As a Norwegian, fluent in English, Swedish, almost fluent in Danish and having studied Icelandic a bit, I was a bit sceptical to the title of this, but then, you're spot on :) PS: Faeroese and Icelandic are mostly interintelligable, but again, neither of them are intelligable to most norwegians, swedes or danes. PPS: Look out for false friends between these languages. Like any other sets of closely related languages, they share words that have changed meaning over time. Examples include "må / má" in Danish/Icelandic, which means "can" or "may" in English, whereas "må" in Norwegian, means "must". An anecdote I heard was from the times people sent letters and a young, Norwegian woman got a letter from her grandmother in Sweden, inviting her for her 70th birthday or something and the woman wrote back, saying "jeg har dessverre ikke anledning til å komme", meaning "regretfully, I have no possibility of going". "Anledning" means "possibility" or something like that in Norwegian. In Swedish, however, "anledning" means "reason", so her reply could be translated to "regretfully, I see no reason to go there".
Må means must in Swedish as well, it's just rarely used in that meaning. It may also mean may. It's just a way too archaic use for the word. But just looking through the dialects the hardest from all sources in Scandinavia. I have a colleague who came from Persia, to Sweden, lived in the North of Sweden, for 13 years, then moved down to Scania, and thought he had made a mistake and had flew on the wrong plane to France or somewhere. Because he couldn't understand anything. Not a singular word. If people think Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic is hard to understand, no one in Scandinavia would rate anyone of these as hard to pronounce, sure there's a few consonants in Swedish and Icelandic that are harder to say, and Danish has Stød, which is not easy to deal with. I speak Danish as well, but still, my dialect is hard for people in Scania, and while I can talk fine to people age 70+ yeah, I ain't saying that it's not a dying breed of a language but it is.. Let me write it down and let me see you try to understand it before reading the transcript... Jaw gekk té hawa dá er bag hus mitt auk da jaw kom fram da føll jaw tryne ner i møga, sau da wa de baa ad gau enna væjn tébak au in au dass au té ble au mé møg dá føle tryne mitt husro, dá daw wa gal gekk jaw té hawa dá jaw fann ei hawa gott i mitt sinne. Næ wæl we hawa wa da grannt au da sola gakk ner sau wa hawa sau granner ad de jor dawa mø bedder enn inn. Sau næ jaw wæl komid him da tæjnte jaw fø mæ sæl ad øllting kann gau gal au enn kan man me ro sæ finna. In Swedish... Jag Gick till hagen som är bakom mitt hus, och då jag kom fram då föll jag ansiktet ner i skiten, så då var det bara att gå änna vägen tillbaks och in på toa för att bli av med skiten som tyckte ansiktet mitt var hemtrevligt, då dagen var skit gick jag till havet då jag fann inte hagen trevlig i mitt sinne. När väl vid havet var det vackert och då solen gick ner så var havet så vackert att det gjorde dagen mycket bättre än innan. Så när jag väl kommit hem då tänkte jag för mig själv att allting kan gå snett och ändå kan man med ro sig finna. In English... Although it won't be a direct translation... it wouldn't be readable in English if I did. I went to the pasture which is behind my house, and when I arrived, I tripped face first down in the "crud", as it was just then to walk the whole way back and into the bathroom to get rid of the dung which had thought itself a new home on my face, as the day was crap, I went to the sea as I found the pasture a not so fond memory. When I finally reached the sea it was beautiful and when the sun set, the sea was so beautiful that it made the day so much better than before. And when I finally got home, I thought to myself, that everything can go wrong, and yet one can still find peace of mind. Mind you all that's a lot easier to read still, than to actually understand it spoken. My brother and sister doesn't understand it, my father and I do, but we hardly speak anything but Swedish at home, because when the others don't understand you why speak it. You might find it weird, but the dialect is dying out. And I tried to remove as many diphthongs from the words as possible as well, and I tried to swedify it somewhat as well, for instance komid him instead of kuemeid hiim yes that's a ii diphthong... that's 2 different i's because when it comes to vowels Scanian has the most. It's so awful that these following words aren't pronounced the same.... dá(that), dá(which), dá(as)... oh and then we have dää(that is) dá dää da(so that is that then)... It would be so much easier to understand the old Scanian language than it is to understand the modern dialects that descend from it.
@@livedandletdie Very nice! It sounded a bit like østerdøling, like the dialects around Trysil/Tynset or thereabout combined with somewhat modern danish/norwegian/swedish. I find some traces of Solung there as well, as from Flisa/Finnskogen in Hedmark, just west of Värmland. I'd guess I could understand most of it orally, but obviously, it would be a wee tad hard.
There are *lots* of funny false friends in norwegian/swedish - like "han pular med sin dator" in Swedish, meaning "he's fiddling with his computer", whereas "pule" in Norwegian, means to have sexual intercourse with. In Norwegian, the word "pusle" means the same as in Swedish "pule", but then, it's still quite fun. @@BlazeLycan
Yes, As a Swede You easily find Norwegian more as an dialect with a somewhat different accent than Swedish. Very easy to understand. I work with Norwegians everyday and never find it anything else than relaxing to speak with eachother. My grandmother from a village in Sweden with an old dialect is even closer to many words that were comon used in Scandinavia. With Danish we have to listen with focus to understand, thats what Danes say as well, if we both speak slowly though it is much easier to understand eachother. Writing is the same though, if only Danes would speak as they write 👀😂🙌. But with this said, Swedes understand spoken Danish and the more we interact with each other the better we communicate, takes a few minutes to get rid of the barrier keep focus and we are good. That is actually the case with Netherlands as well, we can read it somewhat good but alot more difficult to understand when spoken.
I'm Icelandic, lived in Sweden for 5 years now. It's quite easy for me to learn swedish, so many words we do have in common, and they dont have a lot of grammar. But if a Swede wanted to learn icelandic, that is going to be a lot harder. Interesting videos you have, keep them up!
Is that because Icelandic is still closest and true to the ancient Scandinavian/Viking language as opposed to other Scandinavian languages that have gone through changes over the years?
I would say, as a Swede, that reading Icelandic is not that hard (much closer to modern Swedish than Ancient Greek is to Modern Greek, just as a comparison), but the sound changes of modern Icelandic makes it hard for me to understand when it is spoken. I love the sound of it though, and I am currently (very slowly) getting into it. When reading Old Norse, I usually go for a more reconstructed prononciation, which is easier for a Swede, but again, I love the hard de-voiced sound of Modern Icelandic as well. The phonology sounds rather close to Finnish to me, with the de-voiced consonants.
not at all, as a swede when i traveled to iceland. been a few times i can understand most sentences but not isolated words. cause as you say so much we have in common. i think if i tried learning it it would be farely easy. abit harder than norweigan, easier than danish.
Dang, I thought my native language of Faroese was going to be complete forgotten but at least there was a btw. right at the end so yay? Anyway, Faroese always take the middle ground so the take paradigm: at taka: eg taki - tú tekur - hann tekur / vit taka - tit taka - teir taka dagur - dagar / gestur - gestir / glóð - gløður / stjørna - stjørnur / skip - skip I do also agree that going for Norwegian Bokmål from a written POV is probably the best choice for a sort of catch-all for understand most Scandinavian languages, BUT: speaking of spoken languages, remember that Danish and Swedish have standardised spoken forms but Norwegian does not and the differences in Norwegian dialects can be quite vast. Think British Isles if RP didn't exist, or North America if GenAm didn't exist.
Faroese is also as similar to Norwegian as it is to Icelandic, if one cares to compare. We're reasonably mutually intelligible in written form, and I have indeed spoken with Norwegians, in written Faroese, with success.
@@tordurhansen333 As a Norwegian from Oslo, when spoken, I find it easier to understand Faroese than Icelandic (and Frisian, for some reason). Neither Danish nor Swedish poses any problems, although it depends on the dialect and the person speaking (speed, articulation)
@@viggoholmsen7203 This makes sense. Faroese is, as stated, similar in some aspects including words used. Icelandic does not share this trait towards Norwegians. In fact I believe the only similar language to Icelandic in particular is Faroese
@@viggoholmsen7203 I have always found the sailing nations easy to understand, Frisian is very alike English, and the words in Dutch, Flämisch and Plattdeutsch are very similar to other languages, so once you know English, German and Scandinavian you can easily read whatever, also Faroese, which I believe in many ways are nfluenced by Norwegian, Danish and Scottish, but our little brothers and sisters in Iceland have been so conservative that they are now far off our place, which makes them kind of interesting and annoying. :-)
Yes as a Norwegian native from the esstern dialect I can confirm that I can speak casually with Swedes and Danes as if they spoke dialects of Norwegian. I have to take a break to process and ask them to repeat themselves, but I do that with Norwegians from the South, West and North as well. Only thing about Danish is that it takes a little while to get used to if you aren't used to it. (Northeners struggle a fair bit more than southerners or easterners from my experience). I went on exchange to a college in Copenhagen and I needed two days to get accustomed to which sounds meant what. But after that I was able to participate in lectures on pedagogy on the same academic level I did in Norway.
Danish songs always sound so unintelligible to me the first time, but after listening to them a few times I suddenly understand a lot. The sentence structure is pretty similar, but pronunciation is very different
In general I would disagree with that, albeit with some reservations. The reason is that most Danish innovations do not have parallels in German, i.e.: The weakening of stops (/p t k/ to /b d j,w/) after a long vowel does not exist in Low or High German. The weakening of spirants between vowels (/g/ to /j,w/) does not exist in Low or High German. The merger of unstressed vowels does indeed have parallels in early West Germanic but predates the medieval German influence and also exists to an extent in many Norwegian and Swedish dialects. The change from alveolar (front) /r/ to uvular (back) /r/ seems later than the medieval German influence and also exists in many Norwegian and Swedish dialects. The change from tonal accent to thrust accent (stød) does not exist in Low or High German and to be sure, the Danish dialects with preserved tonal accent are those closest to German. The lack of palatalisation before front vowel (/k g/ to /kj gj/ etc.) in Standard Danish may indeed possibly have had support from German-speaking Copenhageners, although it was also modest and non-phonemic on Zealand before that. So I think that in general, the broad picture rather points to Danish having many independent innovations. This is not to say that there is no massive Low German influence because there certainly is, mainly in the vocabulary. But it is probably important not to get caught up in geography. The Hanseatic league easily extended its influence to Norway and Sweden despite the sea inbetween (and to be sure, the area where early standard Danish developed, Zealand and Scania, also had sea to the south).
It would be very interesting to study how the Danes mainly ( I am a Dane btw. 😉 ) could learn how to change their often rather lazy and plain pronounciation to make themselves better understood to the Norwegians & the Swedes without very much effort - by just speaking a bit slower and more clearly without merging or dropping words, pronouncing all (!) syllables of the words and use proper ending -g's and -d's instead of the usual soft versions ( "-gh" as in "sigh" & "-ð" ~ c. "-th" in E as in "with" - or even the muted versions of "-g" and "-d" after l, n & r ), where N & S typically have a -k and -d / -t ending, speaking with far more open vowels instead of the often very flat Danish ones - and of course by using Scandinavian numbers instead of the rather peculiar Danish ones with their base-20 system ( from 50 to 99 ) and the ones before the tens 😉 I would love to see a TV-show, where we could test what it really takes to understand each others - how to speak clearly, how to listen up and what to avoid etc. - , because it is actually a bit "shameful" that we - especially the younger people - nowadays often need to communicate in English between us Scandinavians, when our languages are so very closely connected and at least in principal mutually intelligible to a high degree - if we only bother 🙄 Maybe we could even invent some sort of simple Standard Scandinavian of this type that would be fairly easy to learn and understand for all three groups of Scandinavians? 😊
@@daneaxe6465 No, it's not! - that's a common misunderstanding 😉 If you just watched Danish TV for a couple of months ( with subtitles in Danish if need be ), you would understand almost everything without much effort, since the basic Danish vocabulary is around 85 % the same as Swedish - just pronounced somewhat differently and spelled a little differently but along predictable lines - and around 95 % the same as that of Norwegian, and very close in spelling. The grammars are also very similar in most important respects, so knowing one of the three languages makes it fairly easy to learn the other two languages ( not including Nynorsk here, since I don't know enough about it ). So Danish is very much like Norwegian Bokmål ( Book language ) without the melodic intonation ( musical accent ) and with more flat vowels and some soft or mute ending consonants - and then of course our weird old fashioned number system, which the other Scandinavians rightfully "hate" us for 🙄😂 So for a Swede or a Norwegian it's basically just a question of learning what to listen up for and getting to know a "few" unfamiliar words and expressions here and there, that either have completely different meanings or don't exist in one or both of the other languages (any longer), even though you would typically expect them to ( from a Danish perspective and vice versa ).
Thank you for acknowledging dialects and being clear when you are talking about standard languages. It really helps us who are working for the traditional dialects.
I had an overnight delay in Iceland a few years ago. Listening to people speak icelandic, I had 2 reactions: it reminded me of English spoken backwards, and I felt as if I should understand it, like a dream language.
@@Miggy19779 :-) I was really surprised when I stayed in Venlo and then visited Köln. The local dialect there had a lot of different words obviously but at the same time the whole cadence of it was so similar to the way people speak in and around Venlo (there is a German/Low Saxon dialect spoken there as well)
I grew up in a monolingual household, now I have kids of my own we've decided to learn Icelandic and I've come to your videos in a very roundabout way but enjoy them all and found them really helpful. So, thanks.
@@daneaxe6465 Yes. I believe it is call Gudbrandsdøl (after the area Gudbrandsdalen), but here's the thing about Norwegian dialects, there are so many and interchange so much because of the nature, that one valley has one dialect, and then just over the other side of that mountain the words are different, so maybe it is called Lesjamål (mål means language) what they speak in Lesja ;-)
@@trondellingmichalsen4957 Thanks for the reply. Knowing the terrain of Norway its to see why dialects were different. Prior to powered transport people probably didn't get out of those narrow valleys very often.
