Despite being sold all over the world, IKEA products are all given unapologetically Swedish names (as opposed to more international names), which no one – apart from Swedish speakers – can pronounce. I have heard that they are checked against an international database of offensive words, though Jerker did manage to slip through that particular net.
But there is a method to their names – something I didn’t know.
Find the rest of the article here. I love to hate the Daily Mail, but now and then they have interesting articles.
When I was studying Swedish many years ago, I had to present two large projects. I did one on the art in the Stockholm underground and the other one on the history of IKEA, which I chose because it is probably one Swedish thing that people all over the world can name.