Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, just like Czech and Slovak. It's nice when two nations understand each other and don't need translators. As far as Scandinavian languages are concerned, Swedish leads the way for me :)
You also don't need translators between Norwegian and Danish (just slower conversation). Norwegians are in general the best at understanding other Scandinavian languages and Swedes have the most trouble (but there are probably more factors at play than just the languages themselves!) The dialect continuum continues down to Denmark btw, so Northern dialects of Danish has three genders like west Norwegian (which also has the Danish r), and southern Swedish also has the guttural r and has a lot of Danish loan words and more danish sounding vowels. Bornholm Danish is VERY close to southern Swedish and so forth. This video is mostly talking about the dialects of the capital cities (which is also probably what a foreigner would be learning) but mind you that the reality is of course more nuanced. I would guess Oslo Norwegian/Bokmål is the most widely understood dialect in Scandinavia, because it is pronounced very close to how it is written and has a lot of influence from both Danish and Swedish. It is however also perhaps the most singsongy dialect, so other dialects/languages will make a bit fun of you haha
I learned some Danish as an exchange student over a summer, then got in a situation where my school dropped Danish instruction but still offered Swedish. So I took that. Then Danish came back and I was taking both for a couple years. I was very good (I'm told) at keeping them separate, but it takes constant practice. In the years since, as I've gotten busy with other things, I make far more mistakes when switching now. As you allude to, there are far more Swedish speakers (Swedes also tend to be better at promoting their national "brand" than Danes are) so I've gone from being equally good to being better at Swedish now. There are just more opportunities to practice it.
I am Danish. If you want to learn a Scandinavian language, take Swedish. Why? Because the three of us understands each other, but speaking Swedish, you will do fine in Finland, too. Swedish is an official language in Finland, therefore many Finns speak Swedish.
As a northern swede I would say it's a bit generous to say that the three of us understand each other. Danes have to adapt a bit to be understood, I can read danish semi fluently, but as soon as potato mouth comes in it's over :D Most norwegian is very easy to understand though. I must admit, although I wish it was different, that I prefer swapping to english with danes. It would probably be quite easy with a little bit of exposure to get used to the danish sounds in order to understand spoken danish.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 I have Swedish friends, we meet about once each 2 years. The first 5-10 minutes I have to adjust my ears and brain. After that, we talk fine. It happens there is a word I don't understand, then I'll just ask. There are maybe 10 words or so, you need to learn, such as "rolig". It has completely different meaning in Swedish and Danish. "Taske" also has a different meaning 🙂
As a Finn I can say that ” by speaking Swedish You will do fine in Finland too” is a bit overexcarated. Altough technically Swedish is official language in Finland due to historical reasons, only about 5% of Finland’s population speaks it as their first language and the amount has been declining since the Finnish independence. I can definently say that you can do fine with speaking Swedish in Åland, around the city of Vaasa and in some smaller villages in Ostrobothnia and southern Finland. However for an example in the capital city metro area, where almost 1/4 of the whole Finland’s population lives you will be looked weird if you go to shops, restaurant etc… and start speaking Swedish. And It’s the same story in pretty much all the eastern and northern parts too.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 It’s not completly monolingual. Altough Swedish is definently the dominant language there, about 10% of the Ålands population speaks Finnish, and many people there have atleast some knowledge of Finnish because it was only recently removed from being mandatory to study at schools.
you will. odin will bless you, and you will be able to stand the smell of surstrøming. congratulations my brethren welcome to the scandinavian family. here have a cod and dont sit besides me.
I really enjoy the singsong sounds of Swedish and its closeness to English. But this is a great explanation. I did wonder what the similarities to the three languages were.
I started off with Norwegian but the 2 written standards and the millions of dialects made me switch to Swedish. Swedish has twice the amount of speakers, the dialects are more similar and it's spoken in Finland so it was like a "gate" to 2 countries.