Well, I have heard Danish countless times, been to Denmark many times, studied the language at school for years and still, every. single. time. I hear it I think to myself 7:22
@@MrJol420 to be fair, i've seen subtitles on norwegian plenty of times, too. It's madness. And you just need a little exposure to danish and then it's easy to understand, which i'm sure goes the other way, too. Just gotta figure out the sound correspondences, since the grammar and the actual words used are virtually identical
How much one understand though really depends on the dialects spoken in both languages. North Jylland meets Westerbottnian inland would be interesting... when I hanged with a guy from Århus we understod about 60% of the other so we switched to english after a little while to get 98% or so instead...
@@sirseigan I'm pretty close to the hypothetical swede you're talking about, and I count myself lucky if I understand a few words once in a while of spoken danish. Honestly, even thick scanian dialects are difficult to understand.
@@MrJol420 Danish is very natural to Norwegians, it's our language with just a twist. I think you've misunderstood something about Norwegian/Danish if you think we can't speak it at all, but speaking it exactly like a Dane is harder. This has been researched recently, Norwegians understand the both of the other languages better than Swedes/Danes.
@@MrJol420 Thats wrong and true. Norwegians that lives on the eastside of Norwayy understans Swedish well. Swwedes that lives on the west side of sweden understands Norwegian fairly well. Depends on the exposure. Same with danes. Depends on exposure not nationality and language.
Jackson, I love that you had Luke here as a guest on your channel -- I just watched (well, yesterday) a video he did on the absence of discrete yes and no words in ancient Latin and how speakers and writers of ancient Latin managed without having those words in their linguistic toolbox, and a day or two prior to that, I watched another one he did on Latin's vocative case! I have to say that it's quite a bit visually jarring to see him jump from walking through Roman streets with all those historic architectural sites surrounding him while discussing the into-the-weeds vagaries of ancient spoken and written Latin to seeing him standing beside you donning a cowboy hat with Rocky Mountain scenery in the background!
Started learning bokmål on duolingo as a joke because someone I play a mobile game with is in Norway. Knowing a little German has made it really easy and I've enjoyed it. This video gives me some reason to get more serious with it. 🙂
Good sir, once I've finished my matric, university, and have found a retirement plan for my parents, I will throw myself into the studies you show on this channel. I've always wasted so much time but I'll get on track and learn. Things like this are truly beautiful- I want to know them & learn them
I love these collab videos! I noticed something in your noun list though. To my knowledge as a native swedish speaker, there is no singular and plural of Glöd. I don't remember what the grammatical term is for this but Glöd doesn't directly translate into ember. It's more of a phenomenon than an object in swedish. For example, you can say "Han stirrade in i glöden", "He stared into the embers" but in that case, Glöd means something akin to the glow itself rather than the pieces of coal. You couldn't say "Han plockade ut några glöder ur elden", "He picked a few embers out of the fire". At least, I've never heard anyone use a plural of Glöd in that way in spoken swedish. In that case you would have to say "några glödande kol", "a few glowing coals". (Kol is another one of those words that doesn' have a direct plural) That makes much more sense in swedish. I'm not sure if the same is true for danish and norwegian. Anyway, great video as always!
Makes sense to me, it's the same way in German. As it is with many words, "Glut" (glöd) is always in the plural form, much like water, air and sand in German
Danish has both, essentially. 'Glød' with no plural means 'a glow', and 'glød' with the plural 'gløder' means 'ember'. I suppose this is a border case where you can actually discuss whether it is the same word or two different words.
I fully agree with you. 'Glöder' is the present tense of the verb 'glöda' (to glow), not the plural of 'glöd', which acts as an uncountable noun in Swedish.
In Norwegian it's mostly the same - "glød" is "glow", i.e. a symbol, and effect, not a physical ember, while "gløder" is not the plural of "glød" but is instead the present tense of the verb "å gløde" (to glow, implicitly from something that appears to be hot), while in dialectical Norwegian the word "glør" would be "embers". That's plural of "glo" which is a (singular) ember.
I am a Finn (who used to live in Colorado), I speak Swedish and that has gotten me by in most of Scandinavia, Oslo is easy, just say accurat instead of just det etc. Northern Norway, too. Stavanger is tougher, but I refuse to switch to English. Denmark is easy once you get a hang of the accent and they tend to understand Swedish. Icelandic is a different story. My experience. Swedish would be the first one to learn, gives you ten million people to start.
The problem with Swedish compared to Norwegian is that spoken Swedish has more in common with spoken Norwegian than Danish and written Danish have more in common with written Norwegian than Swedish. Actually written Nynorsk have more in common with written Swedish, but to most people Nynorsk is not the language to choose. Even though you can communicate with both Norwegians and Danes it is not the easiest way to go for people who are totally new to Scandinavia languages. You also have to keep in mind that two of the ten million Swedes you are talking about actually are speaking other languages than Swedish, for instance Arabic. In some areas in Sweden Arabic is considered more useful than Swedish.
@@ahkkariq7406 I think you could make a case for both Norwegian and Swedish as the language to learn. Obviously, Norwegian is going to be the best in terms of being able to communicate decently with speakers of all the Scandinavian languages, especially if the written form you choose is Bokmål. Not to add that it is supposedly easier to learn in terms of grammar. That said, Swedish does have some strengths of its own. The amount of Swedish speakers does slightly eclipse the amount of Norwegian and Danish speakers combined, even if we discount the nearly 300 thousand Fenno-swedes in Finland. This means that with Swedish, you will be able to communicate much better with a far larger chunk of the Scandinavian population compared to Norwegian, while you'll have a lot more trouble understanding spoken Danish. In terms of reading, as a Swede myself, I don't really struggle to read Danish or Norwegian Bokmål all that much. Once you know what the äö equivalents are, it mainly comes down to some words that don't exist in Swedish, or the occasional false friends. While I am sure there are areas in Sweden where Arabic might be more useful, those aren't exactly great areas to visit for a Scandinavian experience anyhow, if not active problem areas, and the people that do speak Arabic are not in the 2 million; it's just over 200 thousand. So between choosing Norwegian or Swedish, and you don't have plans to move or work in any specific country, then it largely comes down to whether you value communicating more broadly with everyone with Norwegians being the smallest population out of the 3, or better with around ¾. That, and whether you value relatively easier grammar with Norwegian or not. Another way to put it with my personal anecdote, is that due to the much larger population; whenever I meet a Scandinavian online, it is most often Swedes I meet, followed by a roughly even amount of Norwegians and Danes.
@@ahkkariq7406Swedish is the only official language in Sweden and also spoken in Finland. It has 10 million speakers which is the amount of Norwegian and Danish speakers combined. Also Sweden has one written standard and dialects are different intonation and vocabulary in general. In Norway there are 2 written standards and thousands of dialects which can look like different languages. You'll be in trouble in most of the country unless your Norwegian is very fluent if you learned Oslo dialect.
@@lmatt88 My argument is based on linguistic theme. The fact that Sweden only has one official language does not mean that all citizens can speak this language. Sweden has close to 800,000 illiterate adults, and the number is increasing. Do you think these people can speak Swedish, or is their understanding of Swedish at best at a level that is far below that of all Norwegians understandig of Bokmål? All Norwegians actually have training in both Norwegian languages. A very large proportion of Swedish pupils do not speak Swedish at home. I strongly doubt that these families can be counted in the number of Swedes who speak Swedish fluently.
@@ahkkariq7406 if they don't now they will soon. And also their children will obviously speak the local language. In any case, even ruling out 1 million people, there would be 9 million Swedish speakers, far more than the Norwegian speakers.
My grandmother spoke a dialect from Småland.. Where they still used inflection in the verbs. Jag tar. Du tager.. Han/Hon Tager.. Vi tagom.. Etcetera. And this was only a hundred years back. This is why I believe Swedes have an easier time in general have an easier time of understanding Icelandic than both Danes and Norwegian. (Especially if you have grown up in a rural setting and heard a lot of older dialects).
Note that Norwegian "skip" is pronounced with a long "i". Otherwise it would be spelt "skipp". Language nerds should look into Norwegian Nynorsk, whose original author himself was a language nerd. His version of Nynorsk might seem very conservative today exaggerating the link with Old Norse, but I think this is a bit misunderstood. He wanted a modern Norwegian. For instance, he saw no point in insisting on the use of the dative case, since it was lost in the majority of the country. The reason why he originally kept old plural forms of verbs despite these being even more rare in the dialects than the dative case, no doubt was because the written Danish and Swedish of the time had them (despite being practically lost in the spoken language in Sweden and Denmark as well), and he wanted to avoid being too radical and break away from Swedish and Danish and what people of the time were used to.
However, it is worth noting that both Danes and Swedes have a hard time understanding Nynorsk. If the point is to learn a Scandinavian language that is relatively easy to understand in all the Scandinavian countries, Norwegian Bokmål is definitely the way to go (as Crawford also points out). If, on the other hand, the point is to learn the variant of the Scandinavian languages that is most reminiscent of Old Norse, this is without a doubt Nynorsk. However, it is also worth noting that Nynorsk is a contrived language that does not belong to a specific area (perhaps except for the county of Møre og Romsdal where Ivar Åsen who assembled Nynorsk came from). Very few people in Norway therefore speak purely Nynorsk, but mix in their own dialects.
Two things to consider here: Whether to learn the language that is most widely understood or whether to learn the language with the simplest grammar (and supposedly easiest to learn). Bokmål scores pretty good on both, but something also tells me that Nynorsk as a pretty constructed language can be quite suited for foreigners to learn, since it was created by regularising a cross section of dialects. So it's arguably more regular than the other Scandinavian languages loaded with historical baggage. Nynorsk is more a fresh start. The only thing really more complex in Nynorsk that I can think of is the plural forms of masculine and feminine nouns, which bokmål has simplified into just adding -(e)r, whereas in Nynorsk you preferably need to know what kind of root the word belongs to. But even Nynorsk has been simplified quite a bit and offer quite a bit of freedom (meaning that in many cases where the masculine -ar and feminine -er main rule traditionally doesn't apply, you can often chose, e.g. both gjester/gjestar and elvar/elver are accepted). So I think it should be fairly easy for a foreigner to learn a somewhat simplified version of Nynorsk, and then optionally learn advanced Nynorsk, for instance by learning Old Norse and many of the "advanced" features of Nynorsk will make sense.
Some years ago there was a rather nonsensical tv dating programme in Denmark that actually gained some popularity, because one of the contestants spoke with heavy south jutland dialect, and most of us really had no idea about what he was saying. Someone made subtitles on what it sounded like and it was very funny. Some dialects are very hard to understand in Denmark.
I’m here to add that the vast amount of Swedish entertainment I’m interested in would make me lean that way. Sabaton, Opeth and Falconer all have albums and songs in Swedish, the Millennium Trilogy has 3 complete films in Swedish, heck I even watched Vi Är Bäst with subs on Netflix.
As a Dane this may come off as herecy but I hapen to find that sung and softly spoken Sweidish is one of the most beautiful languages on Earth. I have Swedish and Danish ancestry and contemporary Swedish family for all it´s worth. So to break it all down: Sweden: Swedes are the most intelligent, smart, progressive, succesful and developed fantastic people on Earth,- ask any Swede,- he´ll tell you. Norway: Do you know what a high rise is called in Norwegian? Hyttepåhyttepåhyttepåhytte. Denmark: Wæl, it ids, ju knøv, more like mådern dænis is , lejk, måår lejk modærn Dænglish, ju knøv, jæs?....
I am Norwegian and have experienced a lot of times that the Swedes and the Danes make me a translator so they can communicate, so there's that. You are nearly always right about the modern Nordic languages, therefore I trust you about the old stuff as well. Keep the good stuff coming.
I find it a bit sad when Swedes talk about how they can’t understand spoken Danish given how very easy it is to *learn* to understand it, more or less perfectly, if you already understand Swedish. I basically did so in an afternoon and without really actively *doing* much. All I had to do was watch a couple of Danish news shows (TV-avisen on DR) - where they tend to speak quite clearly - and during my watching my brain started to automatically crack the Danish “pronunciation-code”. At the start of the first news show I generally got the general gist of what they were talking about but missed out on much. At the end of the second I understood *almost* everything they were saying. And now, having exposed myself to quite a bit more Danish, I can listen to podcasts in Danish and stuff like that and it doesn’t really feel different from listening to something in Swedish. Maybe I am some sort of language genius who could pull this off, but I don’t think so. I think that most Swedes could do the same if they tried and must assume that the same is true for Danish people that find Swedish difficult to understand. Given this, I think it very worthwhile to try something like what I describe above as if you can learn to understand a new language (though today I actually tend to view Swedish, Norwegian and Danish as dialects of the same language) as quickly and easily as I did Danish, it is almost certainly worth doing.
I love the way you did it. I (Dane) started reading Norwegian books as a child, Swedish books as a teenager and Faroese papers as an adult. In my current job I work together with Swedes and we understand each other fine.
Same for me (Native Swedish speaker here). I work at a callcenter that gets some calls in Danish, and it takes some sentences but eventually I can understand spoken Danish just fine.
Same for me (a Dane) I actively refuse to speak English to Swedes and Norwegians, because I want to understand and be understood. I think it's a bit ridiculous how the discourse around understanding each other often gets overtaken with lazy, overused excuses that sometimes completely devolve into insults. Like you mentioned, it's not hard, it just takes a little bit of consistent effort to keep in shape. And the Swedes I've talked to who didn't want to understand Danish, I just spoke Swedish to instead, because it's not all that hard to learn to speak it either.
I think there is a bit of where in Sweden you are from as well. I am raised in the north and i really struggle to understand Danish but i do try to make an effort into doing so when i hear it. Then again i also struggle with some accents from the Skåne region in Sweden.
It took me several of weeks until I understood Danish at all. And after one month I did understand……some of it. I was there for two month visiting a Danish classmate and her family. They was very amused over my efforts to understand them. Love Denmark
I do have a thing for Swedish language music I don't understand and deep love for Ingmar Bergman films. I suppose I'd go for Swedish, if I were to delve into it, though for surprisingly modern reasons. I would probably get a lot more out of music and movies. But from the very little I do understand of Swedish, I am always kind of surprised how close it actually does seem to English.
@@eckligt I am not familiar with the name, but maybe I should check them out. If you have a reccomendation for a starting point, I'd certainly take take it. I have been a big fan of Kent since I was a teenager in the early 2000s and then also some more obscure metal.
