Word: swedishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just a few decades Sweden's small, once homogenous population has undergone dramatic transformation. While immigrants constituted just 4% of the population in 1960, today more than a fifth of the country's nearly 9 million inhabitants are either immigrants or have at least one non-Swedish parent. Prior waves of migrants, like the Finns who arrived after World War II, assimilated quickly into Swedish society, their transition facilitated by racial affinity and the fact that the dominant culture was never seriously challenged. Today's newcomers are more likely to be refugees from Africa, Asia or the former Yugoslavia...
...Ekenberg estimates more than 100 nationalities are represented. Suman, whose parents are from India, was born in Sweden. Katarina's family has been in Sweden for generations, but the same is not true of most of her classmates and friends. "I hang out mostly with them," she says. "The Swedish girls and immigrants have a different attitude. I'm like an immigrant, only Swedish...
...Still, facilitating cultural integration-while at the same time creating an environment that fosters diversity-is the stated goal of the school's administrators. Achieving that goal is a tricky process, especially since many Swedish students remain in their own academic cocoon, isolated from their non-native schoolmates. The 23 students in Yngve Blomfelt's Wednesday afternoon geography lesson, for example, are almost all native Swedes and all are from Olofstorp, a small village nestled in the countryside. Hjällboskolan's hallways may teem with diversity and the babel of foreign tongues, but none of this is evident inside...
...gritty, multiethnic environment into which the Olofstorp students are delivered bears little resemblance to their pristine, predominantly Swedish village. But their interactions at Hjällboskolan are comfortingly familiar. The Olofstorp children remain together for most of their course of study, in core subjects like history and Swedish, and mix with other students only for secondary subjects like athletics...
...gave in to the temptation. My poor mother, used to waiting to serve dinner until the half was over, now had to wait for a line change, a qualifying heat and for that big Swedish dude to finish pulling the firetruck accross the line...