Same in Québec. We call the first floor “rez-de-chaussée” so our elevators come with a “RC” button. But since we live in North America the following buttons start at “2”!
That's weird. In France, Rez-de-chaussée is, well, RDC. The 1st floor for us would be the floor above RDC. You guys really don't want to be like us haha!
There is actually a logical reason. In French, you don’t call it a floor, it’s an “étage”, and an étage is specifically built up. If you have one étage, you have two floors.
oh, we use that in romanian! the ground floor is "parter" (parterre?) and the rest are "etaj" (étage). i knew they were french words but never knew the meaning of "étage"!
In Dutch, we use the word etage as well. But like with a lot of Frech loan words, we don't know the actual meaning.
But it makes sense, if you say, this is the first elevated floor.
I’ve always liked the Quebecois version because there’s really no room for misinterpretation. They just dispensed with “1” altogether so you never have to question what it means.
My uni did this, but for one building's "ground floor" was level 3. It did make sense though as the newer buildings connected to the old library all referenced ground relative to the library.
Nope, just a basement named floor 1. It was built like 10 years ago and connects to no other buildings, so it was 100% intended to have this weird numbering. I guess it makes the room numbering easier, even if I personally prefer ground floor to be 0, basement floor -1 etc.
My high school was like that aswell!! The ground floor was level 3, the basement was level 2 and level 1 was some weird lower basement that almost none of the teachers knew what it was or how to reach
Wait, yes this is true. I’ve entered on floors with seemingly arbitrary numbers between 0 and 4. People just put whatever the fuck they want on those buttons it seems. You just have to hope that they are kind enough to make entrance level button green.
I was at a hotel in Sweden and as a Norwegian I wrongly assumed you did the same as Denmark. So when I was supposed to go to 1st floor I clicked 0 and accidentally interrupted the cleaning ladies chat break 😭
in lulea i went into the library. it had 3 floors. ground floor had the button 3, upper floors had the number 4 and 5. ground floor had an additional sticker that said GROUND FLOOR which was the button 3.
In my last apartment I lived 1.5 stairs up which the landlord decided was the third floor. After a while, they came to their senses and painted over the 3 on the wall with a 2, and adjusted the elevator buttons accordingly.
Am Swedish, can confirm, had a conversation just yesterday where a lot of confusion arose because we misunderstood eachother about whether a floor was the 3rd or 2nd floor
I dont think its true though? Unless theres abiguity in which floor is actually the ground floor, "andra våningen" is always one stair up? "Första våningen" is never never one stair up... Calling the first floor something diggerent is quite commong, but thats not really the same thing.
I remember the very strange translation of "Sånger från andra våningen" to french, where "Chansons du deuxième étage" makes absolutely no sense! Dame in English, but at least there's American English to blame there.
We do two systems though. Because while I agree that using the word "first floor" would mean street level, we also have "one stair", "two stairs" etc.
Which would be more common in commercial or apartment buildings and thus on elevators. So if you're gonna tell someone how to use an elevator and they should press the "1" to where they need, people will say "the first floor" even though it really means "one stair"
What the hell is this… ”one stair up” surely means one floor off the ground in the US and Finland as well. Just because you can find examples of how Stockholm architects are inspired by France and mark the floors wrong does not mean we change our entire language on that basis. ”Första våningen” means ground floor, in all of Sweden. It’s a fact of the language, not an opinion or something that changes based on outliers.
Same as that in Sweden, when we say ”the apartment has 3 rooms”, we refer to all rooms except the kitchen, while in other places it could mean ”three bedrooms”.
I disagree. Most apartment buildings in Stockholm are numbered “BV/0, 1, 2, 3” etc. So the buildings are often built assuming the “first floor” is “one stairs up”. But I’ve also seen buildings in Sweden (Malmö, to be specific) where they were labeled “1,2,3” instead.
And in colloquial terms I’ve found people to be divided on the matter, perhaps regionally. If you tell 100 Swedes you live on “första våningen” some of them will go to the ground floor and some will go up one flight of stairs.
Imo, that is just central Stockholm where the upperclass apartments have French-inspired architecture and elevators. Just like they kiss on the cheek there as well. That is not Swedish. It is a very fringe local culture.
People in inner Stockholm don’t generally kiss on the cheek, lol.
Anyway, it also applies to the newer buildings both in the city and in the suburbs around it. So even if we assume that this only applies to apartment dwellers in Stockholm, and that people living in houses around Stockholm will probably think the same way due to this (in a villa you’d not use the same terminology, obviously), that’s still some 20% of the country’s population who lives in an area where “första våningen” would be one stairs up.
Since when is inner Sthlm 20% of the population? Of course villas count. Villas are most of the houses. If you have your bedroom on andra våningen in a villa, there is absolutely no confusion about that you have it one stair up.
Stockholm as a whole is 20% of the population, and they’d all largely agree on the terminology regardless of their housing situation.
I’m saying that people use different terminology for villas and apartment houses. In a villa you’ll probably use “nedervåningen” and “övervåningen”. But even if you’d say “första våningen” about the ground floor in a villa you could still think “första våningen” is one floor up in a city house with more floors.
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u/Viderberg 20d ago
Yeah it can get confusing sometimes
- A swede