Most products are distributed throughout the Iberian Peninsula, so the packagings have both Spanish and Portuguese descriptions. Recently, I spoke with a fellow Portuguese neighbour about how we know basic food vocabulary in each other’s language beause of that.

Also, if it’s national store, products probably have descriptions in all four official languages in Spain.

35 comments
  1. Usually Swedish and Finnish grouped together (nobody knows why) and Danish and Norwegian together (makes more sense)

  2. Depends on the product, but “Scandinavian” and Finnish are pretty typical.

    The “Scandinavian” is sometimes merged into one, sometimes merges Danish/Norwegian but not Swedish, and sometimes have all three listed separately. When merged into one, words that are deemed too dissimilar are listed with slashes/solidi/virgules.

  3. German, Englisch, French. Often Dutch. Then depending on the product also Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.

  4. German, and then depending on the product Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Slowenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Italian, French or English, sometimes Spanish.

  5. it can be really anything depending probably how companies split the continent, but it is usually surrounding countries + hungary, also often see nordic languages on bathroom and toilet related items.

    Also it is not unusual to see things originally packed for different EU markets and having just paper sticker with Czech version over it.

  6. Depends on the product. Supermarket brands will usually have the country of origin language: for example Lidl products often have Polish and German. Biedronka (which is owned by a Portugese company Jeronimo Martins) products have Polish and Portugese (like for example [this oatmilk](https://media.centrumrespo.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/06113757/go-vege-owies-600×600.png)). Non-in-house brands usually have languages which are located nearby geographically: Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainain, Russian, Slovak or Czech.

  7. Unless it is Italian only or Italian+English, I’d say we are usually paired with Greek and/or the two Iberian languages. Probably a «Southern Europe» packaging.

  8. Most often Scandinavian, sometimes with Finnish sometimes not. Sometimes general western European (BeNeLux, German and French the most common). Also some English from the UK or English from the US (can be recognised by the HUGE nutritional info label). Occasionally printed Icelandic as part of the packaging, sometime a white sticker placed over the other languages with Icelandic on it. Very often foreign products don’t have anything in Icelandic.

    Iceland products have Icelandic and sometimes English or other languages if the intention is to market to tourist or sell overseas.

  9. German, French, Italian. Italian not always, actually, but most of the time.

    Kelloggs cereals curiously have Swedish, Danish/Bokmål and Finnish on them.

  10. Dutch and French, mostly. Sometimes English or German. Also got the German, French and Italian, German and French, German, French, Italian and Romansch. Depending on which side of the border I get my groceries.

  11. GENERALLY speaking mostly Dutch and French

    If you shop at Lidl all bets are off and you have to look for the Dutch instructions on the bottom left side of the bottom of the packaging

  12. Czech, Ukrainian, German, Lithuanian are the most common ones (maybe including Hungarian), the rest depends on the product and its origin

  13. Mostly in English primarily, but you’ll see quite a few products with multilingual small print on the labels.

  14. In Switzerland it’s always written in French, German and Italian and it varies by region if you’re in the German side it’s listen in German, French, Italian. In the Italian side it’s Italian, German, French and then in the French side it’s French, German, Italian.

  15. Always one or more of Danish, norwegian, swedish, since it’s required by law, most common after that is finnish and english, but not at all uncommon is german, french, dutch and icelandic. But you can also find a lot of others at times. Some of the rarest i have seen, barring special imports from the languages neighborhood: vietnamese, chinese (don’t ask me what variety, beyond that it was simplified), and thai.

  16. Im drinking orange juice right now and it has Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish on the packaging.

  17. Usually just Dutch when it’s a specifically Dutch-market brand but I regularly buy products (usually non-food) with a few languages in the ingredients list. I think my shampoo has Dutch, French, Polish, Italian, German, and maybe Hungarian?

  18. Hungary imports the a lot of products from Germany and there are a lot of German store brands seen throughout the country. DM, CCC, Deichmann, H&M, and so on. That is to say German is always one of the languages shown on packaging. Other common ones are Romanian, and probably a Southern Slavic language because of our neighbours.

  19. It depends. Usually there are croatian and english plus bosnian/serbian, slovenian and macedonian for items targeted to balkan region. But for certain items country of origin is also there, italian for say barila pasta or french for some pastry etc.

  20. If someone really wants to jump into the rabbit hole of languages and packaging labels, I recommend the book “The Babel Message” by Keith Kahn-Harris. It starts with the 40 or so languages of the Kinder Surprise Eggs and expands to a lot more languages of every type.

  21. In England and Scotland it’s mostly just English. I haven’t been to Wales but I imagine Welsh is also prominent with English

  22. Scandinavian Germanic languages usually appear together, as do Czech and Slovak, and some Yugoslavian languages. Then you’d have a breakdown into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, and Bulgarian. Basically, all the majority languages of Europe.

  23. Either just English or some random assortment of up to 6 other languages. Sometimes a product sold in multiple countries will have multiple languages listed, similair to how sometimes products will list other currencies like euros amd us dollars (sometimes even Canadian dollars too).

  24. Of course we have Estonian, usually with Latvian, and Lithuanian or Finnish depending on what is the product. English and Russian are too included but lately Russian language on packages are shorter that original text (maybe only description and how to contain the product). And this is only about consumable products, where it’s written directly on the package, eg. food etc.

    Sometimes when there are product from more far away and there are no place to write Estonian/ or some other reason we put a sticker with text on it, usually only Estonian. We put that on some food products, foreign brands of shampoos and other little things.

    There are always exceptions to that though, but that’s the .ost frequent languages you will see.

  25. Most of the time: English, German, Spanish, Italian, dutch, Portuguese, but in general it’s either french only or a dozen of languages.

  26. Yeah here the main ones are Portuguese and Spanish, followed by English, Italian, sometimes French

  27. Depends on the product. Quite often it will be Polish exclusively. If not, it can be all over the place, few examples from stuff I checked on hand: PL/EN/UA, PL/LT/LV/EE, PL/PT, PL/DE/DK/NL, PL/EN/HU.

  28. From my observations, it used to be mostly Turkish 30 years ago. Later became Turkish and English around 20 years ago. Since last couple of years, it is in mostly Turkish, English, Arabic (I am guessing it is because of refugees and exporting to Middle East). But honourable mentions are Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian.

  29. Finnish and Swedish always due to law; and often also Norwegian, Danish, English, Russian and Estonian. Latter two in S-group’s own products since that Finnish chain used to have stores in those countries and there is minority in both languages. Sometimes the packages have random assortment of European languages, some brands have megalist of almost all western European languages in very small print. Products that are imported by small vendors might also have French, Polish, Thai, Chinese, Turkish etc. With sticker glued on top of those with Finnish translation.

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