This thesis work involves a quantitative study concerning secondary school students' understanding of older Swedish words in the lyrics in the Lucia song written by Elmfors way back in 1919th. The text has some old words and phrases that today's high school students do not really understand. The study includes surveys of two different classes in high school, a theoretical and a practical program. In some cases students can understand words by the context, but previous research shows results in general weakness in students' existing vocabulary. According to previous research, this is due, inter alia, that young people read and write less today.

The results of all students are totally 38%, where the theoretical program has a slightly higher performance. Very few pupils on the Media Program have a somewhat understanding of what each word means and it is clear that many students in this class have little understanding of old words. The result shows that girls in the Media Program has a notably better word comprehension than boys in the Media Program, while boys in the Society is distinguished by markedly higher word comprehension of specific words.