2676: Goose”s Eyes: Humorous Scandinavian Quotation Marks Apr 19, 2024

British English and American English have different words for the same punctuation, like “period/full stop”, “parentheses/brackets” or “quotation marks/inverted commas”. Bearing in mind on the last example British English uses only one apostrophe for a quote, they’re all basically plain descriptions of function.

The Scandinavians, meanwhile, are equally as divided, but along different lines, namely, whether they are goose-eyes (gåseøjne in Danish / in Norwegian gåseauge), goose-feet (gæsalappir in Icelandic/ Gänsefüßchen in German). In Swedish it is bunny ears (kaninöron). These are not the only way of calling them (e.g Norwegian’s more formal “anførselstegn”), but they are all used regularly.

Aside from the division on which cute names to use, every single example above writes quotation marks differently to each other, and different from English. Some of these have secondary forms for quotes within quotes, but the primary versions are as follows:

Denmark: »...«

Iceland : „ “

Norway: «…»

Sweden: ” ” (Double right)