Thank you so much, Norbert, for having me on and giving me the opportunity to spread the word about my native language a bit. I really enjoyed doing this. As you may have noticed I was a bit nervous in the beginning so my intro is ultra short. But in the beginning I never really explained which langauges I speak like the other participants did and I've seen some people asking about that. So, in addition to Faroese, I also speak Danish, English, Swedish, German, and Slovak. My Norwegian is pretty good but not as strong as my Swedish and I also speak very basic Spanish. I have also taken courses in a handful other languages but I don't speak these to any extent. Again, thanks for having me on and I hope your viewers will enjoy this video.
We certainly did. This was very interesting. As a swede I didn't expect to understand anything at all, but got all words. And it was a pleasure to hear skånska representing Sweden.
@Johan Petur Dam Nothing to criticize! You all created a really interesting episode with everyone's little effort into it. Thanks alot. Absolutely exclusive to have faroese standing in the middle of all. Often gets forgotten and left behind sadly.
Well, you know, when my ancestors decided to move to the Faroes, they also decided to do a detour to the Irish sea and take... I mean marry a woman there first. In fact, DNA shows that we Faroese are 80-ish% Nordic in the male line and 80-ish% Gaelic in the female line. So we're an interesting mix in that respect.
@Prof. Spudd According to the Faroese speakers who communicated with some of the last Norn speakers, they were very, very close. In fact, they would have been mutually intelligible. For me when reading the remaining Norn texts, the most difficult part is deciphering the orthography the native English or Scots speakers used when writing down Norn.
As an Icelander it was so fun to see the similarities with Faroese. Although it did help that it had the text, I was still able to understand a lot of the Faroese. Icelandic is the most similar language to Faroese of all the Nordic languages, you should include them both in a video if you haven't already!
I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an 🐂 ox / bull! I had to pause the video to share this comment, as I am trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
Many times, I understand full sentences in Faroese, for example, the sentence ‘Tað sum vit so nú fara at gera er, at eg fari at... vit fara at hava fimm orð og eg fari so á Føroyskum at lýsa ella geva klú um, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru, og so skulu M, A and G gita, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru’ which literally means ‘that as (that / it which) we so now fare at do (go / are going to do) is, i fare at (am going to) ... we fare at have (are going to have) five words and i fare so on Faroese at describe (i am going to describe in Faroese) or give clues about, what... which these words are, and so shall M, A and G guess what... which these words are’ and many other sentences as well, so I could understand every single word, without looking at the English subs, and I also didn’t look at the Icelandic subtitle yet, because first I want to see how many words I can understand and how many new words’ meanings I can figure out from the context, and after that I will read the Icelandic subs and the English subs, to check if I got all the meanings right, and, I also know that sum probably means as because sem means as in Norse and Icelandic tho som in Swedish etc can also be used in cases wherein the words which or that or who would be used in English, and, I think the word that means so in most Norse languages can also be used with the meaning then, so the Faroese word so could probably be translated to then in some of these cases - in many cases I can also tell the meaning of some new words from the context, for example, I haven’t seen the verb at gita before, but from the context I can tell that it means að giska / at gissa / to guess because I recognize / know all the other words in the sentence and I also know that the verb að geta in Icelandic can also mean to guess tho its normal meanings are to get and can / could etc when used together with the past participle of another verb, and it’s most likely cognate with gita! (By the way, if one is learning Faroese and Icelandic and Norse etc, re the LL sound, in Icelandic the LL is usually pronounced TL, and in Faroese the LL is usually pronounced DL or TL or the D sound can even sound between a D sound and a T sound and then the L sound right after it, and, the aspired letter combinations like the TN in vatn are pronounced by adding a bit of an H sound in there and in a slightly nasal way, but it’s the good type of nasal sound which is kinda closed and projected towards the inner part of the nose or under the nose or somewhere around that area, which sounds cool, so the Norse nasals are not the same type of nasal sounds as those used in French which are very open and projected towards the outside that can sound too nasal, so, in Faroese and Icelandic and Norse the nasal sounds like TN and the other aspired consonants are very subtle and elegant and romantic, which makes them very cool-sounding and unique!)
Being from Hardanger in western Norway I could actually understand faroese nearly 100% when spoken slowly like this. I remember going to the islands on holiday as a kid and my dad could converse pretty seamlessly with the locals by speaking the way he remembered his grandfather did. Da va trivle pao Færøyane og eg kjeme jedna att
Yeah, I think it would've worked with more diverse dialects for the continental Scandinavian speakers As the Swedish speaker is from Scania, right next to the Danish border
As a Norwegian I didn’t expect to understand ~90% or more of the Faroese examples being used, but between what was spoken and the written text I damn near understood everything and came to the right conclusions every time anyway. Super fun!
I know this video is old but as a German-Norwegian, this is fascinating to watch. It's joyful. I understand what's being said (especially in writing) and I feel connected to all these languages around my ancestry. Thanks so much for running this channel, Norbert. It's been so lovely to dive into it.
As a Swede, having the subtitles on while listening to Johan speak Faroese made it a lot easier to understand. I think I could almost understand all of it with the subtitles on, and it was a lot harder when I tried to just listen as Mikael mentioned in the end of the video. It was a really interesting video to be able to see how closely related our languages are!
I’m Danish and overall I don’t understand Faroese, but suddenly out of the blue comes a sentence I do understand and obviously single words here and there. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the Faroe islands twice, nice people and beautiful place.
Beautiful ancient language. For me it sounds like Icelandic witn no rolled Rs and a lot of sh and dzh sounds. Also, the manner of speaking recalls me something from Scottish, monotonous and nasal
I was also trying to find more videos with Faroese! By the way, Germanic languages don’t use rolled Rs, especially in the standard accents, though there might be a few groups of speakers that use rolled Rs in every language, depending on the accent / dialect, and, the soft Rs used in Icelandic and Gothic and Norse and Swedish and Norwegian are different variations of the soft normal Rs, which are also taps (soft Rs) and, it is usually easy to tell if an R is soft or rolled, as soft normal R and all other types of soft Rs don’t have the engine sound or motor sound that rolled Rs have and are pronounced softly and very softly, so, if one listens to languages that use rolled Rs such as Spanish, one can hear that the Icelandic Rs aren’t the same as the rolled Rs, as Spanish has both the normal rolled R that’s spellt with one R and the extra rolled R or the prolonged rolled R which is spellt RR in Spanish and in Italian also, though Italian also uses variations of the soft normal R when it’s spellt with one R only, though the Icelandic Rs are even softer than the Italian Rs! (Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!)