@@seamussc Veronica Maggio is one of Scandinavia's biggest pop stars, she started out in 2006 and broke through in 2008. If you like indie music, I recommend Säkert a.k.a. Annika Norlin. To help people like you out, she even put out an album with translations called _Säkert på Engelska_ EDIT: I mostly listen to rock and metal myself as well, so I'm not the best to give more specific recommendations. Although I'm partial to Maggio's second album, it has a motown soul vibe instead of being straight pop. Another popular artist is Melissa Horn, she is a singer-songwriter.
As a native Dane I totally get why Danish is hard to get for others, even other Scandinavians. And you should make fun of it :) My wife speaks English, French, Arabic, and Marachi (an Indian language), but she gave up with Danish, it's simply impossible for her to get.
As a swed you can get a mental break down when you listen to Danish for the first time, when you realize their mouths moving and they making sounds, but you could hardly make any sense of it. But after a while when you brain start to adjust you will be able to identify words and understand what they are saying. This is usually done within some hour, but need to be retrain if you have had a Danish-free period, but the learning time will be shorter for each time.
I have spend most of my time flying as a cabin crew in scandinavia, as a dane, it is very clear to me that what you commented is true. Swedes and Norwegians have been told that danish is impossible to understand, so most Swedes and Norwegians panic and switch to english very fast, but they should give it a chance, danish is not the most beautiful language out there, we never claimed this, but if you give us a chance, we are actually not that difficult to understand. Flying from copenhagen it was always a funny situation to notice new swedish colleagues fresh from over the bridge, they looked like white ghosts in the beginning, but it took them no longer than 2 days to adjust and in the end it's just a question of learning the danish number system. It took me a year to learn to speak swedish at a conversational level, its not perfect, but it's SO useful with swedish passengers, because they never understand me, ha ha ha... Today I live in Norway, and they seem to have trouble understanding a single word I say, but learning norwegian after learning swedish is impossible for me, so honestly I just let it be...english it is...
Thanks again to our two ancient European language heavyweights! I have myself studied Latin, Ancient Greek, German and (some) Icelandic, so I can relate to what Jackson and Luke say. I have for a long time been interested in all things Old Norse, read some of the sagas, watched Vikings (oh no!), etc., but in the end decided that the best way into Old Norse and Icelandic was to first learn a modernized version, and I went for Swedish! That took care of the basic vocabulary, sentence structure (verb in 2nd place), article tagged on at the end, etc. It was then much easier to tackle Icelandic / Old Norse, which kind of seemed to me to cumulate the niceties of Latin, Ancient Greek and German all in one! But I managed in the end to get it into my ear that the sequence a-u was a cacophonic no-no and must always change into an ö-u, which now seems natural. A kind of vowel harmony, I suppose, like in the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic languages. Anyway, that seems to be working. And I had no trouble using my (still limited) Swedish in Norway’s Finnmark - Tromsø, Alta, Karasjok, etc., nor in Bergen, even though Nynorsk is preferred there or English or even, as I found out to my great surprise, Spanish and Portuguese!?! (half joking here, but there are heaps of Spanish and Portuguese speakers working in Norway’s fish markets etc., and Norway’s now national dish is bacalau, a Portuguese dish. (That too came as a big surprise!). Btw, when I was in Norway they told me that the thing they eat at Xmas is a re-heated frozen pizza bought at the local supermarket. I didn’t find out why -assuming it’s true - but my hunch is that given the way kids are brought up in Scandinavia, to me that sounds like the best way to lure kids to the family table for a Xmas dinner! Very shrewd. - You two should do more of such joint videos: they’re great and we can learn a lot from your interactions, aka Q&A’s. Thanks again and cheers from Australia!
When I visited Copenhagen some years ago many Danes though me and my friends where Norwegian. I guess they are used to the dialects from Skåne and not other Swedish dialects.
@@hakon_dlc There are some traits in the dialects in Skåne with the R-sound similar to danish. But Skånska is also very diphthong driven and this dipthongs doesn't exist in danish. Who knows, maybe it's something that has disappeared from the danish language.
@@hakon_dlc It sounds different. But several scanian words have a similar cognate in Danish, where it is different in Swedish, like grina (grine in Danish and means laughing..in Swedish you say skratta). I suppose Scanian exists in between standard Swedish and standard Danish on the dialect continuum which encompasses all the Scandinavian languages and dialects. Maybe related to the east-danish dialect from Bornholm (that sounds quite different from standard Danish and also have distinct words).
@@DirtMcStride The Scanian diphthongs are an independent innovation from Swedish times. For example, they don't exist in Bornholmsk which is also a Scanian dialect.
Thanks, nice to hear you confirm my choice for Bokmål... I choose to study it because of its simplicity and because I'm Dutch and there's so much in common with Dutch (I live in the north-east, can understand some "hanseatic" dialects) and german, especially expressions are more similar than to English. Btw, you didn't mention that skandinavion languages extend nouns when it's definitive plural. I really needed to get used to that.
I would not agree swedish verbs are more simplified than english, just because we lack a third person singular conjugation (which anyway is just an s in english) Swedish verb tenses are far more complex than english, besides irregular verbs which both swedish and english has, swedish has 4 different verbgroups for conjugation, and we always distinguish preteritum and supinum forms, unlike english which doesn't distinguish past and perfekt for regular verbs (just using the auxiliary verb for that) also english present participe is the same as it's ongoing form (a form which admitedly swedish lacks, and english past perfekt is the same as normal past/perfekt, while in swedish those forms are unique and perfekt particip is conjugated based on the gender of the word it describes. Also the passive voice is more distinct in swedish than it is in english Besides that swedish excessive use of particles, modal verbs and rules for verb placement which is different in main- and subordinate clauses makes verb not overly difficult but still a good chunk of stuff to learn.
I have a (40-ish year old person) friend from Uruguay (Spanish speaker) who moved to Sweden a year ago. I think is going to take him many years to master Swedish, if at all. And the accent won't be easy.
I have friend from Honduras (speaks English and Spanish) who moved to Sweden in his thirties and he learned good conversational Swedish in 3 years and after 5 he was fluent and well versed in the language at that. Sure still he had some accent but it was minimal and he grasped 99,9% of everything without a problem - he even grasped dialects. So it is not impossible at all if one sets the mind to it 🙂
@@gem3132 you don't have to master the accent or prosody to be fully and easily understood though. There are even dialects that lack pitch accent, like the Swedish dialects of Finland. Most immigrants speak accented and sometimes grammatically quite flawed Swedish and it works just fine if the vocabulary is alright.
Correct nynorsk: "Takk for ei god samanlikning av dei skandinaviske språka. Eg set pris på at du nemner nynorsk og korleis det heng saman med dialekter/dialektar." Sorry, I had to. There might be language students reading these comments and thinking they were reading nynorsk, while in fact it was dialect (which is completely fine).
I love Norwegian bokmål for 2 reasons. 1. I'm in love with Norway since I'm a kid and I want to go there some day, and learning the language of where you want to go is always a plus, even though everyone speaks English lol 2. It's so simple compared to other languages that you can get a good grasp of the language with freaking duolingo. I learnt Norwegian on duolingo as a "side" project while learning German more "formally". You just get on duolingo a few minute a day and within a few months you'll have a bunch of vocabulary, you would have understood how the definiteand indefinite forms work, how the word order and stuff like that works and you're basically done. The only thing you should look up outside the app is how to construct past and future tense, cause it takes way too long to get to that on the app. Once you know all that it's a matter of hearing and practicing a bunch of norsk until you get conversational fluency. And yes, you understand a bit of the other languages as well, so it's really cool.
So at 5:20 with regards to "skib / skibe" that you guys talk about - the plural / singular of skib are not homophones, as you represent, although that is easily assumed with just a single "-e" at the end. The vowel sound is clearly pronounced in the plural form, and it becomes a two-syllable word -- "et skib" but "mange skib-EH". And it would be the same for all nouns in danish. Thank you so much for the video! Love seeing foreign academics puzzling over our little languages!
@@kristoffseisler2163 Norwegian and Swedish actually count as Continental Scandinavian, in opposition to the languages that are sometimes referred to as Insular Scandinavian i.e. Icelandic and Faeroese. Scandinavia's definition isn't universally agreed on. The most common (and the domestic one) is Denmark/Sweden/Norway but sometimes the islands in the Atlantic are also included. In Scandinavia itself the extended region goes under the name "Norden" (the Nordic countries) which also includes Finland.
Orkney and Shetland Norn have nearly died out and currently heavily endangered. Only a very few speakers of each are left and trying to revive their respective language.
@@felix6 I just happen to have read and listened to a lot of examples from a wide range of varieties including those rare ones. So I don't speak them but I know they exist.
As a footnote, skip in Norwegian is almost always pronounced like sheep among most speakers, with exceptions being when it's part of a compound noun, where the i is shortened in pronounciation - unless it's at the very end of the compound noun, in which case it's got a long i like in sheep.
Very informative, thank you! I personally would learn Swedish for 2 reasons: firstly, I like how it sounds, secondly, there are many similarities in vocabulary with German. And since I speak German it is very funny to recognise cognates 😊
Also Swedish has twice the amount of speakers Norwegian has, 1 written standard and the differences in dialect are mostly accent and vocabulary. Norwegian has 2 written standards and millions of dialects.
@@lmatt88 I know you're using "millions" figuratively here, but since there are only about 5 million people in Norway, wouldn't it be funny if every person spoke it differently?
@@Sindraug25 Yeah on a linguistic level it's awesome, but for a learner it's a bit discouraging as it makes it harder to understand other people. Norwegians from other areas won't "standardize" their speech and will switch to English
Don't forget that you can get by in some parts of Finland with Swedish, too. It's the second official language and the state by law has all official things in both languages. The Nordic countries are very close in history, culture and all parts of society and Finland is right there. Linguistically you make a difference between the languages by talking about Scandinavian vs the other languages, but geographically it makes more sense to talk about Nordic countries vs Scandinavia. But indeed, as a Finland Swede, spoken Danish is the hardest to understand of the continental languages. That's probably due to less exposure. I have no issues communicating with people from Norway, but with Danes, it's easier to communicate in English. And don't mention the Danish number system...
As somebody studying Danish as a foreign language at university, I can say that Swedish is the far more difficult for me to understand, compared to Norwegian Bokmål (both in writing and in speech). Doable, but we ofter compare the three with people studying Swedish and Norwegian.
I read alot of people are opting for Swedish, but this is my choice, for any looking for opinions of what to study: I decided on Norwegian and German to build up my understanding for an end goal of Icelandic. I remembered a pertinent story my grandmother told me about some guy from Germany meeting a Swedish girl on a boat trip to American and discovered that they could understand one another perfectly well without ever using English as a go between language. So, I peaked at Swedish and after a lesson or two, I found Swedish to be much more natural for me. I put it, as one does with books on a shelf, before Norwegian but after German on my Scandinavian language discovery/fluency map. I felt like Swedish words were discernable, almost like a strange German dialect of English. I tried a few sentences out on my kids one morning and they liked it, too, though my son still likes the way Norwegian sounds for what that's worth.
But, my desire of learning Icelandic started as a desire to read the sagas in their original (hoping to remove a go between and all of their biases) but, the more I learn and see I think I just want to learn Icelandic because I love Iceland. 🇮🇸
I was in a train compartment with two Swedes, a Norwegian, a German, and me, an English speaker who speaks decent German and Swedish. We all ended up just using our native language, and somehow everybody understood everybody else.
I been listening to Wardruna and Heilung, and skald and so on for a while n the language is beautiful, i want to learn the scandinavian/Norwegian language so i speak fluent in it and sing along to the songs, are there any beginner books u recommened for learning ?
I would like to correct the table at 4:25, the swedish word "glöder" is a form of the verb "att glöda" (to glow), "glöder" means "is glowing" (det glöder = it's glowing). The plural form of glöd is glödar.
My late father told me a fun story about the difficulties other Scandinavians have with the Danish pronunciation. During world war 2 he was in the resistance and had to flee to Sweden when his cover was blown. He continued to work for the resistance and the SOE in Stockholm. Anyway, the Danish refugees had special get togethers where good food etc was provided. In order to stop any Norwegian or Swede sneaking in pretending to be a Dane they had to say a Danish phrase that other Scandinavians can't pronounce . It's a traditional Danish dessert " roed groed med floede". Pronouncing that shows if you are a Dane or not. BTW you talk about the Southern influence that probably created the great difference in pronunciation. From living many years in Germany I would say that " Platt Deutsch " and Dutch have some of the "soft/swallowed " consonants you find in Danish.
I feel like the odd one out, I'm from New England and I chose to go directly to old norse and learn it through books and some of Dr Jackson Crawford's videos. I enjoy learning old norse more than speaking English. I hope to one day be proficient in speaking old norse, even if it is just for myself.
Am learning Swedish (just moved here). A while ago I was watching a TH-cam video about weaving and it was five minutes in before I saw a ø in the subtitles and realised it was in Norwegian. On Ryanair flights into Copenhagen, the announcements in Danish are just Noises for like 30 seconds and then suddenly start making sense, which is weird. Flew SAS last time. The announcements were randomly in Danish, Swedish or Norwegian, depending on which member of the crew it was. The Swedish and Norwegian, no problem. Danish, I felt like I'd just had a stroke.
This has likely been mentioned already, but in case it has not: Danish is taught in Iceland as well, so, to an extent, I would imagine, you can get by with Danish in Iceland as well.
Luke you should learn Bokmål then bounce over to Icelandic for that historical depth. I'm finding Norwegian super clear for English speakers and I love that jumpy intonation/pitch
A useful, conversational overview of the modern Scandinavian languages... As someone of Norwegian descent, I'm somewhat biased towards Norwegian, I guess.. It's great, however, to hear the merits of the other family members.
As a Norwegian that learned Bokmål and Nynorsk in school, live near Sogn, which is the place they speak a dialect closest to Iceland (apparently) and watched Danish and Swedish children shows, I readily understand all of the aforementioned. However...if I visit eastern Norway, Sweden or Denmark, they only understand me if I talk in a posh version of my dialect. Weird huh?
