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Comment by sk00byd00 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in currently in Sweden and I get a 502 bad gateway... so I can't comment on the site, but out of curiosity, if this is targeted at the Swedish entrepreneur, why call it 'Swedish' anything rather than Svensk/Sverige which would be the first phrase typed in by a Swedish person on Google (one would assume)?

I know some people speak English in Sweden (you can even hear people modelling their accents on a British or American variety), but not everyone. I know that English is a requirement of Swedish universities but if the American way of doing things taught me anything, its a lot of very capable people don't go to university. It just seems to me like an unnecessary barrier, you might be missing out on input from the next Ingvar Kamprad.

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> I know that English is a requirement of Swedish universities

Sure, to enter you need to meet certain requirements. But according to at least policy (if not law) all lectures for at least the bachelor level must be available in Swedish (if there is consensus among the students the lecturer may switch to English). Course materials is a different matter however, few if any books on advanced topics are translated into Swedish.

> if the American way of doing things taught me anything, its a lot of very capable people don't go to university.

Sure, but most capable American drop-outs that I know of dropped out at earliest in high school (in fact, finishing upper-secondary school is mandatory for Swedish children, by law). At that point a Swedish student will have studied English for at least six years and should be more than capable to write and read English. Add the enormous cultural influence from America to that.

Now, I agree with your point regarding the name. Perhaps a Swedish noun with an English sub-title would be better, "Raket: Monitoring the Swedish Start-up Scene". But I think the main reason it is in English is to cater to an international audience and possibly to be more accessible for expats living in Sweden (from what little personal experience I have, most of them don't even feel the need to learn Swedish due to the level of English spoken by the common man). Perhaps even foreign investors, who knows...

You would think 6 years is enough to learn English but in my day-to-day experience in Sweden (anecdotal) there are a fair amount of Swedes who speak a little to no English, especially in rural areas (and rural areas in Sweden are cheap, beautiful and fibred to the gills, so I have to assume there are some worthwhile start ups out there).

It certainly is an interesting state of affairs when you don't need to learn Swedish in Swedish cities (personally I feel guilty). At this rate I wonder if there will be a Swedish language at all in 100 years.

Well, in order to promote the Swedish scene to the rest of the world - it must be in English - so that's the fairly simple reason. The second being, I am not Swedish myself, so it doesn't really feel natural to write in Swedish.

Ah, I apologise. I wasn't aware that was the point, I thought the target audience was in Sweden (the site was down when I made that comment so I hadn't seen it).

No problems, I should've made that more clear :)

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