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
As a native Dutch speaker, this was enjoyable hard work! I had never heard Faroese before. Dutch is definitively related to all those northern languages but very distant. It feels like many generations came and went since we spoke with each other last. Only a stray word here and there is still the same. All the other words drifted apart from each other. Thank you for making these great language videos! They reunite us! Keep it up.
For sure! There's a lot of cultural influence in The Netherlands/Downlands from Scandinavia but many many hundred years have gone since then. To a Norwegian, Dutch sounds perfectly normal like Norwegian Østlandsdialect at a distance, but once you get closer it's like "wtf stop using made up words" 😂
As a Swede, I can often understand for instance billboards or ads in the Netherlands. A lot of similarities to the Scandinavian languages + English, so pretty easy to put together educated guesses.
Dutch would be closer to Michal's Jutlantic dialect. There is like a second Germanic language group between Low Saxon, North Frisian, English and South- and West-Jutlantic.
As a native English speaker, Dutch is somewhat easy compared to the other Germanic languages. Some words are different but if we look at the written sentence we can generally understand
Loved the video! I’m Norwegian and I feel like I could understand a lot with the written text. Without it I’d say I would be able to understand a few words here and there, at best. Btw I would love to see this kind of video with speakers of the finno-ugric family! I.e Finnish, sami, estonian and hungarian. Would be very interesting. :)
As a native English speaker, this is interesting. I understood almost nothing, even in the written form, but when I watch these videos with Romance languages I understand a lot more despite the languages in this one being fellow Germanic languages. I get a bit more with other West Germanic languages, especially Dutch, but even then often not as much as Romance languages.
as expected, since english vocabulary is 58% romance loans, and only 26% native words and germanic loans. so it would definitely make sense to understand more from the romance videos than the germanic videos
More common now english is seen a distant Scandinavian or North Germanic language and not a western Germanic language, with a lot of frankish an latin influence. Also some small britonic pieces left.
English-based languages come mostly from Norse, as the creator of each English-based language made it by modifying mostly Norse words and by creating new words, including Modern English which is mostly a Norse language, so most base words are obvious cognates with the Norse words, but one may find it harder to recognize the cognates at first if one is reading them fast without pausing the video, especially if one hasn’t learnt any of the ancient Norse languages yet, due to their differences in spelling rules and aspect, so I would recommend pausing the video a few times, and trying to read each Faroese word slowly, and trying to think of the cognates (or possible cognates) in English, as one can recognize and understand a lot of cognates if one is reading the words slowly, one by one - for me it was easier as I am already advanced level in Norwegian Bokmål and Icelandic (which is the Norse language that’s the most similar to Faroese) and close to advanced level in Norse, so I could recognize the cognates faster and I could process most of them faster without pausing the video, though I am beginner level in Faroese at the moment, and, I am going to rewatch this video several times on different days to learn all the new Faroese words, as it’s not easy to find videos / resources for learning Faroese like vocab videos and videos with subtitles in Faroese etc, so I am using every resource / video that I can find to improve my Faroese! By the way, the Latin languages aren’t romance / romantic languages technically, so I don’t know why they are referred to as romance, as they are very neutral-sounding or normal-sounding and some of them are exotic-sounding, except for Brazilian Portuguese which is the only Latin language that has a slightly romantic feel to it, as it was influenced by Germanic languages a lot, so its pronunciation is similar to Germanic pronunciation, whereas the Germanic languages are the languages that truly sound romantic, with Icelandic being the most romantic language ever created due to its breathiness, being the breathiest language with lots of soft H sounds, while Dutch is also very similar to Icelandic with lots of H-like sounds that also has a very romantic sound, especially when pronounced with the right Dutch accent that uses the softest Rs and the softest Gs etc, and, even though Germanic languages come from Latin (so most base words in all Germanic languages are cognates with most Latin words and most Celtic words, anyway) and most technical terms in English were modified from Latin words, most of the base words in English and in the other Germanic languages have the forms and meanings that are closest to those used in the ancient Norse languages, so it should be easy for one to recognize the cognates in Norse languages, for example, the cognates kaldur / kalt / koldt etc mean cold and the cognates at koma / komið / kommer etc mean at come (to come) in Germanic languages tho in Latin languages their cognates caldo / calor / caliente etc mean warm / warmth and comer / comida / comé etc mean to eat / food / eat etc, so most words are cognates, but the meanings of the cognates used in English are the same or closer to the meanings used in the other Germanic languages than they are to the meanings used in Latin languages! Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word, so, it feels so good to realize that I can understand so many of the new Faroese words, and to realize that my level in Icelandic is quite advanced!
That was very interesting! I am an ex-librarian (found it funny it was one of the chosen word) with a B1 level in Icelandic, B2 for reading. At the beginning, I could understand maybe one word out of 10, then I started to pick up on a few phonetic differences and in the end could understand maybe one word out of 7. When I read it, I could understand a good 70%. I could also pick up on a few bits here and there in the other 3 languages, Danish being the one I understand the least. Being someone speaking 7 germanic and latin languages, I really appreciate your channel and would love to see one with Icelandic as the main language.
Being a Dane when listening to Icelandic and Faroese if find it useful that i also speak English. Seems to really help with the pronunciation, words and the grammar. I would love to see how people from the English isles perceive Icelandic and Faroese.
Intressant! Fist time hearing Faroese. Can't make very much sense out of it, but with subtitles on I feel a bit ashamed not nailing most. Also the mic he's using ist really helping.
I'm curious how much can Icelandic and Faroese speakers understand each others cause the two looks more similar to themselves than to any continental Scandinavian speech (though Nynorsk is maybe exeption). Hope to see that comparison! And thx for this one
Personally: Written Icelandic about 75%, spoken Icelandic significantly less. And I even took Old Norse at university. However, I'm sure a few months in Iceland would totally remedy that.
Faroese spoken slowly 90%, spoken fast and slangy 40%. Written faroese 90-100%. That being said I also know danish so other Icelanders might understand less since faroese has a lot of danish loanwords and influence therefrom.
It’s great to have Faroese at last. It is the Nordic language that is the closest to Icelandic though it is probably only as close as most think. Based on how well they managed to understand him I suspect that Faroese sits right in the middle between mainland Scandinavian and Icelandic. But to correct one of the participants, Icelandic has the same double L sound as Faroese (the tɬ) and also the K pronunciation of Hv in all modern “dialects” of Icelandic though the southern dialect (when there really was one) used to pronounce it as spelled.