I'm an Icelander who lived in Norway 11 years and speaks Icelandic and Norwegian. I have no issue conversing with Swedish people at all and I understand written Danish very well. I can survive with a Dane in conversation but sometimes I have to hear the sentence spoken again. If I can distinguish the words in Danish from one another then I have no issue.
I have the feeling that Danish is more similar to Dutch than to German. Dutch also has the weird sounds like Danish has, and Danes were always far better (surprisingly better) in understanding and speaking Dutch than other Scandinavians were.
Dutch, linguistically-speaking, might have had influence from Danish (and vice-versa) via the Hansiatic League. This is pure speculation on my part -- Jackson --should he actually read this comment-- could weigh-in on whether or not that is the case and to whatever extent if so.
Danish has definitely been in a lot of contact with Low German and Frisian, which are in a dialect continuum with Dutch, and probably also a fair bit with Dutch itself. But High German also had a significant effect as that became the lingua franca.
Historically the influence from Low German and, later, Dutch on Danish has practically only been one-way. There is no Scandinavian influence on Dutch. But I think that it is important to stress that all Scandinavian languages have been heavily influenced by Low German and Dutch. There are no significant differences in the amount of Low German influence on the three Scandinavian languages, since the Hanseatic trade was far-reaching. This goes for the vocabulary. As for the phonology, I am somewhat curious as to what Jackson is aiming at when he talks about similarities with (High or Low?) German in Danish. I can only think of the uvular /r/ but it seems to be somewhat younger than the main German influence and might even be French in origin. The dialects clearly show that is has spread from the capital and not across the border. Curiously, this is different form Norway and Sweden where it is also fairly common but belongs in the geographical periphery near the continent. Come to think of it, he might be aiming at the lack of palatalisation of /k/ and /g/ in the standard language. It is indeed unexpected, since all Danish dialects had palatalisation, and it has been suggested that the pretty modest Zealandic palatalisation ([kʲ], [gʲ]) was reversed to [k], [g] when the German-speaking citizenry of Copenhagen adopted Danish in the 19th century.
I've actually mistaken spoken Dutch for Danish, heard from a distance, abroad more than once before I realize it's not. I'm from east Jutland and have family in south Jutland who can speak the prober local dialect, which has a soundscape similar to north Frisian and has also influenced north Frisian quite a bit. During the middel ages the Scandinavian languages was influenced by low German and where Norwegian and to some degree Swedish keept a tonal/pitchy pronunciation it vanished from Danish with the exception of a few dialects. So in some way I will say you are right, the majorty of spoken Danish has a soundscape that are more western Germanic compared to Swedish / Norwegian.
North Frisian has indeed had much influence from Danish which is quite fascinating. Certainly this goes for the vocabulary while I would say that the any influence on the phonology is more difficult to assess. As for the change from tonal accent to thrust accent (stød) in Danish, I think it is important (in order to untangle the threads of language history) to say that it is an independent development which is not due to influence from Low German. If it were, the dialects closest to Germany would have it; but it is actually those dialects (Rømø, Sundeved, Als, Ærø, Langeland and the extinct dialect in Angel/Angeln) that have preserved the tonal accent. It is not unheard of that tonal languages have changed one of their tones into something stød-like. This has also happened in Latvian and Vietnamese. German, of course, does not have stød or the like (but as a curiosity, the dialects around Luxembourg can be analysed as having tonal accent).
I'm from northern sweden. When I moved to a boarding school in the middle of sweden, I met the first couple of southern people, the first months there were some I couldn't understand at all, and danish? forget about it. Now later in life I'm living in Stockholm and have heard most dialects quite often, now I have (almost) no problem understanding danish.
As a Swede I can easily understand norwegian in speech and writing, but Danish in speech is hard as hell, but easy in writing since it's so similar to norwegian.
I agree. But I'm curious about the development of spoken Danish lately. A while ago I listen to some old programs on Danish radio, maybe from 2 or 3 decades ago, and that was way easier than the Danish of today. I'm wondering if the pronunciation has got "worse" or if it was just the "radio-pronunciation" at the time that was more articulate, though people in general sounded more or less as today. If any Dane out there reads this, I'd apricate some thoughts from a native speaker.
@@katam6471 hi, Dane here :) I think there's been a development in the accent department in Danish, particularly from the areas where many of the radio studios are located. When I watch old movies and TV shows from 2-3 decades ago it had already started, but accents like those from the Vestegn (western part of Greater Copenhagen), and some from the inner city, like Nørrebro, seem to have won out in a majority of people from over here in the Greater CPH area. For reference, if you go up north, they tend to be more articulate in their speech, and down south on Sjælland they tend to sing more, like it happens on Fyn, Lolland, Falster, and the middle of Jylland. I think that the majority of people from Sweden, who comment on Danish accents, only ever hear the two I initially described, and then think that's how people speak all over the country. While we do see an - to me - unfortunate harmonisation in Danish, towards one standard form, i.e. the dialects devolving, the accents in many places are still pretty strong, and in some cases, like on the Vestegn, growing stronger. Personally, I like being able to understand both Swedish and Norwegian, and while some words and dialects do trip me up, I find that I can generally understand people who accommodate me by just speaking a little slower than normal. Same the other way around, as far as I've learned?
@@pipkin5287 Thanks for your long answer, really interesting. I've had coworkers from both Norway and Denmark and my experience is that if we just speak a little slower, as you say, and maybe make some other small adjustments, we can understand each other very well. I think it's a pity when we tend to speak English with each other. I don't do that personally, but I know it's common at least among young people. My dream is that DR, NRK and SVT would come to an agreement that mean that we can watch all each others TV-programmes. I think that could do a lot for us to get to understand the others better, not just the languages but also the cultures. Radio is fine, but TV would be even better.
from an articulation point of view I think danish is the most difficult to learn. it is very difficult to get the mentioned glottal catch right. on the other hand there are dialects that don’t use it a lot.
As speaker of what is usually considered a western Norwegian dialect(actually more of a transitional between east-west and north-south) I found Faroese to be surprisingly understandable in some cases when I tried watching some of their TV-programmes. Though as someone with a strong interest in languages I had already read up and learnt about the difference between Norwegian and Faroese, so that might have made it easier for me, not sure. It was nonetheless interesting, might classify Faroese as a little harder to understand than the dialect of Setesdalen in Norway, though that should honestly be considered a language of its own.
I moved to Sweden recently from Denmark. I gotta say, it's difficult to understand. We have words that are straight up the same, but for the most part, intonations, inflections and consonants such as k and g just being changed to hf sounds and j,y - They really throw me off. Also the structure is sometimes reversed. Out of the scandinavian languages that isn't my own native tongue, I easily prefer Norwegian and I like Icelandic for the same reasons as Luke.
As a swede living in the faroes its actually not that hard to understand the language here, a lot of words are very similar to Swedish/norwegian words. Also if you have a problem understanding most people here are more than happy to switch to danish, english or my favourite, scandinavian (a mixture of their own knowledge of norwegian, danish and Swedish)
Native Swede here with some linguistic background and I know a decent amount of German and Dutch. I checked out a few Faroese videos after watching this. Had virtually no experience of listening to Faroese and it's surprisingly easy to understand quite a lot of what's said. I've heard tons of Icelandic but find it very hard to understand almost any of it. Faroese sounds a lot like standard Swedish or Norwegian but with slightly different grammar and really weird pronunciation. The prosody is surprisingly similar to Central Swedish in a lot of ways.
Totally agree, Danish pronunciation is something special :). I'm a latin language native speaker but my husband is Danish so I've been trying to learning it. I almost want to switch to Norwegian or Swedish as they are way easier to pronounce lol.
I've worked at a big hotel in Copenhagen where I greeted a lot of my Norwegian and Swedish neighbors and I found that if I just changed the sounds of my words I could go long way of them understanding me. Of course I changed some words in respect of either Norwegian or Swedish ESPECIALLY the numbers ;)
Growing up I had a lot of trouble understanding Danish, but when Borgen initially ran on TV I made an effort not to read the subtitles, and after that I have generally understood it fine. BTW, there is a pan-Scandinavian podcast and radio show (DR, NRK, SR) I follow called _Norsken, svensken og dansken_ which is intereting if you want exposure to the other languages without losing the comfort of hearing at least one Dane.
@@christerromsonlande6502 I'm gonna guess that's a way of denoting the numeral 10 based on the pattern of Danish numbers? Sorry, not sure if this is intended as a joke at the Danes' expense.
The way you're describing Iceland as being the most difficult was funny to me as a native German speaker because I was just sitting here like 'Wait, we have all of this, is this not a common thing?'
Hej! Jag precis Jag håller med dig att det är lätt för mig att förstå norska. Norska och svenska är nästan likadana språk men det blir jättesvårt att förstå danska. Hälsningar.
It would be interesting if you went deeper into Norwegian verb conjugation, as it does indeed have plural forms in several dialects. In the Halling Valley, for instance, past plural is _toko_ (ON _tóku_ ) and thus different from the singular _tek_ (< ON _tekr_ ). As you probably know, Ivar Aasen consistently used plural in verbs.
I'm terrible at learning languages yet I love them, I've been trying to learn norwegian bokmål and I've been enjoying it a lot, despite me being unable to trill or roll my R's
I worked with a guy who was from the deep fjords of Western Norway, somewhere in Sogn. I couldn't understand him at all when he spoke his native dialect. One day we got a Faroe Islander in who temped with us for a few months. They understood each other perfectly. Meanwhile the Faroe guy would speak a sorta Danish/Norwegian mix to the rest of us, and the Sogn dude would just speak a compromise Bergen varient with us. It always struck me as interesting that they understood each other without problem, though.
Internally we cut accordingly to our dialect variant letters or change them to fit our hm rythm and we shorten spaces. This to speed up the convience of talking. example: Kva var det du sa? Ke va ra ru (Some change this to an r some of us keep it a d, the closer to Bergen the bigger chance its an r) sa? What did you say?
As a native Svealand Swedish speaker I would like to point out that Swedish verbs have indicative, imperative, and passive forms which are commonly used as well as an indicative form which is rarely used.
Thanks for this great video! I am always curious that at what points and events that those 3 Scandinavian countries decided to simplify their languages. And the incredible thing is, they simplified their languages in the very same manners! I really want to know how they did it. Any enlightenment, Dr.?
You might find clues in history. The word 'Kalmar union' popped up in my mind, something from forgotten history lessons. You might want to check it out.
Eva E thanks! I have checked some of the Kalmar Union history but couldn’t find anywhere mentioned the languages’ “evolution”. I might miss it or most of the brief histories I have read don’t mention it as it’s less important.
as a dane from northdenmark, i understand norwegian just fine, and most of swedish aswell.. but its my experience swedes dont really understand danish. there are a lot of norwegian tourist here, and they are easy to talk to.
In my (native Swedish speaker) eyes and ears, for some reason, Danish seems to be written the way Norwegian sounds. 😁 That makes written Danish easier to read and spoken Norwegian easier to understand, of the two neighbouring mutually intelligible languages. 😊 Also, as a native Scandinavian speaker with many years of school German, reading old Norse sagas and Beowulf in college, and rune stones in transliteration, is not too terribly confusing. As Jackson said in an earlier video, the patterns are there and somewhat familiar from knowing a few of the modern languages, and guessing at least in the ballpark is often possible.
As a Norwegian, fluent in English, Swedish, almost fluent in Danish and having studied Icelandic a bit, I was a bit sceptical to the title of this, but then, you're spot on :)
PS: Faeroese and Icelandic are mostly interintelligable, but again, neither of them are intelligable to most norwegians, swedes or danes.
PPS: Look out for false friends between these languages. Like any other sets of closely related languages, they share words that have changed meaning over time. Examples include "må / má" in Danish/Icelandic, which means "can" or "may" in English, whereas "må" in Norwegian, means "must". An anecdote I heard was from the times people sent letters and a young, Norwegian woman got a letter from her grandmother in Sweden, inviting her for her 70th birthday or something and the woman wrote back, saying "jeg har dessverre ikke anledning til å komme", meaning "regretfully, I have no possibility of going". "Anledning" means "possibility" or something like that in Norwegian. In Swedish, however, "anledning" means "reason", so her reply could be translated to "regretfully, I see no reason to go there".
"Tös" and "rar" is an other that can cause many strange looks.
So, "En rar tös" has vastly different meaning.
Må means must in Swedish as well, it's just rarely used in that meaning. It may also mean may. It's just a way too archaic use for the word.
But just looking through the dialects the hardest from all sources in Scandinavia. I have a colleague who came from Persia, to Sweden, lived in the North of Sweden, for 13 years, then moved down to Scania, and thought he had made a mistake and had flew on the wrong plane to France or somewhere. Because he couldn't understand anything. Not a singular word.
If people think Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic is hard to understand, no one in Scandinavia would rate anyone of these as hard to pronounce, sure there's a few consonants in Swedish and Icelandic that are harder to say, and Danish has Stød, which is not easy to deal with. I speak Danish as well, but still, my dialect is hard for people in Scania, and while I can talk fine to people age 70+ yeah, I ain't saying that it's not a dying breed of a language but it is..
Let me write it down and let me see you try to understand it before reading the transcript...
Jaw gekk té hawa dá er bag hus mitt auk da jaw kom fram da føll jaw tryne ner i møga, sau da wa de baa ad gau enna væjn tébak au in au dass au té ble au mé møg dá føle tryne mitt husro, dá daw wa gal gekk jaw té hawa dá jaw fann ei hawa gott i mitt sinne. Næ wæl we hawa wa da grannt au da sola gakk ner sau wa hawa sau granner ad de jor dawa mø bedder enn inn. Sau næ jaw wæl komid him da tæjnte jaw fø mæ sæl ad øllting kann gau gal au enn kan man me ro sæ finna.
In Swedish...
Jag Gick till hagen som är bakom mitt hus, och då jag kom fram då föll jag ansiktet ner i skiten, så då var det bara att gå änna vägen tillbaks och in på toa för att bli av med skiten som tyckte ansiktet mitt var hemtrevligt, då dagen var skit gick jag till havet då jag fann inte hagen trevlig i mitt sinne. När väl vid havet var det vackert och då solen gick ner så var havet så vackert att det gjorde dagen mycket bättre än innan. Så när jag väl kommit hem då tänkte jag för mig själv att allting kan gå snett och ändå kan man med ro sig finna.
