Last fall I was on the commuter train from the airport to Uppsala, and there were two men sitting next to me, talking. One was sixty or so, and the other was probably about my age. They were speaking Swedish and the older one had a marked accent. At first I thought the younger one was Swedish, but after some time passed, I noticed that he spoke with an accent as well. Both of them spoke good Swedish, better than I do, and their conversation indicated that they were professors at the university. After some time, my curiosity got the better of me and when they came to a lull, I leaned over and asked where they were from, telling them that I was American myself.

The older gentleman was French, though he’d been living in Sweden for more than thirty years, and the younger was Dutch. We chatted for a while about being foreigners living in Sweden, university life, and whatnot, and as we pulled into the station in Uppsala I got to feeling a little self-consious about my rudeness in interrupting their conversation the way I had. They assured me it was okay, and the French man joked, “though if you’d been Swedish you wouldn’t have asked”. We all laughed, then laughed harder when the Dutch man added, “and if we’d been Swedish we couldn’t have answered”.