I really enjoy hearing Faroese. The í/ý diphthong really makes it stick out and sound kind of funny to me (in a good way!). It sounds so much to me like an Irishman learned Icelandic (OWN) but insisted on keeping the accent 😉, with the characteristic r and all the /t͡ʃ// & /d͡ʒ/ sounds. (Also the change from Þ to H and even Ð to glides.) I suppose it's the history. A very interesting language and another fun challenge!
I never thought I would live to see a danish speaker ”help” a swedish speaker understand a different language (by speaking danish)… Quite ironic! Cool video. 👍
Fascinating video! I'm a Norwegian speaking Englishman, can understand Swedish pretty well, can read Danish pretty easily (understand spoken Danish only if it's slow like Mikael said!), and have studied a little Icelandic. Faroese is a fascinating hybrid - looks like Icelandic to a degree, but sounds very different. Very obvious Celtic influences, which isn't a surprise considering the relative proximity to Scotland and Ireland.
@@explodingmonad4535 I was thinking specifically of the phonology which sounds more like Gaelic than a Scandinavian language. Faroese looks Scandinavian but sounds Celtic.
Very interesting video. As a Norwegian from the western parts of East-Norway I actually could understand alot more of the Faroe Island language then expected, especially in writing. It might have do to with my dialect (Valdres) wich have more in commen with Nynorsk then Bokmål, at least in spelling. A funny thing i noticed was that the Faroe word for potato "eple", also is the word for potato in my dialect and older people here use it, while younger people tends to use "potet".
In my dialect of swedish, we often use 'pära' for potato, which is norwegian pære/english pear. But we use 'päron', the standard swedish version of the word, when referring to pear, the fruit.
In French it's the same word too. Pommes and pommes de terre. The root of "eple" is a word for any fruit not just what we call apples today. Maybe they thought of potatoes as a kind of fruit in the old days.
I learned Faroese and Danish over 20 years ago when I lived in Denmark and the Faroes and even though I haven’t really used either of them very much in the past 20 years I understood everything perfectly in all of the languages. It’s amazing how languages just stay dormant somewhere in my brain until I need to access them again.
If one learns the words automatically by seeing / revising / hearing each word many times over a longer period of time (spaced repetition method) until each word is instantly processed and automatically remembered, the words become permanent! By the way, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an 🐂 ox / bull! I had to pause the video to share this comment, as I am trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! (I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!)
@@FrozenMermaid666 most Icelanders understand around 60 percent of Faroese or even more when it’s written down, but spoken they understand very little. Knowing Norwegian will help immensely as well considering Faroese is heavily influenced by western Norwegian dialects from a couple hundred years ago. Knowing Danish helps, but knowing Norwegian Bokmål essentially means you understand written Danish as that’s basically what it is :-). There are many loan words from English now as well so I would venture to guess that you would understand most written Faroese soon enough. There are some interesting words that are Faroese and perhaps even have some Celtic influences even in the pronunciations of some words. Once you become fluent enough though you won’t recognize individual words as much as you will hear phrases and sentences and they begin to come from your language center in the brain and not your memory. Once I switch my mind over to my Faroese language center the words almost come out in their own and sometimes I second guess myself if I used the correct word, but as long as I just trust myself I find that the words are usually correct 90 percent of the time. This is the same with Danish for me as well now.
I cannot understand many words in Danish and Faroese when spoken most of the times, though sometimes I can understand quite a lot of words, but if I see the written text / subtitles I can understand almost every word - I noticed that I even understand many full sentences in Faroese when seeing the subs, and, I think I shall be fluent in most of the Nordic languages in a few years, as I am in the process of learning! Many times, I understand full sentences in Faroese, for example, the sentence ‘Tað sum vit so nú fara at gera er, at eg fari at... vit fara at hava fimm orð og eg fari so á Føroyskum at lýsa ella geva klú um, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru, og so skulu M, A and G gita, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru’ which literally means ‘that as (that / it which) we so now fare at do (go / are going to do) is, i fare at (am going to) ... we fare at have (are going to have) five words and i fare so on Faroese at describe (i am going to describe in Faroese) or give clues about, what... which these words are, and so shall M, A and G guess what... which these words are’ and many other sentences as well, so I could understand every single word, without looking at the English subs, and I also didn’t look at the Icelandic subtitle yet, because first I want to see how many words I can understand and how many new words’ meanings I can figure out from the context, and after that I will read the Icelandic subs and the English subs, to check if I got all the meanings right, and, I also know that sum probably means as because sem means as in Norse and Icelandic tho som in Swedish etc can also be used in cases wherein the words which or that or who would be used in English, and, I think the word that means so in most Norse languages can also be used with the meaning then, so the Faroese word so could probably be translated to then in some of these cases - in many cases I can also tell the meaning of some new words from the context, for example, I haven’t seen the verb at gita before, but from the context I can tell that it means að giska / at gissa / to guess because I recognize / know all the other words in the sentence and I also know that the verb að geta in Icelandic can also mean to guess tho its normal meanings are to get and can / could etc when used together with the past participle of another verb, and it’s most likely cognate with gita! By the way, re the LL sound in Norse languages, in Icelandic the LL is usually pronounced TL, and in Faroese the LL is usually pronounced DL or TL or the D sound can even sound between a D sound and a T sound and then the L sound right after it, and, the aspired letter combinations like the TN in vatn are pronounced by adding a bit of an H sound in there and in a slightly nasal way, but it’s the good type of nasal sound which is kinda closed and projected towards the inner part of the nose or under the nose or somewhere around that area, which sounds cool, so the Norse nasals are not the same type of nasal sounds as those used in French which are very open and projected towards the outside that can sound too nasal, so, in Faroese and Icelandic and Norse the nasal sounds like TN and the other aspired consonants are very subtle and elegant and romantic, which makes them very cool-sounding and unique!
@@FrozenMermaid666 you sound like you are doing very well and I was very similar to you when I learned then initially. I first learned Icelandic when I lived in I lceland, then moved to the Faroes and learned it fluently, then moved to Denmark and learned it fluently. After those 3 I watched a lot of Norwegian and Swedish movies and I am like you in that I understand 90 percent of them simply by making educated guesses. I can even understand a good amount of Dutch and some German as well, but German is much different it seems. The Faroese have a language called Gøtudansk that they use to communicate with all of the Nordic countries and it’s a more intelligible mix of the languages and sounds close to Danish but without the harsh Danish sounds and without the Norwegian singing (even though the Norwegians will fight to the death to prove they don’t sing, they say the Swedes do 😂). My older two sons are Faroese and live in the Faroes and I still use it from time to time but I really haven’t even tried it much in 20 years until this past summer when my oldest son visited me in the states. I was still just as fluent it seems. Once you learn the languages you are learning now I have no doubt you will be able to understand all of the Nordic languages for the rest of your life. 😊I myself have decided to take up leaning Russian now after not having learned a language in over 20 years now so it’s been very interesting. I was spoiled with the Nordic languages all being so similar and relying on that, now I have to learn completely different words, but the grammar is similar to Icelandic and Faroese so that helps. 😊
As a native Dutch and Frisian speaker who learned Swedish at university, I was surprised how much Faroese I could understand. It definitely helped that everything said here was spelled out, but even without the subtitles I was able to understand quite a bit more than I thought. The first word was the only one I guessed wrong :) This was also pretty much the first time I could understand Danish without any problems at all, but as Michael said, understanding Danish is much harder when it's spoken at a faster, more regular pace. Great video!
