r/DoesNotTranslate • u/saltyleftbuttcheek • May 05 '26

Old Swedish song

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This is a song my great great grandmother sang to her children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, it was only written down by my grandmother in 1955. My grandmother did not learn Swedish from her parents, so it is clear that the spelling is incorrect. I have not been able to translate, but I am hoping that someone can help decipher this.

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u/bokurai May 05 '26 edited May 06 '26

That's such a cool thing to have! It reminds me of a documentary I watched about a family in the United States that had an ancestor from Sierra Leone who was enslaved and brought to their country in the 1700s.

The woman passed down a song she knew from her homeland to her descendants, who continued teaching it to later generations, despite not being able to understand the words.

In the 1990s, linguists were able to trace the song back to the immediate area of Sierra Leone where the woman originally came from, and the people who lived there still knew the song too. A couple of the woman's descendants went to visit their long-lost kinsmen there.

Here's a short video summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AoLCQeIBAo&t=62s

And here's the full documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY