This bachelor thesis presents a contrastive study of fixed expressions in Swedish and Dutch including idioms, semi-idioms and proverbs. The study is based on a corpus of 45 articles from each language equally divided among editorial articles, news articles and sports articles from the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and De Standaard.

The results show that there are about 0.3 idioms, semi-idioms and proverbs per 100 words in the Swedish corpus and 0.5 per 100 words in the Dutch. In the Swedish corpus there are more fixed expressions in the sports articles than in the other types of articles but in the Dutch corpus there are more fixed expressions in the editorial articles. 

I also studied the number of similes, word pairs, somatic idioms and kinegrams in the idioms and semi-idioms. Similes occur only in the Dutch corpus while word pairs are twice as common in the Swedish texts. 19 per cent of fixed expressions in the Dutch corpus and 14 per cent in the Swedish corpus are somatic idioms. In the Swedish corpus, somatic idioms are most common in sports articles but in the Dutch texts, they appear more often in editorials and news articles. No kinegrams were found in either corpus.