Been waiting for this one to come out! I always love lesser-known/lesser-spoken languages being featured on this channel. Of all the interesting features of Faroese phonology & orthography, the most intriguing to me is the shift of the sound represented by the letter eth (Ð ð), which is overwhelmingly pronounced as some sort of dental fricative in most of the languages that have it (including neighboring Icelandic), but in Faroese it usually represents /j/, /w~v/, or isn't pronounced at all. Does anyone have more info on how this sound shift took place? Faroese definitely has its own unique "lilt" to it…it's a treat listening to it spoken casually. I echo the sentiments of those in this comment section who hear its similarity to the phonology of Irish and Irish English-the approximant /ɹ/ sound really contributes to that!
Well, the fricative ð and fricative g were both completely lost in Faroese so to avoid a hiatus we compensate by adding a glide. But the glide depends on the preceding vowel so if the vowel is a i/y or í/ý it will be a /j/ and if it's a u or ú it will be a /v~w/.
@@johanpeturdam Fascinating! Definitely results in a more etymological orthography…I've heard Faroese and Icelandic have a fair amount of mutually intelligibility in written form due to this. Takk!
Most Norwegian dialects, but not all, have had a similar shift of the medial dental fricative, and more varyingly of the the voiced velar fricative. There are glides in most places were they were for us as well, though like I mentioned, there are exceptions.
As an Englishman who speaks Danish and Swedish, I found them all relatively easy (with the advantage of being able to read), but like Gustaf, I was initially somewhat torn between 'veska' being a Danish 'væske 'or a Swedish 'väska', but the next sentence cleared that up.
In Norway "Veske" is purse, while "Væske" is liquid. They are pronounced the same; one of the few instances the æ isn't really pronounced like æ. Just to make it more difficult LOL
I am German and don't speak any of those languages. But as I have been to all of the 4 countries and know some basic scandinavian words and expressions, I could understand quite a lot. Most of my guesses were pretty close :D Highly interesting video!
This was really interesting Norbert! As a swede, some words and sentences were oddly familiar but some f it was harder to figure out than Icelandic. Really cool nonetheless
This setup is incomplete without an Icelandic speaker. Being a B2 Icelandic speaker, I was able to vaguely grasp the general meaning of the sentences without subtitles (but then again, I know Faroese phonetics thanks to Eivør!)
Eivør and I do speak very similar dialects. In fact, we are from the same island but about 30 km away. However, our dialects are pretty different from the capital's. If you listen to the songs that Týr sing in Faroese, you will hear Heri Joensen's voice and he has more of a Tórshavn dialect (but not quite either as I believe he grew up in several places).
@@dan74695 I'm not personally a fan of saying that a language is closer to this one or that one or that a language is older than this one or that one but it is however true that Faroese takes a sort of middle ground with Icelandic being on one side and (West) Norwegian being on the other side.
I kind off agree that an Icelander was missing… I would have thought that was an unfair game before seeing this episode, as I considered Faroese closer to Icelandic than the Scandinavian languages… but, based on how much they understood it is probably more half way between West-Norwegian and Icelandic like Johann Peter said. I’m not sure that an average Icelandic speaker would have done any better than the rest of the crew.
@@sgjoni Færøysk er nærare norsk en folk tru. Når folk skulla samanlikna færøysk med norsk samanlika dei det næsta alltid med bokmål, sum er dansk, ikkje norsk.
As a Slavic language speaker, I always find Germanic languages brutal in terms of pronunciation. I like the fact that both Icelandic and Faroese remain untouched for 1000 years, there are some changes in pronunciation, but I like the fact you guys can read the old sagas, at least you can understand what is written there. You guys have a wonderful culture and history. Iceland and the Faroese islands saved the spirit of the Vikings who lived centuries ago. I hope your culture will remain the same for the next centuries or even thousands of years as well.
As a west-coast Norwegian, I understood: * 70 % of the Faroese, * 100 % of the Norwegian, * 100 % of the Danish, and * 100 % of the Swedish in this video. Admittedly, I played it at 50 % speed. Faroese can sometimes be a bit similar to the dialects of Western Norway, such as pronouncing "hv-" word as "kv-" and pronouncing "ikki" (or "ikke" as I would spell it) as with a voiceless palatal fricative (or something like that) with some plosive in front of it, something like /'itçə/ (I'm not an IPA expert). Phonetically, the thing that seems most different with any dialect in my region is that Faroese uses a kind of American-sounding R. This also seems to get retroflex in some situations, which in Norwegian is associated with East-Norwegian dialects. I'm going to guess that this aspect developed separately.
@@dan74695 It's a lot like Icelandic. If I hear and I'm not listening it sounds familiar - like I should be able to understand it. Once I start listening I find that I can't really understand all that much.
I'm a native English speaker, but I know bits of Swedish, German and Norwegian. It's interesting being able to pick out some random common words between all the languages here, usually with different spelling or slightly different pronunciation. Also awesome Týr poster Johan, that's where I initially learned about Faroese and some of the stories and mythological stuff they sing about.
As a Swede I hade no trouble of understanding Faroese. The Faroese I have met before I thought they were Swedish for a short moment. As they remove their diphthongs when they speak "Danish" and the vowel sounds are very close to Swedish. Which would place them in a triangle of dialects in east Uppland, Gotland and Åland area.