In English... Although it won't be a direct translation... it wouldn't be readable in English if I did.
I went to the pasture which is behind my house, and when I arrived, I tripped face first down in the "crud", as it was just then to walk the whole way back and into the bathroom to get rid of the dung which had thought itself a new home on my face, as the day was crap, I went to the sea as I found the pasture a not so fond memory. When I finally reached the sea it was beautiful and when the sun set, the sea was so beautiful that it made the day so much better than before. And when I finally got home, I thought to myself, that everything can go wrong, and yet one can still find peace of mind.
Mind you all that's a lot easier to read still, than to actually understand it spoken. My brother and sister doesn't understand it, my father and I do, but we hardly speak anything but Swedish at home, because when the others don't understand you why speak it. You might find it weird, but the dialect is dying out.
And I tried to remove as many diphthongs from the words as possible as well, and I tried to swedify it somewhat as well, for instance komid him instead of kuemeid hiim yes that's a ii diphthong... that's 2 different i's because when it comes to vowels Scanian has the most. It's so awful that these following words aren't pronounced the same....
dá(that), dá(which), dá(as)... oh and then we have dää(that is) dá dää da(so that is that then)... It would be so much easier to understand the old Scanian language than it is to understand the modern dialects that descend from it.
@@livedandletdie Very nice! It sounded a bit like østerdøling, like the dialects around Trysil/Tynset or thereabout combined with somewhat modern danish/norwegian/swedish. I find some traces of Solung there as well, as from Flisa/Finnskogen in Hedmark, just west of Värmland.
I'd guess I could understand most of it orally, but obviously, it would be a wee tad hard.
Swede here, and one false friend I have heard off is supposedly "Rolig".
It means fun in Swedish, while in Norwegian it supposedly means calm.
There are *lots* of funny false friends in norwegian/swedish - like "han pular med sin dator" in Swedish, meaning "he's fiddling with his computer", whereas "pule" in Norwegian, means to have sexual intercourse with. In Norwegian, the word "pusle" means the same as in Swedish "pule", but then, it's still quite fun. @@BlazeLycan
As a Dane living in Sweden it's my experience, that Danish is the weirdest sounding (for Swedes and Norwegians).
Yup, as someone learning all three... Yup...
Som en svensk kan jag bekräfta att jag finner danska svårare att förstå än norska.
Ohh yes 🙂
Yes, As a Swede You easily find Norwegian more as an dialect with a somewhat different accent than Swedish. Very easy to understand. I work with Norwegians everyday and never find it anything else than relaxing to speak with eachother. My grandmother from a village in Sweden with an old dialect is even closer to many words that were comon used in Scandinavia. With Danish we have to listen with focus to understand, thats what Danes say as well, if we both speak slowly though it is much easier to understand eachother. Writing is the same though, if only Danes would speak as they write 👀😂🙌. But with this said, Swedes understand spoken Danish and the more we interact with each other the better we communicate, takes a few minutes to get rid of the barrier keep focus and we are good. That is actually the case with Netherlands as well, we can read it somewhat good but alot more difficult to understand when spoken.
There are even Danes who speak English to each other for convenience.
I'm Icelandic, lived in Sweden for 5 years now. It's quite easy for me to learn swedish, so many words we do have in common, and they dont have a lot of grammar. But if a Swede wanted to learn icelandic, that is going to be a lot harder. Interesting videos you have, keep them up!
Is that because Icelandic is still closest and true to the ancient Scandinavian/Viking language as opposed to other Scandinavian languages that have gone through changes over the years?
I would say, as a Swede, that reading Icelandic is not that hard (much closer to modern Swedish than Ancient Greek is to Modern Greek, just as a comparison), but the sound changes of modern Icelandic makes it hard for me to understand when it is spoken. I love the sound of it though, and I am currently (very slowly) getting into it. When reading Old Norse, I usually go for a more reconstructed prononciation, which is easier for a Swede, but again, I love the hard de-voiced sound of Modern Icelandic as well. The phonology sounds rather close to Finnish to me, with the de-voiced consonants.
not at all, as a swede when i traveled to iceland. been a few times i can understand most sentences but not isolated words. cause as you say so much we have in common. i think if i tried learning it it would be farely easy. abit harder than norweigan, easier than danish.
To be fair, Icelandic is more of a riddle than a language lol
@@rebel4466 That's rather rude - try studying it and you'll learn something new ;)
Dang, I thought my native language of Faroese was going to be complete forgotten but at least there was a btw. right at the end so yay? Anyway, Faroese always take the middle ground so the take paradigm:
at taka: eg taki - tú tekur - hann tekur / vit taka - tit taka - teir taka
dagur - dagar / gestur - gestir / glóð - gløður / stjørna - stjørnur / skip - skip
I do also agree that going for Norwegian Bokmål from a written POV is probably the best choice for a sort of catch-all for understand most Scandinavian languages, BUT: speaking of spoken languages, remember that Danish and Swedish have standardised spoken forms but Norwegian does not and the differences in Norwegian dialects can be quite vast. Think British Isles if RP didn't exist, or North America if GenAm didn't exist.
Faroese is also as similar to Norwegian as it is to Icelandic, if one cares to compare. We're reasonably mutually intelligible in written form, and I have indeed spoken with Norwegians, in written Faroese, with success.
@@tordurhansen333 As a Norwegian from Oslo, when spoken, I find it easier to understand Faroese than Icelandic (and Frisian, for some reason). Neither Danish nor Swedish poses any problems, although it depends on the dialect and the person speaking (speed, articulation)
@@viggoholmsen7203 This makes sense. Faroese is, as stated, similar in some aspects including words used. Icelandic does not share this trait towards Norwegians. In fact I believe the only similar language to Icelandic in particular is Faroese
@@viggoholmsen7203 I have always found the sailing nations easy to understand, Frisian is very alike English, and the words in Dutch, Flämisch and Plattdeutsch are very similar to other languages, so once you know English, German and Scandinavian you can easily read whatever, also Faroese, which I believe in many ways are nfluenced by Norwegian, Danish and Scottish, but our little brothers and sisters in Iceland have been so conservative that they are now far off our place, which makes them kind of interesting and annoying. :-)
Yes as a Norwegian native from the esstern dialect I can confirm that I can speak casually with Swedes and Danes as if they spoke dialects of Norwegian. I have to take a break to process and ask them to repeat themselves, but I do that with Norwegians from the South, West and North as well. Only thing about Danish is that it takes a little while to get used to if you aren't used to it. (Northeners struggle a fair bit more than southerners or easterners from my experience). I went on exchange to a college in Copenhagen and I needed two days to get accustomed to which sounds meant what. But after that I was able to participate in lectures on pedagogy on the same academic level I did in Norway.
Danish songs always sound so unintelligible to me the first time, but after listening to them a few times I suddenly understand a lot. The sentence structure is pretty similar, but pronunciation is very different
@@LordOfSweden Its the German influence that makes Danish that way. That's my theory any way as it seems most logical.
In general I would disagree with that, albeit with some reservations. The reason is that most Danish innovations do not have parallels in German, i.e.:
The weakening of stops (/p t k/ to /b d j,w/) after a long vowel does not exist in Low or High German.
The weakening of spirants between vowels (/g/ to /j,w/) does not exist in Low or High German.
The merger of unstressed vowels does indeed have parallels in early West Germanic but predates the medieval German influence and also exists to an extent in many Norwegian and Swedish dialects.
The change from alveolar (front) /r/ to uvular (back) /r/ seems later than the medieval German influence and also exists in many Norwegian and Swedish dialects.
The change from tonal accent to thrust accent (stød) does not exist in Low or High German and to be sure, the Danish dialects with preserved tonal accent are those closest to German.
The lack of palatalisation before front vowel (/k g/ to /kj gj/ etc.) in Standard Danish may indeed possibly have had support from German-speaking Copenhageners, although it was also modest and non-phonemic on Zealand before that.
So I think that in general, the broad picture rather points to Danish having many independent innovations. This is not to say that there is no massive Low German influence because there certainly is, mainly in the vocabulary. But it is probably important not to get caught up in geography. The Hanseatic league easily extended its influence to Norway and Sweden despite the sea inbetween (and to be sure, the area where early standard Danish developed, Zealand and Scania, also had sea to the south).
It would be very interesting to study how the Danes mainly ( I am a Dane btw. 😉 ) could learn how to change their often rather lazy and plain pronounciation to make themselves better understood to the Norwegians & the Swedes without very much effort - by just speaking a bit slower and more clearly without merging or dropping words, pronouncing all (!) syllables of the words and use proper ending -g's and -d's instead of the usual soft versions ( "-gh" as in "sigh" & "-ð" ~ c. "-th" in E as in "with" - or even the muted versions of "-g" and "-d" after l, n & r ), where N & S typically have a -k and -d / -t ending, speaking with far more open vowels instead of the often very flat Danish ones - and of course by using Scandinavian numbers instead of the rather peculiar Danish ones with their base-20 system ( from 50 to 99 ) and the ones before the tens 😉
I would love to see a TV-show, where we could test what it really takes to understand each others - how to speak clearly, how to listen up and what to avoid etc. - , because it is actually a bit "shameful" that we - especially the younger people - nowadays often need to communicate in English between us Scandinavians, when our languages are so very closely connected and at least in principal mutually intelligible to a high degree - if we only bother 🙄
Maybe we could even invent some sort of simple Standard Scandinavian of this type that would be fairly easy to learn and understand for all three groups of Scandinavians? 😊
@@daneaxe6465 No, it's not! - that's a common misunderstanding 😉
If you just watched Danish TV for a couple of months ( with subtitles in Danish if need be ), you would understand almost everything without much effort, since the basic Danish vocabulary is around 85 % the same as Swedish - just pronounced somewhat differently and spelled a little differently but along predictable lines - and around 95 % the same as that of Norwegian, and very close in spelling.
The grammars are also very similar in most important respects, so knowing one of the three languages makes it fairly easy to learn the other two languages ( not including Nynorsk here, since I don't know enough about it ).
So Danish is very much like Norwegian Bokmål ( Book language ) without the melodic intonation ( musical accent ) and with more flat vowels and some soft or mute ending consonants - and then of course our weird old fashioned number system, which the other Scandinavians rightfully "hate" us for 🙄😂
So for a Swede or a Norwegian it's basically just a question of learning what to listen up for and getting to know a "few" unfamiliar words and expressions here and there, that either have completely different meanings or don't exist in one or both of the other languages (any longer), even though you would typically expect them to ( from a Danish perspective and vice versa ).
Thank you for acknowledging dialects and being clear when you are talking about standard languages. It really helps us who are working for the traditional dialects.
I had an overnight delay in Iceland a few years ago. Listening to people speak icelandic, I had 2 reactions: it reminded me of English spoken backwards, and I felt as if I should understand it, like a dream language.
English is Icelandic spoken backwards...
Have a similar sensation when I hear Dutch. It feels like I should understand it, but none of it makes any sense
@@Dommi1405 Dutch is like Cockney German. :-)
@@sazji Dutch is Swamp German
@@Miggy19779 :-) I was really surprised when I stayed in Venlo and then visited Köln. The local dialect there had a lot of different words obviously but at the same time the whole cadence of it was so similar to the way people speak in and around Venlo (there is a German/Low Saxon dialect spoken there as well)
These series of collabs are the best content on TH-cam right now. Can't get enough of 'em
Also you can get around in west coast of Finland with Swedish where it is regularly spoken. It is also the second official language of Finland.
I grew up in a monolingual household, now I have kids of my own we've decided to learn Icelandic and I've come to your videos in a very roundabout way but enjoy them all and found them really helpful. So, thanks.
As a native Norwegian Norwegian teacher (from Western Norway), I can confirm basically all of this. Well done.
Å se ein lærer på youtube e ikkje noge man ser kver dag.
Jag håller med!
Does the area around Lesja have a particular dialect?
@@daneaxe6465 Yes. I believe it is call Gudbrandsdøl (after the area Gudbrandsdalen), but here's the thing about Norwegian dialects, there are so many and interchange so much because of the nature, that one valley has one dialect, and then just over the other side of that mountain the words are different, so maybe it is called Lesjamål (mål means language) what they speak in Lesja ;-)
@@trondellingmichalsen4957 Thanks for the reply. Knowing the terrain of Norway its to see why dialects were different. Prior to powered transport people probably didn't get out of those narrow valleys very often.
Well, I have heard Danish countless times, been to Denmark many times, studied the language at school for years and still, every. single. time. I hear it I think to myself 7:22
@@MrJol420 to be fair, i've seen subtitles on norwegian plenty of times, too. It's madness. And you just need a little exposure to danish and then it's easy to understand, which i'm sure goes the other way, too. Just gotta figure out the sound correspondences, since the grammar and the actual words used are virtually identical
How much one understand though really depends on the dialects spoken in both languages. North Jylland meets Westerbottnian inland would be interesting... when I hanged with a guy from Århus we understod about 60% of the other so we switched to english after a little while to get 98% or so instead...
@@sirseigan I'm pretty close to the hypothetical swede you're talking about, and I count myself lucky if I understand a few words once in a while of spoken danish. Honestly, even thick scanian dialects are difficult to understand.
@@MrJol420 Danish is very natural to Norwegians, it's our language with just a twist. I think you've misunderstood something about Norwegian/Danish if you think we can't speak it at all, but speaking it exactly like a Dane is harder. This has been researched recently, Norwegians understand the both of the other languages better than Swedes/Danes.
@@MrJol420 Thats wrong and true. Norwegians that lives on the eastside of Norwayy understans Swedish well. Swwedes that lives on the west side of sweden understands Norwegian fairly well. Depends on the exposure. Same with danes. Depends on exposure not nationality and language.
Jackson, I love that you had Luke here as a guest on your channel -- I just watched (well, yesterday) a video he did on the absence of discrete yes and no words in ancient Latin and how speakers and writers of ancient Latin managed without having those words in their linguistic toolbox, and a day or two prior to that, I watched another one he did on Latin's vocative case!
I have to say that it's quite a bit visually jarring to see him jump from walking through Roman streets with all those historic architectural sites surrounding him while discussing the into-the-weeds vagaries of ancient spoken and written Latin to seeing him standing beside you donning a cowboy hat with Rocky Mountain scenery in the background!
