TipAI costs more in Swedish than in English: the same text needs more tokens, and Finnish even more
A new study shows AI models split text in languages other than English into more small pieces, called tokens. Swedish needs about 35 percent more tokens than English for the same text, Finnish around 60 percent more. That can make automations more expensive and fill the AI’s memory faster. Here is how to reduce the effect.
AI services do not read words the way we do. They first split text into small pieces called tokens, roughly parts of words. The tool that does this is called a tokenizer. If you pay per use, for example a business with its own AI automation, you pay per token. So it matters how many tokens a text becomes.
On 29 September 2026 the research group CLEAR (Coalition for Language Equity in AI Research) published a study that ran the same texts in about 200 languages through tokenizers from the big AI companies. For the 20 biggest languages online, the most expensive language needed between 1.5 and 3.1 times more tokens than the cheapest, with one exception. Across all 200 languages the gap was up to 17 times. The study calls it a hidden tokenizer tax. Rest of World covered it on 26 October.
What about the Nordic languages? A separate measurement by the site ioptera, made on 2 October 2026 with OpenAI’s current tokenizer, shows Swedish needs about 1.35 times as many tokens as English for the same text, and Finnish about 1.62 times. Norwegian and Danish were not measured. Languages with other writing systems, such as Greek, are hit harder.
If you chat on a normal monthly plan, it does not cost you more money. But long conversations and documents fill the AI’s working memory (the context window) faster, and you may reach your usage limit a little sooner. For businesses that pay per token, the same customer service bot can cost about a third more in Swedish than in English, and more in Finnish.
Good to know: this is no reason to stop writing in your own language. Answers should be in the language you and your customers understand. But in automations, fixed instructions that are sent every time can be written shorter or in English while the answers still come in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Finnish. Also compare models on your own text, not on English examples. Try our prompt Make my prompt shorter in Promptverkstan.
How to get started
- Only on a fixed monthly plan? You do not need to do anything, but split very long documents.
- If you have an AI automation that pays per token: find the fixed instruction that is sent every time.
- Make it shorter, or write it in English and add that answers must be in your language.
- Test the cost on a real text in your language in the model you use before you switch.
More on TipAI
Sources
- CLEAR: The Tokenizer Tax (29 sep 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-27)
- Rest of World: AI models cost more when you don’t use English (26 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-27)
- ioptera: Every language but English pays more for AI (mätt 2 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-27)
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