Lätt är nog lite överdrivet, men i sammanhanget var det inte svårt att lista ut vilka ord det var. Vissa meningar var helt omöjliga att förstå vid första försöket, men det blev lättare när man kunde läsa Färöiskan ovanför. Är rätt stolt över att jag lyckades förstå att tjuren blev ilsken av färgen röd på första försöket. Färöiska är lite enklare att förstå än Isländskan i den tidigare videon. Intressant att det finns många likheter (t ex Mjölk, vatten) med uttal och ord i svenskan :-)
@@oskich Precis, både ljud och text hjälper stort i detta fall. De färingar jag träffat tidigare talade "danska" (berättarröst: det var inte alls danska). Som du säger är ljudbilden väldigt lik svenskan, det som försvårar är diftongerna. Det var inte svårt för mig att lista ut vad orden var. Arbetar mycket med folk från hela norden som talar vitt skilda dialekter. Så vissa drag finns i olika dialekter av olika språk. Vilket bara visar att det är ett spektrum av olika dialekter. Skånska har fler likheter med danska och sydliga norska dialekter än andra dialekter av svenska. Svenskan i Österbotten har fler likheter med norrländska mål som bondska än andra finlandssvenska dialekter i Nyland. osv osv. Färöiska har likheter med svenskan som saknas i danskan och norskan. Som kanske och mjölk, istället för måske och melk. För att ta två exempel.
A good and cozy video, getting to practice listening to other nordic languages, it was great and many thanks you all of you good folk, may you bet sheltered from cold on many a winter and bask in the sun of summer on as many!
Interesting about the word "vøllur" because in Swedish we have the word "vall" as a synonym to "fotbollsplan". We have, for example Vångavallen in Trelleborg and Ryavallen in Borås and both of them are football fields.
Much respect to Johan for having Nightwish, Tyr and X files posters on the background 😁 Tyr came to my city Almaty, Kazakhstan for a tour back in 2018. A little bit of nostalgia :) Faroese sounds very unusual, even in comparison to Icelandic
Norbert! It would be super interesting if you could get a Finnish speaker, an Estonian speaker and maybe a Karelian speaker together to see if they understand each other! Thanks for the content!
I could understand almost everything from all these languages, even lots of the Danish words! Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
8:22 come on, ‘okse’ are probably the most use work for that in Danish. In works like ‘oksekød’ especially, ‘okse’ were mainly used when they back in the days were used to pull a plow or something like that.
I started learning Norwegian and it's really interesting to look at the difference between Scandinavian languages and see familiar words. I'm fascinated!
As a C1 Swedish speaker (native French speaker), I guessed 4/5 right, the bull was really hard to understand. I sort of cheated and was reading the Faroese transcription throughout, though. Otherwise I think I would have understood much much less 😂
This is interesting; I come from Ostrobothnia in Finland and I can hear some resemblance to the dialects of Swedish that are spoken natively in that area. Och nu först ser jag att min namne Johan också kan svenska XD
Im from Møre og Romsdal(Norway). i didn't expect faroese to have so many similar words, grammar and even pronunciation in common with some of the dialects here.
Something about this conversation between the other Scandinavian languages, it feels similar, like elements of it I understand, even if the pronunciation isn’t what I’m used to.
As a native Swedish speaker I did try and just listen to the last two words and I managed to pick up enough words to piece together what word it was, but it was right on the edge. Reading is easier than listening. I enjoyed this a lot, thank you. Also thanks to the Danish gentleman for making it easier for us mere mortals. :P
This is fascinating. Im a faroese person whos spoken danish and norwegian since the age of 4 due to family. (Godan dagin, eg havi tiverri eingilskt knappabord) I find it amusing called out our apple logic to be similar to french, haha. I adore the scandinavian languages for having a lot of similarities and the same roots dating back to the viking age.
@@mohamadmosa8116 Remember also that Saami is not a single language. Ecolinguist could try to pit North Saami against South Saami, against Pite Saami, against Lule Saami, etc.
Bad idea. Estonian and Finnish make a common group. Sami and Hungarian are different beasts. Call some Mansi for Hungarian, at least. And call another Sami for the first one )))
Interesting! Would love to have an elaboration video, on: 1. Vocabulary. Some 30% of Scandinavian words are of Low German origin (the Medieval Hansa merchants left huge footprints). Few of them reached Iceland, what about the Faroes? 2. Grammar. Scandinavian grammar is simple. Icelandic grammar is very complex. What about Faroese grammar?
The Hansas left their mark indeed on our language. Compare to landsmaal/nynorsk, we mostly have the same vocabulary. If I recall correctly, we had regular trade with Bergen up till til 1600s, a city very much influenced by low german.
Also it differs from language (and dialect), how much low german has influenced the languages. I think standard danish has up to 50%? Of their vocabulary from plat? Either way, that's how we got words like "smal" and "små", in the same language. Same words, but different meanings. Btw, "radio" in faroese is called "útvarp". "Varpa" is to throw, coming from low german. High german has "werfen".
I was an exchange student (from the US) to Denmark for six months in 1993. I am all sorts of proud of myself for how much of these languages I still understood!!! 😁
Well they're all relatively grammatically tame and easy yo remember, faroese and Icelandic are the only ones who still have grammatical genders and cases
I was an exchange student in Sweden two years before and yeah, still understand a lot, even some of Faroese. Though because I lived further north in Sweden, I actually found the Swedish guy a bit difficult to understand as the Skånska accent is quite different to a more northern Swedish accent.
As a native English speaker who has studied Swedish a bit, there were sentences in every language that I understood and many words in each I did not. For my first time hearing Faroese, I was surprised at how familiar it was. I think the words chosen were a bit too easy.
As a Swedish person who lived on the Faroe Islands for almost a year (even though it was around 15 years ago) this was such a fun video to watch and brought back a lot of great memories!
You should do the same video with people from different places along the coast of Norway (not east) where the dialects are more similar to old norse. That would be so interesting, because you would recognize the same words i.e «Hvussu hevur tú tað» Would be very simililar to «Koss he du det?» I think there is a lot of links there 😊
I love seeing the ones where they all just speak to each other in their native language the whole time. Like, they might not be guessing the words perfectly, but the fact that they can all communicate with each other without switching into a common language means they're already pretty mutually intelligible languages! Like, the fact that they were able to work out the distinction between "learn" and "borrow" despite how similar they sounded, just by discussing the meanings in their native languages, was astounding to me.
I'm Gustaf, from the video, and I can tell you that i only understand danish since I'm born and raised in Helsingborg, which is just a 20 minute ferry ride from Helsingør in Denmark. Swedish people from the very south may understand some Danish, but the rest of the country usually don't understand more than a word here and there. They sometimes say that Danish sounds like somebody trying to speak with searing hot porridge in their mouth 😆
@@gyrran Oh, very interesting! As a native speaker of English, I definitely had to work really hard to properly pronounce my one Danish friend’s name. XD
Geat to see Faroese - really interesting. Surprised to see 'tarvur' which souds similar to Wesh 'tarw' (bull). As a Welsh speaker who speaks no Scandinavian language, Norwegian seems to be the easiest one to 'hear' and pick up words which I may be familiar with from my limited German.
