Many Swedish TV viewers were left baffled last week after a local broadcaster ran a commercial in a language that most of the viewers could not grasp – and it didn’t even have subtitles.
The ad, launched by the local department store Ahlens, shows a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter – a piece from the Swedish children’s book Pippi Longstocking – apparently in Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken largely in Afghanistan.
Many people had trouble accepting the company’s politically correct message. Social media users made it clear they would prefer to watch the commercial in Swedish. “I thought we were speaking Swedish in Sweden,” one person wrote on Ahlens’
Facebook page. Another said, “those who come here should learn Swedish.”