4 ms·

I know it's not that much better, but it's not the actual n-word right?

• BurningFrog 6y ago
  It's the Swedish "neger", which was the uncontroversial term for black people at the time. Times have changed!
• liversage 6y ago
  I'm Danish so i only know the Danish version but I think it's the same word as in Swedish. The Danish word is "neger" and the best translation to English would be "negro" (Pippi's dad is the "negro king" or "negerkonge"). Today it's a controversial word because by many it's considered racist almost like the n-word. However, especially older people don't consider it racist and they use it to describe people that otherwise might be described as "black". Newer revisions of the Pippi books have been edited to no longer use the word "neger" and I think this applies to both the Danish and Swedish editions (it was approved by Astrid Lindgren's daughter).
• rags2riches 6y ago
  The Swedish word used in Pippi, until recent editions, was "neger" which has historically been used comparably to the English "negro" but also as a slur more comparable to the English "nigger". The Swedish phrase "n-ordet" ("the n-word") covers both the Swedish words "neger" and "nigger". The former was considered correct at one time. To my knowledge, the latter was always a slur, in Swedish. So there is bound to be some imprecision when discussing this topic across the two languages if one does not want to type out the full words even in their meta use. It is not hard to find examples of meta uses of "neger" in respected sources from just a few years ago. "N-ordet" is a quite recent import, obviously influenced by the American "the n-word".
• sorokod 6y ago
  In Russian "негритянский король" - "king of the negroes"