The Faroese word tarvur (as well as Icelandic tarfur) is actually a borrowing from Middle Irish. I know that the Scottish Gaelic modern form is tarbh and it's probably a cognate to Welsh tarw.
@@johanpeturdam Also cognate with Latin taurus, Greek ταυρος, and possibly Hebrew שור (shor, ox), where the /ʃ/ was originally /θ/. It's suspected that PIE borrowed the word from Proto-Semitic or they both borrowed it from the same other language.
@@ShishiSonson Yes, it is. Faroese has retained the Germanic root too in the form of tjórur and tjórneyt both of which are archaic ways of saying oksi.
I'm a native English speaker and I've always felt a bit guilty that my first language is the one other people have to learn to talk to people across the world, particularly given that's largely the case because of my own country's historical colonial past. So I always try to learn as much as possible of the main or one of the main languages of any country I go to on holiday so I'm not just expecting the locals to speak English to me. I usually spend a few months on it beforehand. Sometimes, it works well. For example, on holiday in Prague with my 6yo son, I took him to the Lego place and had an exchange with a cashier there who was not very confident in English and she looked so relieved that I could manage enough Czech to complete our transaction and general chat. So I really do try. However, this all broke down last year when I went to Iceland for the first time. I tried. But an Icelander friend of mine told me in advance: "we really prefer you speak in English rather than halting Icelandic". It's true that Icelandic is bloody difficult for foreigners to learn to speak fluently, and I couldn't. So I swallowed my pride and spoke in English, just keeping a couple of tiny phrases like "I don't speak Icelandic" and "I'm Scottish" in my back pocket to impress the locals with. Then, one evening, I met a few lovely Icelanders in a bar. One of them had lived and worked in the Netherlands and I explained my take on not wanting to assume people would just speak English to me wherever I went and he actually looked quite stern and declared "EVERYONE should speak English." As if he were quite annoyed that not everyone had made the effort. I laughed. Anyway, why am I saying this? Because Faroese sounds like a cute version of Icelandic to my foreign ears, that's all.
What sound corresponds to "ð" in Faroese? I hear no sound at all, maybe a slightly longer vowel before "ð". in Icelandic it's a clear "ð" sound, like in English.
Well, no sound corresponds to it. Ð is completely lost in Faroese but in cases where no consonant would leave a hiatus, we compensate by adding a glide. This is usually a /j/, /v/, or /w/ depending on the preceding vowel.
Great video! It would be interesting if you could get together someone who speaks Elfdalian (a language spoken by 2000 people in Sweden) with someone who speaks Icelandic or faroese and see if they can understand each other!
i adore it when the nordic circlejerk appears. i think that dansk is the most beautiful language in the whole world, and my sentiments towards that statement will never change, but on the other hand it is the fist time a lad from the Faroese islands speaks at really slow speed so me, for instance, has a chnace to enjoy it, feel it, actuallt try to bear it, understand it, thus grand great big and vast thank you Johan, you're amazing! Norbert, we love you! Hilsen fra Sibirien.
I totally agree with you about the beauty of the Danish language. Especially when it's pronounced the way Michael or Jacob Matthiesen (from the Norwegian video) do it.
I taught myself old Norse and I read quite often. I also speak Norwegian (not natively) and I'm amazed of how much of this that I understood. It's amazing how similar all these languages are. I was able to guess all of these.
As a German Native Faroese is very difficult to understand just by listening but I have to say that reading doesn't help so much then. The other scandinavian languages are good to understand especially reading them. I can understand Norsk also by hearing because I have learned it for a time. But I think I forgot the most
Interesting, Icelandic is probably the language most related to Faroese, but still different enough, that as an Icelander, I had to listen really closely to understand what Johan was saying. Faroese also seems to mix in some Danish, Swedish, or simply Scandinavian words.
This conversation is fascinating. I know English and Spanish. I came here to hear Faroese and to get a glimpse of what it sounds like. Not sure exactly which language each person is speaking all the time.
Number 5 in Norwegian can also be just like the Faroese word Vatn, we have two writing systems in Norway, Nynorsk, wich is very similiar to Faroese and Swedish and Bokmål wich is very similiar to Danish
I was looking at TROM in which Faroese is spoken. I was astonished that there were people speaking Danish (of whom I suppose they ARE Danish). But Faroese is so strange and different from the other languages, which I myself being West-flemish do understand quite well. Especially Norwegian . And Danish and Swedish more or less but I do read all of them easily and I almost always know what the texts are about. There is a lot of Ingveonic resemblance between our dialect and those languages. For example. Old English and our dialect is quite similar. As is Afrikaans. Can anyone explain the mutual understanding between Danish and Faroese?
Faroese people learn Danish in school which is why they understood the Danes in the show. As for the two Danes in the show: 1. The woman had lived in the Faroes for years, had a husband and children there and understood Faroese by now. It’s very common for Danes who have moved to the islands to continue speaking Danish despite having learned Faroese fluently, because it’s easier for them. 2. The guy was Faroese but had apparently lived in Denmark for most of his life which is why he now spoke Danish rather than Faroese. And why he understood Faroese. If a Dane hasn’t learned Faroese, they generally don’t understand much.
As an English speaker not knowing any of these languages I was surprised to be able to follow the conversation at times by listening and reading. I recognized "cow, bull, ox, stud, gelding" and the words related to Latin "taurus." I also guessed "apple" before they showed it because I picked up "fruit" and "green." It was a lucky guess because I didn't think the Faroe islands would have a word for lime.
Tarvur, tarfur á íslensku eru tökuorð úr fornírskunni/ gelískunni: tarbh. En samt er einnig þetta orð í raun og veru komið frá sömu indóevropsku rótinni og tyr, tjur eða einnig þjór á íslensku. Einnig taurus og torro. Tarvur, tarfur in Icelandic are borrowed words from Old Irish/Gaelic: tarbh. But even this word actually comes from the same Indo-European root as tyr, tjur or also þjór in Icelandic. Even taurus and torro.
*Jeg kan lese norsk, og når jeg ser på en færøysk tekst kan jeg forstå ganske mye av den. Men når jeg hører talespråket er det like uforståelig for meg som islandsk!*
I haven't heard this language before,but it sounds melodic to me.I think that because the Faroe Islands are isolated,Faroese has a different accent from other Scandinavian languages.
As a German I could guess all words, but honestly I only got some catchwords right, not whole sentences. He choose pretty easy things to guess, but many words are similar to German words.
Didn't know I understood Faroese. Sounds like a combo of Swedish and Icelandic. SOOOOO frustrating when they didn't get that he meant BULL, and took so long to get it. Hahaha! Fun challenge.