Started learning bokmål on duolingo as a joke because someone I play a mobile game with is in Norway. Knowing a little German has made it really easy and I've enjoyed it. This video gives me some reason to get more serious with it. 🙂
Heia!
Man I actually found a new video less than an hour after posting. Another great video! Your content gets me through my day working in a lab
Good sir, once I've finished my matric, university, and have found a retirement plan for my parents, I will throw myself into the studies you show on this channel. I've always wasted so much time but I'll get on track and learn. Things like this are truly beautiful- I want to know them & learn them
I love these collab videos!
I noticed something in your noun list though. To my knowledge as a native swedish speaker, there is no singular and plural of Glöd. I don't remember what the grammatical term is for this but Glöd doesn't directly translate into ember. It's more of a phenomenon than an object in swedish. For example, you can say "Han stirrade in i glöden", "He stared into the embers" but in that case, Glöd means something akin to the glow itself rather than the pieces of coal. You couldn't say "Han plockade ut några glöder ur elden", "He picked a few embers out of the fire". At least, I've never heard anyone use a plural of Glöd in that way in spoken swedish. In that case you would have to say "några glödande kol", "a few glowing coals". (Kol is another one of those words that doesn' have a direct plural) That makes much more sense in swedish. I'm not sure if the same is true for danish and norwegian.
Anyway, great video as always!
Makes sense to me, it's the same way in German. As it is with many words, "Glut" (glöd) is always in the plural form, much like water, air and sand in German
Danish has both, essentially. 'Glød' with no plural means 'a glow', and 'glød' with the plural 'gløder' means 'ember'. I suppose this is a border case where you can actually discuss whether it is the same word or two different words.
I fully agree with you. 'Glöder' is the present tense of the verb 'glöda' (to glow), not the plural of 'glöd', which acts as an uncountable noun in Swedish.
By the way, the grammatical term for nouns with no singular or plural is 'uncountable' or 'mass noun'.
In Norwegian it's mostly the same - "glød" is "glow", i.e. a symbol, and effect, not a physical ember, while "gløder" is not the plural of "glød" but is instead the present tense of the verb "å gløde" (to glow, implicitly from something that appears to be hot), while in dialectical Norwegian the word "glør" would be "embers". That's plural of "glo" which is a (singular) ember.
As always, very informative. Thank you, keep up the good work.
Much love and respect from Copenhagen
“And I’m not making fun of Danish…. I mean…”
Just a lil bit 😂
I am a Finn (who used to live in Colorado), I speak Swedish and that has gotten me by in most of Scandinavia, Oslo is easy, just say accurat instead of just det etc. Northern Norway, too. Stavanger is tougher, but I refuse to switch to English. Denmark is easy once you get a hang of the accent and they tend to understand Swedish. Icelandic is a different story. My experience. Swedish would be the first one to learn, gives you ten million people to start.
The problem with Swedish compared to Norwegian is that spoken Swedish has more in common with spoken Norwegian than Danish and written Danish have more in common with written Norwegian than Swedish. Actually written Nynorsk have more in common with written Swedish, but to most people Nynorsk is not the language to choose.
Even though you can communicate with both Norwegians and Danes it is not the easiest way to go for people who are totally new to Scandinavia languages. You also have to keep in mind that two of the ten million Swedes you are talking about actually are speaking other languages than Swedish, for instance Arabic. In some areas in Sweden Arabic is considered more useful than Swedish.
@@ahkkariq7406 I think you could make a case for both Norwegian and Swedish as the language to learn. Obviously, Norwegian is going to be the best in terms of being able to communicate decently with speakers of all the Scandinavian languages, especially if the written form you choose is Bokmål. Not to add that it is supposedly easier to learn in terms of grammar.
That said, Swedish does have some strengths of its own. The amount of Swedish speakers does slightly eclipse the amount of Norwegian and Danish speakers combined, even if we discount the nearly 300 thousand Fenno-swedes in Finland. This means that with Swedish, you will be able to communicate much better with a far larger chunk of the Scandinavian population compared to Norwegian, while you'll have a lot more trouble understanding spoken Danish. In terms of reading, as a Swede myself, I don't really struggle to read Danish or Norwegian Bokmål all that much. Once you know what the äö equivalents are, it mainly comes down to some words that don't exist in Swedish, or the occasional false friends.
While I am sure there are areas in Sweden where Arabic might be more useful, those aren't exactly great areas to visit for a Scandinavian experience anyhow, if not active problem areas, and the people that do speak Arabic are not in the 2 million; it's just over 200 thousand.
So between choosing Norwegian or Swedish, and you don't have plans to move or work in any specific country, then it largely comes down to whether you value communicating more broadly with everyone with Norwegians being the smallest population out of the 3, or better with around ¾. That, and whether you value relatively easier grammar with Norwegian or not.
Another way to put it with my personal anecdote, is that due to the much larger population; whenever I meet a Scandinavian online, it is most often Swedes I meet, followed by a roughly even amount of Norwegians and Danes.
@@ahkkariq7406Swedish is the only official language in Sweden and also spoken in Finland. It has 10 million speakers which is the amount of Norwegian and Danish speakers combined. Also Sweden has one written standard and dialects are different intonation and vocabulary in general. In Norway there are 2 written standards and thousands of dialects which can look like different languages. You'll be in trouble in most of the country unless your Norwegian is very fluent if you learned Oslo dialect.
@@lmatt88 My argument is based on linguistic theme. The fact that Sweden only has one official language does not mean that all citizens can speak this language. Sweden has close to 800,000 illiterate adults, and the number is increasing. Do you think these people can speak Swedish, or is their understanding of Swedish at best at a level that is far below that of all Norwegians understandig of Bokmål? All Norwegians actually have training in both Norwegian languages.
A very large proportion of Swedish pupils do not speak Swedish at home. I strongly doubt that these families can be counted in the number of Swedes who speak Swedish fluently.
@@ahkkariq7406 if they don't now they will soon. And also their children will obviously speak the local language. In any case, even ruling out 1 million people, there would be 9 million Swedish speakers, far more than the Norwegian speakers.
My grandmother spoke a dialect from Småland.. Where they still used inflection in the verbs. Jag tar. Du tager.. Han/Hon Tager.. Vi tagom.. Etcetera. And this was only a hundred years back. This is why I believe Swedes have an easier time in general have an easier time of understanding Icelandic than both Danes and Norwegian. (Especially if you have grown up in a rural setting and heard a lot of older dialects).
Note that Norwegian "skip" is pronounced with a long "i". Otherwise it would be spelt "skipp".
Language nerds should look into Norwegian Nynorsk, whose original author himself was a language nerd. His version of Nynorsk might seem very conservative today exaggerating the link with Old Norse, but I think this is a bit misunderstood. He wanted a modern Norwegian. For instance, he saw no point in insisting on the use of the dative case, since it was lost in the majority of the country. The reason why he originally kept old plural forms of verbs despite these being even more rare in the dialects than the dative case, no doubt was because the written Danish and Swedish of the time had them (despite being practically lost in the spoken language in Sweden and Denmark as well), and he wanted to avoid being too radical and break away from Swedish and Danish and what people of the time were used to.
However, it is worth noting that both Danes and Swedes have a hard time understanding Nynorsk. If the point is to learn a Scandinavian language that is relatively easy to understand in all the Scandinavian countries, Norwegian Bokmål is definitely the way to go (as Crawford also points out). If, on the other hand, the point is to learn the variant of the Scandinavian languages that is most reminiscent of Old Norse, this is without a doubt Nynorsk. However, it is also worth noting that Nynorsk is a contrived language that does not belong to a specific area (perhaps except for the county of Møre og Romsdal where Ivar Åsen who assembled Nynorsk came from). Very few people in Norway therefore speak purely Nynorsk, but mix in their own dialects.
Two things to consider here: Whether to learn the language that is most widely understood or whether to learn the language with the simplest grammar (and supposedly easiest to learn). Bokmål scores pretty good on both, but something also tells me that Nynorsk as a pretty constructed language can be quite suited for foreigners to learn, since it was created by regularising a cross section of dialects. So it's arguably more regular than the other Scandinavian languages loaded with historical baggage. Nynorsk is more a fresh start. The only thing really more complex in Nynorsk that I can think of is the plural forms of masculine and feminine nouns, which bokmål has simplified into just adding -(e)r, whereas in Nynorsk you preferably need to know what kind of root the word belongs to. But even Nynorsk has been simplified quite a bit and offer quite a bit of freedom (meaning that in many cases where the masculine -ar and feminine -er main rule traditionally doesn't apply, you can often chose, e.g. both gjester/gjestar and elvar/elver are accepted). So I think it should be fairly easy for a foreigner to learn a somewhat simplified version of Nynorsk, and then optionally learn advanced Nynorsk, for instance by learning Old Norse and many of the "advanced" features of Nynorsk will make sense.
Nynorsk was a concept… certainly… and an abomination.
@@MrTheWaterbear Nynorsk, while well-intentioned, was deliberately biased to ignore entire regions of dialects.
@@MrTheWaterbear You watch Jackson Crawford _and_ think Nynorsk is an abomination?
Some years ago there was a rather nonsensical tv dating programme in Denmark that actually gained some popularity, because one of the contestants spoke with heavy south jutland dialect, and most of us really had no idea about what he was saying. Someone made subtitles on what it sounded like and it was very funny. Some dialects are very hard to understand in Denmark.
Thanks for the informative video as well as the clue about the "Complete" series.
I’m here to add that the vast amount of Swedish entertainment I’m interested in would make me lean that way. Sabaton, Opeth and Falconer all have albums and songs in Swedish, the Millennium Trilogy has 3 complete films in Swedish, heck I even watched Vi Är Bäst with subs on Netflix.
i could watch these two for hours on end :) more pls
As a Dane this may come off as herecy but I hapen to find that sung and softly spoken Sweidish is one of the most beautiful languages on Earth.
I have Swedish and Danish ancestry and contemporary Swedish family for all it´s worth.
So to break it all down:
Sweden:
Swedes are the most intelligent, smart, progressive, succesful and developed fantastic people on Earth,- ask any Swede,- he´ll tell you.
Norway:
Do you know what a high rise is called in Norwegian?
Hyttepåhyttepåhyttepåhytte.
Denmark:
Wæl, it ids, ju knøv, more like mådern dænis is , lejk, måår lejk modærn Dænglish, ju knøv, jæs?....
Ja, men självklart, vist är vi det!
Giv mig dit danske stastborgerskab
Mr. Crawford I used your wide comprehension of Germanic languages to pass an exam once. Great explainer, captivating teacher.
I am Norwegian and have experienced a lot of times that the Swedes and the Danes make me a translator so they can communicate, so there's that. You are nearly always right about the modern Nordic languages, therefore I trust you about the old stuff as well. Keep the good stuff coming.
I find it a bit sad when Swedes talk about how they can’t understand spoken Danish given how very easy it is to *learn* to understand it, more or less perfectly, if you already understand Swedish. I basically did so in an afternoon and without really actively *doing* much. All I had to do was watch a couple of Danish news shows (TV-avisen on DR) - where they tend to speak quite clearly - and during my watching my brain started to automatically crack the Danish “pronunciation-code”. At the start of the first news show I generally got the general gist of what they were talking about but missed out on much. At the end of the second I understood *almost* everything they were saying. And now, having exposed myself to quite a bit more Danish, I can listen to podcasts in Danish and stuff like that and it doesn’t really feel different from listening to something in Swedish.
Maybe I am some sort of language genius who could pull this off, but I don’t think so. I think that most Swedes could do the same if they tried and must assume that the same is true for Danish people that find Swedish difficult to understand. Given this, I think it very worthwhile to try something like what I describe above as if you can learn to understand a new language (though today I actually tend to view Swedish, Norwegian and Danish as dialects of the same language) as quickly and easily as I did Danish, it is almost certainly worth doing.
I love the way you did it. I (Dane) started reading Norwegian books as a child, Swedish books as a teenager and Faroese papers as an adult. In my current job I work together with Swedes and we understand each other fine.
Same for me (Native Swedish speaker here). I work at a callcenter that gets some calls in Danish, and it takes some sentences but eventually I can understand spoken Danish just fine.
Same for me (a Dane) I actively refuse to speak English to Swedes and Norwegians, because I want to understand and be understood. I think it's a bit ridiculous how the discourse around understanding each other often gets overtaken with lazy, overused excuses that sometimes completely devolve into insults. Like you mentioned, it's not hard, it just takes a little bit of consistent effort to keep in shape. And the Swedes I've talked to who didn't want to understand Danish, I just spoke Swedish to instead, because it's not all that hard to learn to speak it either.
I think there is a bit of where in Sweden you are from as well. I am raised in the north and i really struggle to understand Danish but i do try to make an effort into doing so when i hear it. Then again i also struggle with some accents from the Skåne region in Sweden.
It took me several of weeks until I understood Danish at all.
And after one month I did understand……some of it.
I was there for two month visiting a Danish classmate and her family.
They was very amused over my efforts to understand them.
Love Denmark
I do have a thing for Swedish language music I don't understand and deep love for Ingmar Bergman films. I suppose I'd go for Swedish, if I were to delve into it, though for surprisingly modern reasons. I would probably get a lot more out of music and movies.
But from the very little I do understand of Swedish, I am always kind of surprised how close it actually does seem to English.
Veronica Maggio fan?
@@eckligt I am not familiar with the name, but maybe I should check them out. If you have a reccomendation for a starting point, I'd certainly take take it.
I have been a big fan of Kent since I was a teenager in the early 2000s and then also some more obscure metal.
@@seamussc Veronica Maggio is one of Scandinavia's biggest pop stars, she started out in 2006 and broke through in 2008.
If you like indie music, I recommend Säkert a.k.a. Annika Norlin. To help people like you out, she even put out an album with translations called _Säkert på Engelska_
EDIT: I mostly listen to rock and metal myself as well, so I'm not the best to give more specific recommendations. Although I'm partial to Maggio's second album, it has a motown soul vibe instead of being straight pop. Another popular artist is Melissa Horn, she is a singer-songwriter.
