Fika: everything a Swedish word can teach us about linguistic borrowing

There is a Swedish word that has been making its way across Europe for years now. You find it in lifestyle magazine headlines, agency decks, corporate wellness programmes. It gets cited as an example of that Nordic wisdom in finding the right balance between productivity and wellbeing, alongside hygge, lagom, friluftsliv and other terms that English-speaking and broader European audiences have adopted with growing enthusiasm.

The word is fika. In Sweden, it refers to a cherished daily ritual — a moment to pause, connect with others over coffee and something sweet, and simply be present. In Italy, however, the same word is immediately recognised as a vulgar colloquial term for female genitalia, which tends to produce a rather different reaction from the one Swedish wellness culture had in mind.

This small phonetic collision is, in its own way, a perfect introduction to a much larger question: what happens to a word when it crosses a border? What does it carry with it, what does it lose, and what responsibilities come with borrowing it? The trajectory of fika — from Swedish cultural institution to global linguistic trend — tells us something important about how words travel, and about what we risk when we take them along for the ride without really asking ourselves what we are doing.

A linguistic borrowing is never neutral

When a word moves from one language to another, it does not travel light. It carries a context, a history, a system of values. Fika is not simply "a coffee break with something sweet": it is a social institution deeply rooted in Swedish work culture and daily life, a codified moment of human connection that carries very specific weight in Sweden. Companies like Spotify and IKEA practise it institutionally. Studies on organisational wellbeing cite it as one of the defining features of the Scandinavian working model.

When an Italian or French brand decides to "have a fika", or to use it as a tagline, a product name, or a campaign concept, it is borrowing all of this. The question too few people ask is: does it know that? And more importantly: does it respect it?

Because there is a substantial difference between importing a word to enrich a message and importing it to capture attention, draining it of the very meaning that made it worth borrowing in the first place. The former is a cultural act. The latter is, at best, superficiality. At worst, appropriation.

The playful side: yes, in Italian it raises an eyebrow

Here we should address something that anyone familiar with Italian cannot politely ignore — and that it would be rather absurd to treat with undue gravity.

In Italian, and particularly in Roman dialect and colloquial usage across much of the country, fika is a fairly common vulgar term for female genitalia. The association is immediate, widely shared, and — let's be honest — quite amusing. There is nothing catastrophic about this: languages intersect, sounds overlap, and the results can sometimes make people smile.

The question is not whether to be scandalized. The question is what to do with it, consciously and deliberately.

The brand that can play with it

A young, irreverent brand that builds its communication around breaking conventions, and whose audience is already tuned to that frequency, might choose to play on the phonetic ambiguity with lightness and wit. Turning the double meaning into complicity, the potential awkwardness into a shared moment of recognition. It is a legitimate strategy, provided it is fully intentional, consistent with the brand's tone, and respectful of the audience it addresses.

The brand that cannot afford to

An institutional brand, a B2B company, or a luxury player cannot afford the same freedom. Not for lack of a sense of humour, but for a very concrete reason: the message would not land. It would be intercepted by the phonetic association, and the brand would lose credibility at the precise moment it was trying to build it.

But there is a limit that applies to everyone, regardless of tone or audience. You can smile at the sound of a word. You cannot use that smile as an excuse to dismiss the culture that word represents. Playing with the phonetics of fika is one thing; reducing a Swedish cultural institution to a punchline is another. The first can be a coherent creative choice. The second is a lack of respect — towards a culture that has built something of genuine value around that word, and towards an audience that always deserves more than a cheap trick.

Linguistic borrowings as a mirror of the brand

Fika is not an isolated case. The world of communication is full of words borrowed from distant cultures, often precisely for the patina of authenticity, depth or exoticism they evoke. Hygge in furniture catalogues. Ikigai in coaching programmes. Ubuntu in corporate values. Wabi-sabi in design aesthetics.

These words work, when they are used with respect and awareness. When the people using them genuinely understand what they mean, not just on the surface but within the cultural context that produced them. When the borrowing is a tribute, not a theft.

The problem is that they are often used as shortcuts: a foreign word standing in for a concept that would require more effort to explain, or more courage to truly embody. And the audience, especially the more attentive and informed part of it, notices. A brand that uses fika without understanding what the Swedish ritual of pausing actually means is not communicating wellbeing: it is communicating that it read an article in a magazine and decided the word sounded good.

What it means to treat a linguistic borrowing with respect

Respecting a foreign word does not mean refusing to use it. It means using it knowing what you are doing.

It means asking whether you truly understand the cultural context it comes from, not superficially but in depth. It means evaluating whether your brand and your message are consistent with the values that word carries. It means considering how that word will be received by your specific audience, in that specific market, with that specific register.

And it means, sometimes, having the honesty to step back. To recognise that a word belongs to a culture that is not your own, and that the most respectful way to honour it is to describe the concept it represents without appropriating the label.

That is not weakness. It is precision. And it is exactly the kind of precision that distinguishes solid international communication from communication that works by accident, until it suddenly does not.

The role of professional localisation

This is where the work of those who deal with languages and cultures professionally becomes essential. Not only to resolve phonetic issues, which do exist and need to be managed, but to guide companies through a deeper reflection on how they intend to engage with the cultures they encounter.

At Eureco, when we work on a localisation project involving linguistic borrowings or culturally dense concepts, our starting point is not the dictionary. It is a question: what does this brand want to communicate, who is its audience, and what is the most respectful — as well as the most effective — way to carry that message from one culture to another?

Sometimes the answer is: use the word, but contextualise it. Sometimes it is: adapt it. Sometimes it is: find a way to express the same value using linguistic tools that already belong to the target audience.

There is no universal answer. There is only the right one for that brand, at that moment, with that audience. Finding it requires linguistic expertise, certainly, but it requires above all one thing: respect. For the culture of origin. For the culture of arrival. And for the people in between, who are simply trying to understand one another.

The foreign words we use say a great deal about us — far more than we tend to think. The next time you borrow one, ask yourself whether you are treating it the way it deserves.