2:28 WTF Ser rødt, is a normal thing to say in Danish and is often used regarding bulls. Though bulls don’t see colors. I think it’s the same in Swedish and Norwegian
I love these challenges: the ones with Nordic languages - I'm danish the ones where German is involved - I've German as a second language the one with English in different versions So keep them coming please, it's such fun.
@@Pracedru Ja, det ville være så oplagt - især hvor danskere og svenskere kan finde på at snakke engelsk med hinanden GRRRRRRH Men dansk TV har jo efterhånden det princip at kun keendisser må medvirke i udsendelser, hvor man udfordrer hinandens viden - eller mangel på samme :-((( .
Thank you so much, Norbert, for having me on and giving me the opportunity to spread the word about my native language a bit. I really enjoyed doing this.
As you may have noticed I was a bit nervous in the beginning so my intro is ultra short. But in the beginning I never really explained which langauges I speak like the other participants did and I've seen some people asking about that. So, in addition to Faroese, I also speak Danish, English, Swedish, German, and Slovak. My Norwegian is pretty good but not as strong as my Swedish and I also speak very basic Spanish. I have also taken courses in a handful other languages but I don't speak these to any extent.
Again, thanks for having me on and I hope your viewers will enjoy this video.
Thank you so much for your contribution to the project, Johan! 🤗
We certainly did. This was very interesting. As a swede I didn't expect to understand anything at all, but got all words. And it was a pleasure to hear skånska representing Sweden.
@@Ecolinguist Nie ma za co. :)
this was great. I loved it.
@Johan Petur Dam Nothing to criticize! You all created a really interesting episode with everyone's little effort into it. Thanks alot. Absolutely exclusive to have faroese standing in the middle of all. Often gets forgotten and left behind sadly.
It sounds like a Scandinavian language with an Irish accent!
Well it's just slightly north of Scotland, so could be like a highland Scots accent rather than Irish.
Slaviska språk har också palatalisering före främre vokaler.
Well, you know, when my ancestors decided to move to the Faroes, they also decided to do a detour to the Irish sea and take... I mean marry a woman there first. In fact, DNA shows that we Faroese are 80-ish% Nordic in the male line and 80-ish% Gaelic in the female line. So we're an interesting mix in that respect.
@Prof. Spudd According to the Faroese speakers who communicated with some of the last Norn speakers, they were very, very close. In fact, they would have been mutually intelligible. For me when reading the remaining Norn texts, the most difficult part is deciphering the orthography the native English or Scots speakers used when writing down Norn.
@@vlagavulvin3847 Yes, but the Slavs call it hard and soft, while the Gaels call it wide and narrow.
As an Icelander it was so fun to see the similarities with Faroese. Although it did help that it had the text, I was still able to understand a lot of the Faroese. Icelandic is the most similar language to Faroese of all the Nordic languages, you should include them both in a video if you haven't already!
Definitely should include both in a video
Faroese sounds more like Norwegian than Icelandic, it sounds like a mix between western Norwegian and northern Norwegian.
@@dan74695 yes but written Faroese is like 90% similar to Icelandic!
@@liljakaren97 It's very similar to written Norwegian as well, it's very close to conservative Nynorsk. I understand almost everything lakfpslfødlfpfl
@@liljakaren97 Me kunna samanlikna norsk, færøysk, og islendsk.
As an Italian speaker I understood 0% but was fun to watch
Boa noite, amigo italiano!
I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an 🐂 ox / bull! I had to pause the video to share this comment, as I am trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
Many times, I understand full sentences in Faroese, for example, the sentence ‘Tað sum vit so nú fara at gera er, at eg fari at... vit fara at hava fimm orð og eg fari so á Føroyskum at lýsa ella geva klú um, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru, og so skulu M, A and G gita, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru’ which literally means ‘that as (that / it which) we so now fare at do (go / are going to do) is, i fare at (am going to) ... we fare at have (are going to have) five words and i fare so on Faroese at describe (i am going to describe in Faroese) or give clues about, what... which these words are, and so shall M, A and G guess what... which these words are’ and many other sentences as well, so I could understand every single word, without looking at the English subs, and I also didn’t look at the Icelandic subtitle yet, because first I want to see how many words I can understand and how many new words’ meanings I can figure out from the context, and after that I will read the Icelandic subs and the English subs, to check if I got all the meanings right, and, I also know that sum probably means as because sem means as in Norse and Icelandic tho som in Swedish etc can also be used in cases wherein the words which or that or who would be used in English, and, I think the word that means so in most Norse languages can also be used with the meaning then, so the Faroese word so could probably be translated to then in some of these cases - in many cases I can also tell the meaning of some new words from the context, for example, I haven’t seen the verb at gita before, but from the context I can tell that it means að giska / at gissa / to guess because I recognize / know all the other words in the sentence and I also know that the verb að geta in Icelandic can also mean to guess tho its normal meanings are to get and can / could etc when used together with the past participle of another verb, and it’s most likely cognate with gita! (By the way, if one is learning Faroese and Icelandic and Norse etc, re the LL sound, in Icelandic the LL is usually pronounced TL, and in Faroese the LL is usually pronounced DL or TL or the D sound can even sound between a D sound and a T sound and then the L sound right after it, and, the aspired letter combinations like the TN in vatn are pronounced by adding a bit of an H sound in there and in a slightly nasal way, but it’s the good type of nasal sound which is kinda closed and projected towards the inner part of the nose or under the nose or somewhere around that area, which sounds cool, so the Norse nasals are not the same type of nasal sounds as those used in French which are very open and projected towards the outside that can sound too nasal, so, in Faroese and Icelandic and Norse the nasal sounds like TN and the other aspired consonants are very subtle and elegant and romantic, which makes them very cool-sounding and unique!)
@@FrozenMermaid666 wow, clever
Being from Hardanger in western Norway I could actually understand faroese nearly 100% when spoken slowly like this. I remember going to the islands on holiday as a kid and my dad could converse pretty seamlessly with the locals by speaking the way he remembered his grandfather did. Da va trivle pao Færøyane og eg kjeme jedna att
As a Western Norwegian and user of Nynorsk I was able to understand more Faroese than the others. I find it really fascinating to hear!
I'm a Nynorsk user from the north and I understand almost everything. Faroese sounds like a weird mix between western and northern Norwegian to me.
Why do they always use Bokmål speakers, it sounds super cringe to hear and they barely understand Norwegian
@@FluxTrax They speak Danish that's influenced by Norwegian.
