilian" is jag är brasilianare.

You can also add the från after jag är to give the sentence a bit more substance. In that case you would also have to change the nationality to the name of the country, like we do in English; “I am from [country]”

For example, if you are from France you say,

jag är från Frankrike.

[slowly]jag är från Frankrike.

Or if you are from Australia you say;

jag är från Australien.

[slowly]jag är från Australien.

To return the question you can simply say och du? which is "And you?”.

Now it’s time for Elin’s insights.

Be careful because in Swedish, we don’t write nationality names with a capital letter like in English.

It’s the same with languages as well. But we do write country names with capital letters, so don’t confuse them.

In this lesson we learned how to talk about nationalities.

Next time we’ll continue to study the verb att vara and we'll see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in Swedish? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Svenska på 3 minuter.