I am am a Swede with a lot of childhood time in northwest Skåne but most of my time has been in Stockholm. Skåne is the southernmost "landscape" of Sweden. During the time in Skåne I was exposed to some Danish as we could listen to a Danish radio station (which played more and better pop- and rock music (spoken Danish of course between the pieces of music) than the two Swedish radio channels at the time). This latter area (and also Blekinge and parts of two other neighboring landscapes) was part of Denmark until 1658. After that Danish was banned in these areas - the idea was to teach the former Danes to speak Swedish which resulted in a dialect group - essentially different versions of "skånska" which also includes some vocabulary that is distinct for this area. Today I spend much of my time in the western Blekinge (close to Skåne) and definitely recognize the similarities. With this background I still have to admit that I have much more problems understanding Danish than the two versions of Norwegian but there are Norwegian dialects (or individuals) that also can cause me problems. It feels embarrassing with the large problems I have with Danish and I usually stick to English whenever I visit Denmark. There are also some words which are entirely different from Swedish like - yes the word "different" in Swedish which is "olika". In Danish this is "forskellige" and in Norwegian "forskjellige" or "ulike". A Swede cannot just know the word "forsk(j)ellige" and therefore has to learn it and there are more such examples. Counting in Danish is still a mystery for me (probably learned some of it as a child but forgot it - I am 72 now). It is easier for me to read Danish and but again - Norwegian is easier for me to understand. Icelandic is essentially not understandable but sometimes I have tried to read Icelandic texts and recognize a few of the words but the barrier is huge and would require a lot of studies and experience to overcome. There is however one advantage with Swedish that may be forgotten - that many Finns have a Swedish dialect as their native language and even more people in Finland have studied Swedish which helps a lot. There are however Finnish people who don't know any Swedish - Finnish is very different from Swedish - most Swedes will not understand Finnish. A few words here and there can be recognized - for example "street" is "gata" in Swedish and "katu" i Finnish (the letter "g" seems to be rare in Finnish - it is much more of "k"), a few more recent words are essentially the same as English ("golf" is also "golf" in Swedish and Finnish (not "kolf")) but one cannot build a conversation on just a few words like that... Finally it should be noted that Swedish is not native in all of Sweden: There are large areas in northern Sweden where there are two major groups of "Laplandish" (word?) which also stretch into Norway and Finland - I am not the right person to comment Laplandish but the average person from the southern half of Sweden will not understand any of that.
As a Norwegian, I would also say learn Swedish, and I would say that for two reasons. First because of the dialects in Norway. There are a crazy amount of dialects that can be hard to understand. Second reason is music. There is no language that is as beautiful when sung.
As a Swede (with most of the background from Stockholm and Skåne/Blekinge (southernmost part of Sweden), I am aware of some dialects in southern Sweden which are quite extreme (includes a large glossary of "strange" words - some of these stem from German, others I don't know where they came from) compared to what most people speak in this area.
@@sayitinswedish it was hard to unprogram my brain from Norwegian to Swedish and I get by with numbers in Norwegian because they're close enough that people understand me
The hurdle with Danish language depends of which part of Sweden You come from. I live on an island outside Gothenburg. The dialect where I live is mixed Danish and Swedish due to trade and wars since Viking age. People from Stockholm dose not understand a word of what I say. However, when I go to Northern Denmark /Jylland/ Aalborg etc . I can speak my own dialect and all Danes understands me, ectcept for counting as they have another version of it.Well I manage now
I love the idea of mutually intelligible languages. English doesn't really have any, although some dialects are almost like different languages. I've heard Fresian is the closest, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.
Scots dorics and Frisian and Dutch are more closer in inteligibility. I guess in terms of inteligibility with English it's Globish and Ogden English,ISE another idiom out of these sphere today doesn't have inteligibility with hodiern current English. Frisian today is very far from english, English is very mixed and hibrid in higher level that any idiom can't follow today...
German here. I get the impression, Swedish and Danish is a bit like High German and Swiss German. As a German native speaker from Germany, you need extensive training to understand Swiss German dialects.
Go for Norwegian. You get the written language of half of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Danish) and half of the spoken language of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Swedish). And no, you don't need to learn Nynorsk. The only reason for someone who wants to learn about Nynorsk is if you plan to move to a Nynorsk municipality. The majority of Norway uses Bokmål when it comes to the written language.
