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- "In the afternoon"
"In the afternoon"
Translation:På eftermiddagen
20 Comments
1459
Maybe it's used like that in some dialects, but it's too dialectal to be an accepted answer. You could easily be misunderstood if you used that instead of på eftermiddagen.
On the other hand om eftermiddagarna works in Standard Swedish for talking about things you do every afternoon, but that would be 'in the afternoons' in English.
Not just in Sweden. Most western cultures historically had the major meal of the day in the middle of the work day because a much larger percentage of people worked outside, and high noon is not exactly when you want to be doing manual labor in many climates. English has seen this shift too, as 'dinner' used to be the big mid-day meal, while 'supper' was the smaller late evening meal.
The shift in general is probably related to the fact that it was not unusual in some parts of Europe for more 'white collar' jobs (such as publicans or lawyers) tending to eat only two meals during the day, usually late morning before they started their duties for the day and then late afternoon or early evening after they were done working for the day, with the late meal typically being their big meal for the day.