Tak. 🇩🇰
That’s the Danish word for thank you – but it means so much more than that.
In Danish, we sprinkle ‘tak’ everywhere like it’s seasoning. Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak. We say tak for the food, tak for holding the door, tak for that cosy dinner last night, tak for just being in the room. My Spanish husband finds it funny – he’s even jokingly started saying ‘tak for tak’. What he’s getting at is if we Danes keep thanking everyone for everything, then where does it end? He has visions of us thanking each other just for saying thank you.
Then we have the expression ‘tak for sidst’ which is more of a custom or a cultural obsession than it is a phrase. Essentially, it means ‘thanks for the last time’ and it’s obligatory after any kind of social outing. If your friends invite you round for dinner, you call them or text them the next day to say ‘tak for sidst’. If you bump into somebody on the street that you haven’t seen in months, you say ‘tak for sidst’. It doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, in Denmark we feel this compulsive need to call to mind that last time we were together. It might feel odd, but at its core is an appreciation for one of the most important things we have in this life – each other.
The important thing to recognise about all of this, though, is that it doesn’t mean we’re overflowing with gratitude all the time. Tak is not always effusive or exaggerated expression of deep thankfulness. A lot of the time, it’s just a filler word. It’s verbal punctuation.
It can also be sarcastic, or counter intuitive. When spoken with a certain intuition, it can mean – okay, that’s enough. And when we say ‘tak for kaffe’, we’re not saying thanks for the coffee. This idiom actually means that we find something shocking or unexpected. Can you believe she did that? Tak for kaffe!!!
As my husband rightly recognises, it would be ridiculous if we rendered every last tak as gracias when translating from Danish into Spanish. And when we localise content for the Nordics, we’re constantly making these tiny calibrations. How effusive should the gratitude be? What’s the right level of warmth versus formality?
Get it wrong and your Danish customers may think you’re weirdly over-enthusiastic. Your Swedish ones could interpret you as being passive-aggressive. Cultural fluency isn’t about translating words. It’s about understanding what those words actually mean to the people reading them.
Thanks for reading, and tak for sidst!