I lived in Vienna half my life, and I understand Bavarian quiet well. And Danish and Bavarian have some similarities in the pronouciation, besides the rolling Italian R sound.
Have you seen the "Islandic standup about nordic neighbors"? Its on youtube, from years ago. I still watch it from time to time because it doesn't ever get old 😂😂😂
Its deep, funny and and cute for non nordics foreigners the first impression that danish rwegian and swede are the same idiom in writng and spell, only impressions 😅😅😅😅 Between nordics germanics natives norwegian and swedish are brothers and danish today seems the french nordic cousin, that talks eating the finals letters. Today i can understand and see that, but in past years i couldn't see clearly this phenomenon in the same cultural linguistic backstage.
Bokmål and Nynorsk aren't just different writing systems, they are in fact standards of two separate languages, and while Nynorsk is distinctly West Scandinavian (eg/ek for I is one of the features, for example), Bokmål is indeed more of an assimilated version of Danish which is East Scandinavian.
Like I said in the video, they are different standards in writing, BUT nynorsk is more oriented towards dialects that have more of these traits that are seen as genuine Norwegian. That's true. Hence the difference in pronunciation in my example.
I'm a bit confused, because I used to watch Scandinavian series and in some of them Swedish and Danish people meet and seem to understand each other quite well (like one is talking in Danish and the other one is answering in Swedish). It isn't true in real life?
if u live in øresunds area ( copenhagen and southern sweden). there is a lot exchange between both countries like people communting, police working together so on. so if u live in copenhagen u are exposed to alot of swedish.
@@sayitinswedish I'm a Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish) American who has studied both Danish and Norwegian (though not fluent in either). Also, I have become basically "fluent" in another language as well, so learning another language isn't alien to me, BUT what never ceases to amaze me is how well Scandinavians speak such fluent English, particularly American English. Even your last comment, "Pretty much!" was exactly the way an American would have responded and I know exactly what you meant by it.
So Norwegian has a lot of similarity to Swedish due to proximity, but it also has a lot of similarities to Danish because of previous Danish rule. By this logic, if someone's goal is to understand all three very well, wouldn't that makes Norwegian the best choice? Also, you talk about the dialects of Norway, but again if your goal is to understand everybody in Scandinavia, then studying Norwegian prepares you for understanding them better than studying Swedish does, right?
Yes! I'm fluent in Danish and Swedish, but Norwegian is most definitely the one to choose if you seek to understand everyone in Scandinavia to some extend. Danes generally have a much easier time understanding Norwegian than Swedish. It should be noted however that both Danish and especially Norwegian have many many dialects, and a Norwegian might even have trouble communicating with another Norwegian because of this. Similarly there are some dialects of Danish that I don't understand unless I know some context. The Swedish language also have dialects but they have mostly died out and are nowadays minor in comparison. I would say Oslo Norwegian is comprehensible for most Scandinavians (but it is unrealistic to learn to understand all of the dialects in the region)
Tycker det inte är nämnvärt svårare att läsa nynorsk, men vissa dialekter är givetvis svårare att förstå om man inte är van vid dem, precis som vissa svenska dialekter.
Embodied by The Lost Vikings. The tiny vocal red-haired one is the Dane, the muscular serious blonde one the Norwegian and the frivolous fat blonde one one the Swede.
I think i will start learning some of these languages... I just dont know which of them. I also dont have any native friend from these countries. I need to think about it.
Det er dejligt, bedstefar! Swedes are always so busy criticizing how Danes don't enunciate..... and then go on and pronounce "sj" like ✨THAT✨ WHAT EVEN IS THAT, JOAKIM. I hold you personally responsible.
For starters is Danish in fact the odd kid out? The soundshift of what is today the Scandinavian languages already began during the 800 and the major soundshift of Danish happend during the 1100, long before any of the Scandinavian languages was influenced by middel low German. Old norse had stress accents and neither Faroes or Icelandic, the closest spoken languages to old Norse today, is classified as tonal/musical languages which is the case with Swedish and Norwegian. So Swedish, and in particular Norwegian, quite simpley took a diffrent path evolving into having tonal / musical pronunciation, although it differs throughout Norway from less to very pitchy. In Swedish it seems more stabil throughout the country as less pitchy and in certain regions the pronunciation / soundscape is quite nasal. Danish on the other hand, in particular the varies Jutish dialects and accents, leans more towards western Germanic languages like Dutch, Frisian and northern English. As far as the written standards Swedish is the one that differs the most, Swedish has a significant amount of wotds that differs completly from Danish / Norwegian.
The Danish dropping of consonants and letters is not THAT old. There is written testimony of that by sailors and merchants explaining how odd Danish was beginning to sound.. But this is only as far back as the 16-17 hundreds.. Even from when the R became guttural instead of rolled in the front of the mouth comes from the 16-17 hundreds when French was beginning to dominate the continent...
I think they say Norwegian is West Norse because it originally was, and that shines through in some elements such as diphthongs, the feminine etc - most of those being emphasized in Nynorsk. However, Bokmål (especially the conservative variation) is pretty much Danish, so East Norse.
Yes, but even the more conservative dialects have "Swedish" traits. It's just not that simple. All the classification is good for is, as you say, to describe some sound changes.
@@sayitinswedish Exactly, the whole West Norse thing is essentially just stuff like "ben" vs "bein" or "rök" vs "röyk", and very few of these forms are actually mandatory in Bokmål. What I do find interesting though is their feminine, which is also optional and I hear is slowly disappearing, especially around Oslo: ei kvinne - kvinna instead of en kvinne - kvinnen. More conservative languages such as Icelandic or Faroese f course also keep it
Well, I guess not. The point I was trying to make is that if you want to understand everything written in the language, books etc. you would need experience in both, which includes learning new spellings and idiomatic constructions.
Everyone loves the Danes and Demark, but for the love of all that is good, Denmark -- annunciate! Learning Swedish and looking at Bokmaol, I always find the Norwegian word order confusing to start with: how is that managed on the borders...?
I mentioned this in the video, some standard Norwegian traits sound like rural Swedish traits, like putting the possessive pronoun after the noun as opposed to in front.
@jazibee8269 I blame lenition and the germans and their gutteral R's :p After all we border them, and not our fellow Scandinavian brothers D: By land that is, ofc ;) No Øresund bridges back then D:
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Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, just like Czech and Slovak. It's nice when two nations understand each other and don't need translators. As far as Scandinavian languages are concerned, Swedish leads the way for me :)
You also don't need translators between Norwegian and Danish (just slower conversation). Norwegians are in general the best at understanding other Scandinavian languages and Swedes have the most trouble (but there are probably more factors at play than just the languages themselves!)
The dialect continuum continues down to Denmark btw, so Northern dialects of Danish has three genders like west Norwegian (which also has the Danish r), and southern Swedish also has the guttural r and has a lot of Danish loan words and more danish sounding vowels. Bornholm Danish
is VERY close to southern Swedish and so forth.
This video is mostly talking about the dialects of the capital cities (which is also probably what a foreigner would be learning) but mind you that the reality is of course more nuanced.
I would guess Oslo Norwegian/Bokmål is the most widely understood dialect in Scandinavia, because it is pronounced very close to how it is written and has a lot of influence from both Danish and Swedish. It is however also perhaps the most singsongy dialect, so other dialects/languages will make a bit fun of you haha
I learned some Danish as an exchange student over a summer, then got in a situation where my school dropped Danish instruction but still offered Swedish. So I took that. Then Danish came back and I was taking both for a couple years. I was very good (I'm told) at keeping them separate, but it takes constant practice. In the years since, as I've gotten busy with other things, I make far more mistakes when switching now. As you allude to, there are far more Swedish speakers (Swedes also tend to be better at promoting their national "brand" than Danes are) so I've gone from being equally good to being better at Swedish now. There are just more opportunities to practice it.
What do you think of the grotesko joke
I am Danish. If you want to learn a Scandinavian language, take Swedish. Why? Because the three of us understands each other, but speaking Swedish, you will do fine in Finland, too. Swedish is an official language in Finland, therefore many Finns speak Swedish.
As a northern swede I would say it's a bit generous to say that the three of us understand each other. Danes have to adapt a bit to be understood, I can read danish semi fluently, but as soon as potato mouth comes in it's over :D Most norwegian is very easy to understand though.
I must admit, although I wish it was different, that I prefer swapping to english with danes.
It would probably be quite easy with a little bit of exposure to get used to the danish sounds in order to understand spoken danish.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 I have Swedish friends, we meet about once each 2 years. The first 5-10 minutes I have to adjust my ears and brain. After that, we talk fine. It happens there is a word I don't understand, then I'll just ask.
There are maybe 10 words or so, you need to learn, such as "rolig". It has completely different meaning in Swedish and Danish. "Taske" also has a different meaning 🙂
As a Finn I can say that ” by speaking Swedish You will do fine in Finland too” is a bit overexcarated.
Altough technically Swedish is official language in Finland due to historical reasons, only about 5% of Finland’s population speaks it as their first language and the amount has been declining since the Finnish independence.
I can definently say that you can do fine with speaking Swedish in Åland, around the city of Vaasa and in some smaller villages in Ostrobothnia and southern Finland. However for an example in the capital city metro area, where almost 1/4 of the whole Finland’s population lives you will be looked weird if you go to shops, restaurant etc… and start speaking Swedish. And It’s the same story in pretty much all the eastern and northern parts too.
@@1h30minsmusic2 Yeah, Åland is monolingual swedish, so you wouldnt do fine with finnish there :D
@@alexanderjohansson8133 It’s not completly monolingual. Altough Swedish is definently the dominant language there, about 10% of the Ålands population speaks Finnish, and many people there have atleast some knowledge of Finnish because it was only recently removed from being mandatory to study at schools.
I'm starting to learn swedish and it seems like I will unlock powers if I become fluent in it.
you will. odin will bless you, and you will be able to stand the smell of surstrøming. congratulations my brethren welcome to the scandinavian family. here have a cod and dont sit besides me.
I really enjoy the singsong sounds of Swedish and its closeness to English. But this is a great explanation. I did wonder what the similarities to the three languages were.
It's just scratching the surface!
I started off with Norwegian but the 2 written standards and the millions of dialects made me switch to Swedish. Swedish has twice the amount of speakers, the dialects are more similar and it's spoken in Finland so it was like a "gate" to 2 countries.
I am am a Swede with a lot of childhood time in northwest Skåne but most of my time has been in Stockholm. Skåne is the southernmost "landscape" of Sweden. During the time in Skåne I was exposed to some Danish as we could listen to a Danish radio station (which played more and better pop- and rock music (spoken Danish of course between the pieces of music) than the two Swedish radio channels at the time). This latter area (and also Blekinge and parts of two other neighboring landscapes) was part of Denmark until 1658. After that Danish was banned in these areas - the idea was to teach the former Danes to speak Swedish which resulted in a dialect group - essentially different versions of "skånska" which also includes some vocabulary that is distinct for this area. Today I spend much of my time in the western Blekinge (close to Skåne) and definitely recognize the similarities.
With this background I still have to admit that I have much more problems understanding Danish than the two versions of Norwegian but there are Norwegian dialects (or individuals) that also can cause me problems. It feels embarrassing with the large problems I have with Danish and I usually stick to English whenever I visit Denmark. There are also some words which are entirely different from Swedish like - yes the word "different" in Swedish which is "olika". In Danish this is "forskellige" and in Norwegian "forskjellige" or "ulike". A Swede cannot just know the word "forsk(j)ellige" and therefore has to learn it and there are more such examples. Counting in Danish is still a mystery for me (probably learned some of it as a child but forgot it - I am 72 now).
It is easier for me to read Danish and but again - Norwegian is easier for me to understand. Icelandic is essentially not understandable but sometimes I have tried to read Icelandic texts and recognize a few of the words but the barrier is huge and would require a lot of studies and experience to overcome.
There is however one advantage with Swedish that may be forgotten - that many Finns have a Swedish dialect as their native language and even more people in Finland have studied Swedish which helps a lot. There are however Finnish people who don't know any Swedish - Finnish is very different from Swedish - most Swedes will not understand Finnish. A few words here and there can be recognized - for example "street" is "gata" in Swedish and "katu" i Finnish (the letter "g" seems to be rare in Finnish - it is much more of "k"), a few more recent words are essentially the same as English ("golf" is also "golf" in Swedish and Finnish (not "kolf")) but one cannot build a conversation on just a few words like that...
Finally it should be noted that Swedish is not native in all of Sweden: There are large areas in northern Sweden where there are two major groups of "Laplandish" (word?) which also stretch into Norway and Finland - I am not the right person to comment Laplandish but the average person from the southern half of Sweden will not understand any of that.
As a Norwegian, I would also say learn Swedish, and I would say that for two reasons. First because of the dialects in Norway. There are a crazy amount of dialects that can be hard to understand.
Second reason is music. There is no language that is as beautiful when sung.
AWWW thats like the best compliment you can give a language in a sense.
Thanks! /tack söta bror
As a Swede (with most of the background from Stockholm and Skåne/Blekinge (southernmost part of Sweden), I am aware of some dialects in southern Sweden which are quite extreme (includes a large glossary of "strange" words - some of these stem from German, others I don't know where they came from) compared to what most people speak in this area.
I speak a little Norwegian and it's pretty good for when I visit Sweden as they're quite close but then I get them mixed up
I can imagine that it's easy to mix up. I mean I mix up Danish and Norwegian.
@@sayitinswedish it was hard to unprogram my brain from Norwegian to Swedish and I get by with numbers in Norwegian because they're close enough that people understand me
@@Letthice are you living in sweden?
Keep going man , thanks a lot
The hurdle with Danish language depends of which part of Sweden You come from. I live on an island outside Gothenburg. The dialect where I live is mixed Danish and Swedish due to trade and wars since Viking age. People from Stockholm dose not understand a word of what I say. However, when I go to Northern Denmark /Jylland/ Aalborg etc . I can speak my own dialect and all Danes understands me, ectcept for counting as they have another version of it.Well I manage now
I love the idea of mutually intelligible languages. English doesn't really have any, although some dialects are almost like different languages. I've heard Fresian is the closest, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.
Fresian should be the closest, yes, but is still pretty far away in terms of mutually intelligibility.
Scots dorics and Frisian and Dutch are more closer in inteligibility.
I guess in terms of inteligibility with English it's Globish and Ogden English,ISE another idiom out of these sphere today doesn't have inteligibility with hodiern current English. Frisian today is very far from english, English is very mixed and hibrid in higher level that any idiom can't follow today...
i would say probably scots and english
German here. I get the impression, Swedish and Danish is a bit like High German and Swiss German. As a German native speaker from Germany, you need extensive training to understand Swiss German dialects.
Love that you sneaked Grotesco and Kamelåså in there ;D
Of course!
Go for Norwegian. You get the written language of half of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Danish) and half of the spoken language of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Swedish). And no, you don't need to learn Nynorsk. The only reason for someone who wants to learn about Nynorsk is if you plan to move to a Nynorsk municipality. The majority of Norway uses Bokmål when it comes to the written language.
I lived in Vienna half my life, and I understand Bavarian quiet well.
And Danish and Bavarian have some similarities in the pronouciation, besides the rolling Italian R sound.
Have you seen the "Islandic standup about nordic neighbors"? Its on youtube, from years ago. I still watch it from time to time because it doesn't ever get old 😂😂😂
I have 😉
Its deep, funny and and cute for non nordics foreigners the first impression that danish rwegian and swede are the same idiom in writng and spell, only impressions 😅😅😅😅
Between nordics germanics natives norwegian and swedish are brothers and danish today seems the french nordic cousin, that talks eating the finals letters. Today i can understand and see that, but in past years i couldn't see clearly this phenomenon in the same cultural linguistic backstage.
Bokmål and Nynorsk aren't just different writing systems, they are in fact standards of two separate languages, and while Nynorsk is distinctly West Scandinavian (eg/ek for I is one of the features, for example), Bokmål is indeed more of an assimilated version of Danish which is East Scandinavian.
Like I said in the video, they are different standards in writing, BUT nynorsk is more oriented towards dialects that have more of these traits that are seen as genuine Norwegian. That's true. Hence the difference in pronunciation in my example.
It's the old story: You say _Jantelagen_ , I say _Janteloven_ ... But we both say _berg_ (and even the Dutch all the way to the Icelanders)
2:11 AAHHAHAHAH THE YOUNG ROYALS FANDOM GATHERR.. HE HAS FIGURED OUT WHY WE ARE HERE
I'm a bit confused, because I used to watch Scandinavian series and in some of them Swedish and Danish people meet and seem to understand each other quite well (like one is talking in Danish and the other one is answering in Swedish). It isn't true in real life?
Not so much with Danish and Swedish, no. As a Swede, you need quite a lot of exposure to understand spoken Danish.
if u live in øresunds area ( copenhagen and southern sweden). there is a lot exchange between both countries like people communting, police working together so on. so if u live in copenhagen u are exposed to alot of swedish.
I'm from Brazil 🇧🇷 you just gained a subscribe in your channel account.
I have recently read that Norwegian is like "a Swede trying to speak Danish". I don't know if that's true, but it sounds plausible (and fun) to me.
Pretty much!
@@sayitinswedish I'm a Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish) American who has studied both Danish and Norwegian (though not fluent in either). Also, I have become basically "fluent" in another language as well, so learning another language isn't alien to me, BUT what never ceases to amaze me is how well Scandinavians speak such fluent English, particularly American English. Even your last comment, "Pretty much!" was exactly the way an American would have responded and I know exactly what you meant by it.
So Norwegian has a lot of similarity to Swedish due to proximity, but it also has a lot of similarities to Danish because of previous Danish rule. By this logic, if someone's goal is to understand all three very well, wouldn't that makes Norwegian the best choice? Also, you talk about the dialects of Norway, but again if your goal is to understand everybody in Scandinavia, then studying Norwegian prepares you for understanding them better than studying Swedish does, right?
Yes! I'm fluent in Danish and Swedish, but Norwegian is most definitely the one to choose if you seek to understand everyone in Scandinavia to some extend. Danes generally have a much easier time understanding Norwegian than Swedish. It should be noted however that both Danish and especially Norwegian have many many dialects, and a Norwegian might even have trouble communicating with another Norwegian because of this. Similarly there are some dialects of Danish that I don't understand unless I know some context. The Swedish language also have dialects but they have mostly died out and are nowadays minor in comparison.
I would say Oslo Norwegian is comprehensible for most Scandinavians (but it is unrealistic to learn to understand all of the dialects in the region)
@@kristianemilpaludan1653 Kul, takk for svar 🙂
Som svensk, hur svårt är det för dig att förstå nynorsk jämfört med bokmål? Och de olika norska dialekterna? Jag är nyfiken
Tack för videorna Joakim!
Tycker det inte är nämnvärt svårare att läsa nynorsk, men vissa dialekter är givetvis svårare att förstå om man inte är van vid dem, precis som vissa svenska dialekter.
Embodied by The Lost Vikings. The tiny vocal red-haired one is the Dane, the muscular serious blonde one the Norwegian and the frivolous fat blonde one one the Swede.
I got my potatoes and ready to learn some Danish 😊
I think i will start learning some of these languages... I just dont know which of them. I also dont have any native friend from these countries. I need to think about it.
2:47 "Bæstefar, jeg kan ikke snakker Dansk!", "Det kan jeg ikke heller, høhøhø."
Det er dejligt, bedstefar! Swedes are always so busy criticizing how Danes don't enunciate..... and then go on and pronounce "sj" like ✨THAT✨ WHAT EVEN IS THAT, JOAKIM. I hold you personally responsible.
Don't forget how much Swedes also reduce without being aware of it and then blame Danes for not enunciating 😜
all three languages are fascinating
Swedish is not only the easiest nordic language to learn, (still pretty difficult tho)
But it's also the most spoken one
Good to know that my random decision was a good decision
For starters is Danish in fact the odd kid out? The soundshift of what is today the Scandinavian languages already began during the 800 and the major soundshift of Danish happend during the 1100, long before any of the Scandinavian languages was influenced by middel low German.
Old norse had stress accents and neither Faroes or Icelandic, the closest spoken languages to old Norse today, is classified as tonal/musical languages which is the case with Swedish and Norwegian. So Swedish, and in particular Norwegian, quite simpley took a diffrent path evolving into having tonal / musical pronunciation, although it differs throughout Norway from less to very pitchy. In Swedish it seems more stabil throughout the country as less pitchy and in certain regions the pronunciation / soundscape is quite nasal. Danish on the other hand, in particular the varies Jutish dialects and accents, leans more towards western Germanic languages like Dutch, Frisian and northern English.
As far as the written standards Swedish is the one that differs the most, Swedish has a significant amount of wotds that differs completly from Danish / Norwegian.
I just meant it's the odd one out comparing to the other two _modern_ siblings. The way getting there is another story.
The Danish dropping of consonants and letters is not THAT old. There is written testimony of that by sailors and merchants explaining how odd Danish was beginning to sound.. But this is only as far back as the 16-17 hundreds.. Even from when the R became guttural instead of rolled in the front of the mouth comes from the 16-17 hundreds when French was beginning to dominate the continent...
Alv, yo elijo el Islandes xd
Danish accent sounds more like German or Dutch accent
There is a big difference in prosody there.
I think they say Norwegian is West Norse because it originally was, and that shines through in some elements such as diphthongs, the feminine etc - most of those being emphasized in Nynorsk. However, Bokmål (especially the conservative variation) is pretty much Danish, so East Norse.
Yes, but even the more conservative dialects have "Swedish" traits. It's just not that simple. All the classification is good for is, as you say, to describe some sound changes.
@@sayitinswedish Exactly, the whole West Norse thing is essentially just stuff like "ben" vs "bein" or "rök" vs "röyk", and very few of these forms are actually mandatory in Bokmål. What I do find interesting though is their feminine, which is also optional and I hear is slowly disappearing, especially around Oslo: ei kvinne - kvinna instead of en kvinne - kvinnen. More conservative languages such as Icelandic or Faroese f course also keep it
great video allthough i havent watched it yet
Nobody ever mentions the fact that Dutch is the language that most resembles Swedish .
Because it doesn't really. Sometimes it can sound similar but it's more like German in that sense. It's not intelligible like Norwegian and Danish.
Correction, you do not need to learn Nynorsk if you wanna learn Norwegian
Well, I guess not. The point I was trying to make is that if you want to understand everything written in the language, books etc. you would need experience in both, which includes learning new spellings and idiomatic constructions.
Everyone loves the Danes and Demark, but for the love of all that is good, Denmark -- annunciate!
Learning Swedish and looking at Bokmaol, I always find the Norwegian word order confusing to start with: how is that managed on the borders...?
I mentioned this in the video, some standard Norwegian traits sound like rural Swedish traits, like putting the possessive pronoun after the noun as opposed to in front.
2:11 HE KNOWS….
EDVIN
*Promosm*
Danish sounds like horses speaking
That's not a very nice thing to say about horses.
I think the official description is "like a drunk person with a potato in their mouth".
@@sayitinswedish lol
@@sayitinswedishMy danish heart felt that, but my face is smiling lol all over, even chuggled a little, that was a good one haha :D
@jazibee8269 I blame lenition and the germans and their gutteral R's :p After all we border them, and not our fellow Scandinavian brothers D: By land that is, ofc ;) No Øresund bridges back then D:
finnish
You will have little use of Finnish if you're goal is to understand several Nordic languages at once.
Du scnacker dansk? Lyder hyggeligt...