Contrary to appearances, the name is not Scandinavian; it is simply two made-up words meant to look Scandinavian to American eyes (in fact, the digraphs "äa" and "zs" are impossible in all Scandinavian languages). This is known in the marketing industry as foreign branding. Mattus included an outline map of Scandinavia on early labels, as well as the names of Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, to reinforce the Scandinavian theme. A name was created by reversing the name of Duncan Hines ("Huncan-Dines"), an original potential marketer of the product. When that deal didn't materialize the name was manipulated to sound Scandinavian.
The playful spelling devices in the name invoke the spelling systems used in several European countries. "ä" (an 'a' with an umlaut/diaeresis) is used in the spelling of the German, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak and Swedish languages, doubled vowel letters spell long vowels in Estonian, Finnish, Dutch, and occasionally German; and zs corresponds to /ʒ/ (as in vision) in Hungarian. None of these spelling conventions is used in pronouncing the name of the American product, which has a short a, hard g, and a final s sound. The closest real name to the fake Häagen is Hagen (Danish/Norwegian/German surname, German first name, and German town name). Dazs does not mean anything even in Hungarian despite the "zs" grapheme, does not have any meaning, and sounds too unfamiliar even to be a name. The closest real word in Hungarian is "darázs", which means "wasp".
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