The vikings invaded GB and Irland 1100 years Ago. Many English Words Steams from the norse language.
As a native Dane I totally get why Danish is hard to get for others, even other Scandinavians. And you should make fun of it :) My wife speaks English, French, Arabic, and Marachi (an Indian language), but she gave up with Danish, it's simply impossible for her to get.
As a swed you can get a mental break down when you listen to Danish for the first time, when you realize their mouths moving and they making sounds, but you could hardly make any sense of it. But after a while when you brain start to adjust you will be able to identify words and understand what they are saying. This is usually done within some hour, but need to be retrain if you have had a Danish-free period, but the learning time will be shorter for each time.
I have spend most of my time flying as a cabin crew in scandinavia, as a dane, it is very clear to me that what you commented is true. Swedes and Norwegians have been told that danish is impossible to understand, so most Swedes and Norwegians panic and switch to english very fast, but they should give it a chance, danish is not the most beautiful language out there, we never claimed this, but if you give us a chance, we are actually not that difficult to understand. Flying from copenhagen it was always a funny situation to notice new swedish colleagues fresh from over the bridge, they looked like white ghosts in the beginning, but it took them no longer than 2 days to adjust and in the end it's just a question of learning the danish number system. It took me a year to learn to speak swedish at a conversational level, its not perfect, but it's SO useful with swedish passengers, because they never understand me, ha ha ha...
Today I live in Norway, and they seem to have trouble understanding a single word I say, but learning norwegian after learning swedish is impossible for me, so honestly I just let it be...english it is...
Thanks again to our two ancient European language heavyweights! I have myself studied Latin, Ancient Greek, German and (some) Icelandic, so I can relate to what Jackson and Luke say. I have for a long time been interested in all things Old Norse, read some of the sagas, watched Vikings (oh no!), etc., but in the end decided that the best way into Old Norse and Icelandic was to first learn a modernized version, and I went for Swedish! That took care of the basic vocabulary, sentence structure (verb in 2nd place), article tagged on at the end, etc. It was then much easier to tackle Icelandic / Old Norse, which kind of seemed to me to cumulate the niceties of Latin, Ancient Greek and German all in one! But I managed in the end to get it into my ear that the sequence a-u was a cacophonic no-no and must always change into an ö-u, which now seems natural. A kind of vowel harmony, I suppose, like in the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic languages. Anyway, that seems to be working. And I had no trouble using my (still limited) Swedish in Norway’s Finnmark - Tromsø, Alta, Karasjok, etc., nor in Bergen, even though Nynorsk is preferred there or English or even, as I found out to my great surprise, Spanish and Portuguese!?! (half joking here, but there are heaps of Spanish and Portuguese speakers working in Norway’s fish markets etc., and Norway’s now national dish is bacalau, a Portuguese dish. (That too came as a big surprise!). Btw, when I was in Norway they told me that the thing they eat at Xmas is a re-heated frozen pizza bought at the local supermarket. I didn’t find out why -assuming it’s true - but my hunch is that given the way kids are brought up in Scandinavia, to me that sounds like the best way to lure kids to the family table for a Xmas dinner! Very shrewd. - You two should do more of such joint videos: they’re great and we can learn a lot from your interactions, aka Q&A’s. Thanks again and cheers from Australia!
When I visited Copenhagen some years ago many Danes though me and my friends where Norwegian. I guess they are used to the dialects from Skåne and not other Swedish dialects.
Skåne dialects are also really difficult to understand if you learned standard Swedish, maybe they are more similar to Danish?
@@hakon_dlc There are some traits in the dialects in Skåne with the R-sound similar to danish. But Skånska is also very diphthong driven and this dipthongs doesn't exist in danish. Who knows, maybe it's something that has disappeared from the danish language.
@@hakon_dlc It sounds different. But several scanian words have a similar cognate in Danish, where it is different in Swedish, like grina (grine in Danish and means laughing..in Swedish you say skratta). I suppose Scanian exists in between standard Swedish and standard Danish on the dialect continuum which encompasses all the Scandinavian languages and dialects. Maybe related to the east-danish dialect from Bornholm (that sounds quite different from standard Danish and also have distinct words).
@@DirtMcStride The Scanian diphthongs are an independent innovation from Swedish times. For example, they don't exist in Bornholmsk which is also a Scanian dialect.
@@vanefreja86 Grine in Norwegian is crying/bawling one's eyes out 😆
Thanks, nice to hear you confirm my choice for Bokmål... I choose to study it because of its simplicity and because I'm Dutch and there's so much in common with Dutch (I live in the north-east, can understand some "hanseatic" dialects) and german, especially expressions are more similar than to English.
Btw, you didn't mention that skandinavion languages extend nouns when it's definitive plural. I really needed to get used to that.
Håper dere fortsetter med dette, en eller annen dag må vi få se og høre den latinske pratende karen snakke på norrønt altså!
Attans norrbaggar. Ni vinner denna gången.
Hadde vært kult
verkligen!
Inte så troligt kanske, men man kan hoppas...
Yeah, can't wait for the "Can modern Icelanders understand spoken Old Norse?" videos.
Just want to say this is a very cool channel. Fun to learn about the languages I allready know from a foreginers view.
I would not agree swedish verbs are more simplified than english, just because we lack a third person singular conjugation (which anyway is just an s in english)
Swedish verb tenses are far more complex than english, besides irregular verbs which both swedish and english has, swedish has 4 different verbgroups for conjugation, and we always distinguish preteritum and supinum forms, unlike english which doesn't distinguish past and perfekt for regular verbs (just using the auxiliary verb for that)
also english present participe is the same as it's ongoing form (a form which admitedly swedish lacks, and english past perfekt is the same as normal past/perfekt, while in swedish those forms are unique and perfekt particip is conjugated based on the gender of the word it describes. Also the passive voice is more distinct in swedish than it is in english
Besides that swedish excessive use of particles, modal verbs and rules for verb placement which is different in main- and subordinate clauses makes verb not overly difficult but still a good chunk of stuff to learn.
I have a (40-ish year old person) friend from Uruguay (Spanish speaker) who moved to Sweden a year ago. I think is going to take him many years to master Swedish, if at all. And the accent won't be easy.
I have friend from Honduras (speaks English and Spanish) who moved to Sweden in his thirties and he learned good conversational Swedish in 3 years and after 5 he was fluent and well versed in the language at that. Sure still he had some accent but it was minimal and he grasped 99,9% of everything without a problem - he even grasped dialects. So it is not impossible at all if one sets the mind to it 🙂
@@gem3132 you don't have to master the accent or prosody to be fully and easily understood though. There are even dialects that lack pitch accent, like the Swedish dialects of Finland. Most immigrants speak accented and sometimes grammatically quite flawed Swedish and it works just fine if the vocabulary is alright.
@@fartreta thanks for your input, Jon. I'll tell him.
These videos are the best crossover in history
Takk for ein god sammenlikning av de skandinaviske språkene. Eg sette pris på at du nevne nynorsk og kordan det henge sammen med dialekter.
Correct nynorsk: "Takk for ei god samanlikning av dei skandinaviske språka. Eg set pris på at du nemner nynorsk og korleis det heng saman med dialekter/dialektar."
Sorry, I had to. There might be language students reading these comments and thinking they were reading nynorsk, while in fact it was dialect (which is completely fine).
Amazing video, very helpful!!! Thank you guys!
I love Norwegian bokmål for 2 reasons.
1. I'm in love with Norway since I'm a kid and I want to go there some day, and learning the language of where you want to go is always a plus, even though everyone speaks English lol
2. It's so simple compared to other languages that you can get a good grasp of the language with freaking duolingo. I learnt Norwegian on duolingo as a "side" project while learning German more "formally". You just get on duolingo a few minute a day and within a few months you'll have a bunch of vocabulary, you would have understood how the definiteand indefinite forms work, how the word order and stuff like that works and you're basically done. The only thing you should look up outside the app is how to construct past and future tense, cause it takes way too long to get to that on the app. Once you know all that it's a matter of hearing and practicing a bunch of norsk until you get conversational fluency. And yes, you understand a bit of the other languages as well, so it's really cool.
As an icelander living 10 years in norway, I can only say that dr Crawford is spot on and knows his sh@*
I'm from southern Sweden, and has been to Denmark 30+ times. I still find Norwegan easier to understand.
I’ve been studying Norwegian for about a year. I think it’s a good starting point.
it's interesting to read the excited but very polite discussion in the comments
The crossover we all needed
So at 5:20 with regards to "skib / skibe" that you guys talk about - the plural / singular of skib are not homophones, as you represent, although that is easily assumed with just a single "-e" at the end. The vowel sound is clearly pronounced in the plural form, and it becomes a two-syllable word -- "et skib" but "mange skib-EH". And it would be the same for all nouns in danish.
Thank you so much for the video! Love seeing foreign academics puzzling over our little languages!
As a German speaking Danish I can confirm that this is the hardest of the continental scandinavian languages - because of the difficult pronunciation.
@@kristoffseisler2163 THe peninsula is on the continent.
@@kristoffseisler2163 Norwegian and Swedish actually count as Continental Scandinavian, in opposition to the languages that are sometimes referred to as Insular Scandinavian i.e. Icelandic and Faeroese. Scandinavia's definition isn't universally agreed on. The most common (and the domestic one) is Denmark/Sweden/Norway but sometimes the islands in the Atlantic are also included. In Scandinavia itself the extended region goes under the name "Norden" (the Nordic countries) which also includes Finland.
Orkney and Shetland Norn have nearly died out and currently heavily endangered. Only a very few speakers of each are left and trying to revive their respective language.
do you also speak every other contintental scandinavian linguistic variety?
@@felix6 I just happen to have read and listened to a lot of examples from a wide range of varieties including those rare ones. So I don't speak them but I know they exist.
As a footnote, skip in Norwegian is almost always pronounced like sheep among most speakers, with exceptions being when it's part of a compound noun, where the i is shortened in pronounciation - unless it's at the very end of the compound noun, in which case it's got a long i like in sheep.
Very informative, thank you! I personally would learn Swedish for 2 reasons: firstly, I like how it sounds, secondly, there are many similarities in vocabulary with German. And since I speak German it is very funny to recognise cognates 😊
Sabaton and Hulkoff go brrrr XD
Also Swedish has twice the amount of speakers Norwegian has, 1 written standard and the differences in dialect are mostly accent and vocabulary. Norwegian has 2 written standards and millions of dialects.
@@lmatt88 I know you're using "millions" figuratively here, but since there are only about 5 million people in Norway, wouldn't it be funny if every person spoke it differently?
@@lmatt88 yes, situation with Norwegian languages is too confusing, the danish pronunciation is too weird, so Swedish is the best choice))
@@Sindraug25 Yeah on a linguistic level it's awesome, but for a learner it's a bit discouraging as it makes it harder to understand other people. Norwegians from other areas won't "standardize" their speech and will switch to English
Totally different kind of question; did I catch a glimpse of Bucking Mule Falls there right before the Grimfrost ad played?
Don't forget that you can get by in some parts of Finland with Swedish, too. It's the second official language and the state by law has all official things in both languages. The Nordic countries are very close in history, culture and all parts of society and Finland is right there. Linguistically you make a difference between the languages by talking about Scandinavian vs the other languages, but geographically it makes more sense to talk about Nordic countries vs Scandinavia. But indeed, as a Finland Swede, spoken Danish is the hardest to understand of the continental languages. That's probably due to less exposure. I have no issues communicating with people from Norway, but with Danes, it's easier to communicate in English. And don't mention the Danish number system...
As somebody studying Danish as a foreign language at university, I can say that Swedish is the far more difficult for me to understand, compared to Norwegian Bokmål (both in writing and in speech). Doable, but we ofter compare the three with people studying Swedish and Norwegian.
it would be interesting to get your take on ancient Greek and Latin Jackson..
Guð signi Føroyar, mítt land! ikki ofta at vit verða nevndir :)
Thanks! Fascinating stuff.
I read alot of people are opting for Swedish, but this is my choice, for any looking for opinions of what to study: I decided on Norwegian and German to build up my understanding for an end goal of Icelandic.
I remembered a pertinent story my grandmother told me about some guy from Germany meeting a Swedish girl on a boat trip to American and discovered that they could understand one another perfectly well without ever using English as a go between language. So, I peaked at Swedish and after a lesson or two, I found Swedish to be much more natural for me. I put it, as one does with books on a shelf, before Norwegian but after German on my Scandinavian language discovery/fluency map. I felt like Swedish words were discernable, almost like a strange German dialect of English. I tried a few sentences out on my kids one morning and they liked it, too, though my son still likes the way Norwegian sounds for what that's worth.
But, my desire of learning Icelandic started as a desire to read the sagas in their original (hoping to remove a go between and all of their biases) but, the more I learn and see I think I just want to learn Icelandic because I love Iceland. 🇮🇸
I was in a train compartment with two Swedes, a Norwegian, a German, and me, an English speaker who speaks decent German and Swedish. We all ended up just using our native language, and somehow everybody understood everybody else.
I been listening to Wardruna and Heilung, and skald and so on for a while n the language is beautiful, i want to learn the scandinavian/Norwegian language so i speak fluent in it and sing along to the songs, are there any beginner books u recommened for learning ?
I would like to correct the table at 4:25, the swedish word "glöder" is a form of the verb "att glöda" (to glow), "glöder" means "is glowing" (det glöder = it's glowing). The plural form of glöd is glödar.
My late father told me a fun story about the difficulties other Scandinavians have with the Danish pronunciation. During world war 2 he was in the resistance and had to flee to Sweden when his cover was blown. He continued to work for the resistance and the SOE in Stockholm. Anyway, the Danish refugees had special get togethers where good food etc was provided. In order to stop any Norwegian or Swede sneaking in pretending to be a Dane they had to say a Danish phrase that other Scandinavians can't pronounce . It's a traditional Danish dessert " roed groed med floede". Pronouncing that shows if you are a Dane or not.
BTW you talk about the Southern influence that probably created the great difference in pronunciation. From living many years in Germany I would say that " Platt Deutsch " and Dutch have some of the "soft/swallowed " consonants you find in Danish.
It sure would help if you both sat the same distance from the mic.
Thanks for yet another interesting video.
Shout out to Älvdalska/Elfdalian
I'm shouting out Närpesmål/Nerpesian in return!
I feel like the odd one out, I'm from New England and I chose to go directly to old norse and learn it through books and some of Dr Jackson Crawford's videos. I enjoy learning old norse more than speaking English. I hope to one day be proficient in speaking old norse, even if it is just for myself.
Am learning Swedish (just moved here). A while ago I was watching a TH-cam video about weaving and it was five minutes in before I saw a ø in the subtitles and realised it was in Norwegian. On Ryanair flights into Copenhagen, the announcements in Danish are just Noises for like 30 seconds and then suddenly start making sense, which is weird. Flew SAS last time. The announcements were randomly in Danish, Swedish or Norwegian, depending on which member of the crew it was. The Swedish and Norwegian, no problem. Danish, I felt like I'd just had a stroke.
I can’t get over the scenery
This has likely been mentioned already, but in case it has not: Danish is taught in Iceland as well, so, to an extent, I would imagine, you can get by with Danish in Iceland as well.
Luke you should learn Bokmål then bounce over to Icelandic for that historical depth. I'm finding Norwegian super clear for English speakers and I love that jumpy intonation/pitch
That intonation is only in the south eastern part of the country. In some parts of Oslo to be precise. :)
Kamelåså!
A useful, conversational overview of the modern Scandinavian languages... As someone of Norwegian descent, I'm somewhat biased towards Norwegian, I guess.. It's great, however, to hear the merits of the other family members.
As a Norwegian that learned Bokmål and Nynorsk in school, live near Sogn, which is the place they speak a dialect closest to Iceland (apparently) and watched Danish and Swedish children shows, I readily understand all of the aforementioned. However...if I visit eastern Norway, Sweden or Denmark, they only understand me if I talk in a posh version of my dialect. Weird huh?
I'm an Icelander who lived in Norway 11 years and speaks Icelandic and Norwegian. I have no issue conversing with Swedish people at all and I understand written Danish very well. I can survive with a Dane in conversation but sometimes I have to hear the sentence spoken again. If I can distinguish the words in Danish from one another then I have no issue.
Swede here. I just watched "Rejseholdet" or Homicide squad. Now i am fluent in danish. :)
I love the cowboy ambience of the your videos yet the topic is linguistics lol
I have the feeling that Danish is more similar to Dutch than to German. Dutch also has the weird sounds like Danish has, and Danes were always far better (surprisingly better) in understanding and speaking Dutch than other Scandinavians were.
Dutch, linguistically-speaking, might have had influence from Danish (and vice-versa) via the Hansiatic League. This is pure speculation on my part -- Jackson --should he actually read this comment-- could weigh-in on whether or not that is the case and to whatever extent if so.
Danish has definitely been in a lot of contact with Low German and Frisian, which are in a dialect continuum with Dutch, and probably also a fair bit with Dutch itself. But High German also had a significant effect as that became the lingua franca.
Historically the influence from Low German and, later, Dutch on Danish has practically only been one-way. There is no Scandinavian influence on Dutch. But I think that it is important to stress that all Scandinavian languages have been heavily influenced by Low German and Dutch. There are no significant differences in the amount of Low German influence on the three Scandinavian languages, since the Hanseatic trade was far-reaching.
This goes for the vocabulary. As for the phonology, I am somewhat curious as to what Jackson is aiming at when he talks about similarities with (High or Low?) German in Danish. I can only think of the uvular /r/ but it seems to be somewhat younger than the main German influence and might even be French in origin. The dialects clearly show that is has spread from the capital and not across the border. Curiously, this is different form Norway and Sweden where it is also fairly common but belongs in the geographical periphery near the continent.
Come to think of it, he might be aiming at the lack of palatalisation of /k/ and /g/ in the standard language. It is indeed unexpected, since all Danish dialects had palatalisation, and it has been suggested that the pretty modest Zealandic palatalisation ([kʲ], [gʲ]) was reversed to [k], [g] when the German-speaking citizenry of Copenhagen adopted Danish in the 19th century.
I've actually mistaken spoken Dutch for Danish, heard from a distance, abroad more than once before I realize it's not. I'm from east Jutland and have family in south Jutland who can speak the prober local dialect, which has a soundscape similar to north Frisian and has also influenced north Frisian quite a bit. During the middel ages the Scandinavian languages was influenced by low German and where Norwegian and to some degree Swedish keept a tonal/pitchy pronunciation it vanished from Danish with the exception of a few dialects. So in some way I will say you are right, the majorty of spoken Danish has a soundscape that are more western Germanic compared to Swedish / Norwegian.
North Frisian has indeed had much influence from Danish which is quite fascinating. Certainly this goes for the vocabulary while I would say that the any influence on the phonology is more difficult to assess.
As for the change from tonal accent to thrust accent (stød) in Danish, I think it is important (in order to untangle the threads of language history) to say that it is an independent development which is not due to influence from Low German. If it were, the dialects closest to Germany would have it; but it is actually those dialects (Rømø, Sundeved, Als, Ærø, Langeland and the extinct dialect in Angel/Angeln) that have preserved the tonal accent. It is not unheard of that tonal languages have changed one of their tones into something stød-like. This has also happened in Latvian and Vietnamese.
German, of course, does not have stød or the like (but as a curiosity, the dialects around Luxembourg can be analysed as having tonal accent).
I'm from northern sweden. When I moved to a boarding school in the middle of sweden, I met the first couple of southern people, the first months there were some I couldn't understand at all, and danish? forget about it. Now later in life I'm living in Stockholm and have heard most dialects quite often, now I have (almost) no problem understanding danish.
As a Swede I can easily understand norwegian in speech and writing, but Danish in speech is hard as hell, but easy in writing since it's so similar to norwegian.
I agree. But I'm curious about the development of spoken Danish lately. A while ago I listen to some old programs on Danish radio, maybe from 2 or 3 decades ago, and that was way easier than the Danish of today. I'm wondering if the pronunciation has got "worse" or if it was just the "radio-pronunciation" at the time that was more articulate, though people in general sounded more or less as today. If any Dane out there reads this, I'd apricate some thoughts from a native speaker.
@@katam6471 hi, Dane here :) I think there's been a development in the accent department in Danish, particularly from the areas where many of the radio studios are located. When I watch old movies and TV shows from 2-3 decades ago it had already started, but accents like those from the Vestegn (western part of Greater Copenhagen), and some from the inner city, like Nørrebro, seem to have won out in a majority of people from over here in the Greater CPH area. For reference, if you go up north, they tend to be more articulate in their speech, and down south on Sjælland they tend to sing more, like it happens on Fyn, Lolland, Falster, and the middle of Jylland.
I think that the majority of people from Sweden, who comment on Danish accents, only ever hear the two I initially described, and then think that's how people speak all over the country.
While we do see an - to me - unfortunate harmonisation in Danish, towards one standard form, i.e. the dialects devolving, the accents in many places are still pretty strong, and in some cases, like on the Vestegn, growing stronger.
Personally, I like being able to understand both Swedish and Norwegian, and while some words and dialects do trip me up, I find that I can generally understand people who accommodate me by just speaking a little slower than normal. Same the other way around, as far as I've learned?
@@pipkin5287 Thanks for your long answer, really interesting. I've had coworkers from both Norway and Denmark and my experience is that if we just speak a little slower, as you say, and maybe make some other small adjustments, we can understand each other very well. I think it's a pity when we tend to speak English with each other. I don't do that personally, but I know it's common at least among young people.
My dream is that DR, NRK and SVT would come to an agreement that mean that we can watch all each others TV-programmes. I think that could do a lot for us to get to understand the others better, not just the languages but also the cultures. Radio is fine, but TV would be even better.
from an articulation point of view I think danish is the most difficult to learn. it is very difficult to get the mentioned glottal catch right. on the other hand there are dialects that don’t use it a lot.
I swear, I and Crawford have the exact same nose lol
As speaker of what is usually considered a western Norwegian dialect(actually more of a transitional between east-west and north-south) I found Faroese to be surprisingly understandable in some cases when I tried watching some of their TV-programmes. Though as someone with a strong interest in languages I had already read up and learnt about the difference between Norwegian and Faroese, so that might have made it easier for me, not sure. It was nonetheless interesting, might classify Faroese as a little harder to understand than the dialect of Setesdalen in Norway, though that should honestly be considered a language of its own.
Eg like videoene dine 😄
I moved to Sweden recently from Denmark. I gotta say, it's difficult to understand. We have words that are straight up the same, but for the most part, intonations, inflections and consonants such as k and g just being changed to hf sounds and j,y - They really throw me off. Also the structure is sometimes reversed.
Out of the scandinavian languages that isn't my own native tongue, I easily prefer Norwegian and I like Icelandic for the same reasons as Luke.
As a dane, I can easily understand Norwegian, but I cannot understand Swedish. And that is after having lived in Sweden(Malmö) for several years.
As a swede living in the faroes its actually not that hard to understand the language here, a lot of words are very similar to Swedish/norwegian words.
Also if you have a problem understanding most people here are more than happy to switch to danish, english or my favourite, scandinavian (a mixture of their own knowledge of norwegian, danish and Swedish)
Native Swede here with some linguistic background and I know a decent amount of German and Dutch. I checked out a few Faroese videos after watching this. Had virtually no experience of listening to Faroese and it's surprisingly easy to understand quite a lot of what's said. I've heard tons of Icelandic but find it very hard to understand almost any of it.
Faroese sounds a lot like standard Swedish or Norwegian but with slightly different grammar and really weird pronunciation. The prosody is surprisingly similar to Central Swedish in a lot of ways.
Blandinavisk
Totally agree, Danish pronunciation is something special :). I'm a latin language native speaker but my husband is Danish so I've been trying to learning it. I almost want to switch to Norwegian or Swedish as they are way easier to pronounce lol.
I've worked at a big hotel in Copenhagen where I greeted a lot of my Norwegian and Swedish neighbors and I found that if I just changed the sounds of my words I could go long way of them understanding me. Of course I changed some words in respect of either Norwegian or Swedish ESPECIALLY the numbers ;)
Growing up I had a lot of trouble understanding Danish, but when Borgen initially ran on TV I made an effort not to read the subtitles, and after that I have generally understood it fine. BTW, there is a pan-Scandinavian podcast and radio show (DR, NRK, SR) I follow called _Norsken, svensken og dansken_ which is intereting if you want exposure to the other languages without losing the comfort of hearing at least one Dane.
@@eckligt sounds nice, thank you for the recommendation! I will definitely check it out, I don't want to loose the stuff I've learned 😊
For some reason Danes don't understand what I mean when I say "halv ens".
@@christerromsonlande6502 I'm gonna guess that's a way of denoting the numeral 10 based on the pattern of Danish numbers? Sorry, not sure if this is intended as a joke at the Danes' expense.
@@eckligt You're correct on both accounts
The way you're describing Iceland as being the most difficult was funny to me as a native German speaker because I was just sitting here like 'Wait, we have all of this, is this not a common thing?'
I'm Finnish but have studied most other Nordic languages to some extent. I'm the most fluent in Swedish but Danish and Icelandic are my newest loves.
Hej!
Jag precis Jag håller med dig att det är lätt för mig att förstå norska. Norska och svenska är nästan likadana språk men det blir jättesvårt att förstå danska.
Hälsningar.
It would be interesting if you went deeper into Norwegian verb conjugation, as it does indeed have plural forms in several dialects. In the Halling Valley, for instance, past plural is _toko_ (ON _tóku_ ) and thus different from the singular _tek_ (< ON _tekr_ ). As you probably know, Ivar Aasen consistently used plural in verbs.
This is the cutest thing
I'm terrible at learning languages yet I love them, I've been trying to learn norwegian bokmål and I've been enjoying it a lot, despite me being unable to trill or roll my R's
Okay, this video was so straight-up and by-the-book and then 2:36 he lets out "y'all take" and I nearly keeled over from laughing :D
Interesting! Luke, like myself, also prefers to start with Icelandic and Norwegian.
I worked with a guy who was from the deep fjords of Western Norway, somewhere in Sogn. I couldn't understand him at all when he spoke his native dialect. One day we got a Faroe Islander in who temped with us for a few months. They understood each other perfectly. Meanwhile the Faroe guy would speak a sorta Danish/Norwegian mix to the rest of us, and the Sogn dude would just speak a compromise Bergen varient with us. It always struck me as interesting that they understood each other without problem, though.
Internally we cut accordingly to our dialect variant letters or change them to fit our hm rythm and we shorten spaces. This to speed up the convience of talking. example: Kva var det du sa? Ke va ra ru (Some change this to an r some of us keep it a d, the closer to Bergen the bigger chance its an r) sa? What did you say?
Reminds me of how in Senja, we would say "Ka du sei?" instead of the longer "Ka e det du sei?"
As a native Svealand Swedish speaker I would like to point out that Swedish verbs have indicative, imperative, and passive forms which are commonly used as well as an indicative form which is rarely used.
Thanks for this great video! I am always curious that at what points and events that those 3 Scandinavian countries decided to simplify their languages. And the incredible thing is, they simplified their languages in the very same manners! I really want to know how they did it. Any enlightenment, Dr.?
You might find clues in history. The word 'Kalmar union' popped up in my mind, something from forgotten history lessons. You might want to check it out.
Eva E thanks! I have checked some of the Kalmar Union history but couldn’t find anywhere mentioned the languages’ “evolution”. I might miss it or most of the brief histories I have read don’t mention it as it’s less important.
as a dane from northdenmark, i understand norwegian just fine, and most of swedish aswell.. but its my experience swedes dont really understand danish. there are a lot of norwegian tourist here, and they are easy to talk to.
In my (native Swedish speaker) eyes and ears, for some reason, Danish seems to be written the way Norwegian sounds. 😁 That makes written Danish easier to read and spoken Norwegian easier to understand, of the two neighbouring mutually intelligible languages. 😊
Also, as a native Scandinavian speaker with many years of school German, reading old Norse sagas and Beowulf in college, and rune stones in transliteration, is not too terribly confusing. As Jackson said in an earlier video, the patterns are there and somewhat familiar from knowing a few of the modern languages, and guessing at least in the ballpark is often possible.