Yeah, I think it would've worked with more diverse dialects for the continental Scandinavian speakers
As the Swedish speaker is from Scania, right next to the Danish border
@@FluxTrax cuz almost everyone speaks Bokmål
As a Norwegian I didn’t expect to understand ~90% or more of the Faroese examples being used, but between what was spoken and the written text I damn near understood everything and came to the right conclusions every time anyway. Super fun!
Færøysk er eitt norskt målføre malfkwpflsæfppsøfåspd
It's a old Norwegian coloni that Denmark stole 😅
Yeah I was surprised too when I could understand the Faroese guy; I thought he was speaking danish in parts though?
I know this video is old but as a German-Norwegian, this is fascinating to watch. It's joyful. I understand what's being said (especially in writing) and I feel connected to all these languages around my ancestry. Thanks so much for running this channel, Norbert. It's been so lovely to dive into it.
As a Swede, having the subtitles on while listening to Johan speak Faroese made it a lot easier to understand. I think I could almost understand all of it with the subtitles on, and it was a lot harder when I tried to just listen as Mikael mentioned in the end of the video. It was a really interesting video to be able to see how closely related our languages are!
I’m Danish and overall I don’t understand Faroese, but suddenly out of the blue comes a sentence I do understand and obviously single words here and there. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the Faroe islands twice, nice people and beautiful place.
I'm Norwegian and I understand Faroese.
@@dan74695 good for you👍
I've also been there twice.
And i agree, beautifull place. I was so lucky that i had sun and 16 degrees both times.
Og Nu! Grønlandsk 😅
I've been waiting for faroese
me too
Beautiful ancient language. For me it sounds like Icelandic witn no rolled Rs and a lot of sh and dzh sounds. Also, the manner of speaking recalls me something from Scottish, monotonous and nasal
How long for?
I was also trying to find more videos with Faroese! By the way, Germanic languages don’t use rolled Rs, especially in the standard accents, though there might be a few groups of speakers that use rolled Rs in every language, depending on the accent / dialect, and, the soft Rs used in Icelandic and Gothic and Norse and Swedish and Norwegian are different variations of the soft normal Rs, which are also taps (soft Rs) and, it is usually easy to tell if an R is soft or rolled, as soft normal R and all other types of soft Rs don’t have the engine sound or motor sound that rolled Rs have and are pronounced softly and very softly, so, if one listens to languages that use rolled Rs such as Spanish, one can hear that the Icelandic Rs aren’t the same as the rolled Rs, as Spanish has both the normal rolled R that’s spellt with one R and the extra rolled R or the prolonged rolled R which is spellt RR in Spanish and in Italian also, though Italian also uses variations of the soft normal R when it’s spellt with one R only, though the Icelandic Rs are even softer than the Italian Rs! (Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!)
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
As a native Dutch speaker, this was enjoyable hard work! I had never heard Faroese before. Dutch is definitively related to all those northern languages but very distant. It feels like many generations came and went since we spoke with each other last. Only a stray word here and there is still the same. All the other words drifted apart from each other. Thank you for making these great language videos! They reunite us! Keep it up.
For sure! There's a lot of cultural influence in The Netherlands/Downlands from Scandinavia but many many hundred years have gone since then.
To a Norwegian, Dutch sounds perfectly normal like Norwegian Østlandsdialect at a distance, but once you get closer it's like "wtf stop using made up words" 😂
As a Swede, I can often understand for instance billboards or ads in the Netherlands. A lot of similarities to the Scandinavian languages + English, so pretty easy to put together educated guesses.
I am German and don't understand a single word, LOL. Kinda surprising considering all of these languages are Germanic.
Dutch would be closer to Michal's Jutlantic dialect. There is like a second Germanic language group between Low Saxon, North Frisian, English and South- and West-Jutlantic.
As a native English speaker, Dutch is somewhat easy compared to the other Germanic languages. Some words are different but if we look at the written sentence we can generally understand
Loved the video! I’m Norwegian and I feel like I could understand a lot with the written text. Without it I’d say I would be able to understand a few words here and there, at best.
Btw I would love to see this kind of video with speakers of the finno-ugric family! I.e Finnish, sami, estonian and hungarian. Would be very interesting. :)
As a native English speaker, this is interesting. I understood almost nothing, even in the written form, but when I watch these videos with Romance languages I understand a lot more despite the languages in this one being fellow Germanic languages. I get a bit more with other West Germanic languages, especially Dutch, but even then often not as much as Romance languages.
as expected, since english vocabulary is 58% romance loans, and only 26% native words and germanic loans. so it would definitely make sense to understand more from the romance videos than the germanic videos
English: a Germanic orphan raised by different foster parents, who were Romance languages the majority of the time!
More common now english is seen a distant Scandinavian or North Germanic language and not a western Germanic language, with a lot of frankish an latin influence. Also some small britonic pieces left.
English-based languages come mostly from Norse, as the creator of each English-based language made it by modifying mostly Norse words and by creating new words, including Modern English which is mostly a Norse language, so most base words are obvious cognates with the Norse words, but one may find it harder to recognize the cognates at first if one is reading them fast without pausing the video, especially if one hasn’t learnt any of the ancient Norse languages yet, due to their differences in spelling rules and aspect, so I would recommend pausing the video a few times, and trying to read each Faroese word slowly, and trying to think of the cognates (or possible cognates) in English, as one can recognize and understand a lot of cognates if one is reading the words slowly, one by one - for me it was easier as I am already advanced level in Norwegian Bokmål and Icelandic (which is the Norse language that’s the most similar to Faroese) and close to advanced level in Norse, so I could recognize the cognates faster and I could process most of them faster without pausing the video, though I am beginner level in Faroese at the moment, and, I am going to rewatch this video several times on different days to learn all the new Faroese words, as it’s not easy to find videos / resources for learning Faroese like vocab videos and videos with subtitles in Faroese etc, so I am using every resource / video that I can find to improve my Faroese!
By the way, the Latin languages aren’t romance / romantic languages technically, so I don’t know why they are referred to as romance, as they are very neutral-sounding or normal-sounding and some of them are exotic-sounding, except for Brazilian Portuguese which is the only Latin language that has a slightly romantic feel to it, as it was influenced by Germanic languages a lot, so its pronunciation is similar to Germanic pronunciation, whereas the Germanic languages are the languages that truly sound romantic, with Icelandic being the most romantic language ever created due to its breathiness, being the breathiest language with lots of soft H sounds, while Dutch is also very similar to Icelandic with lots of H-like sounds that also has a very romantic sound, especially when pronounced with the right Dutch accent that uses the softest Rs and the softest Gs etc, and, even though Germanic languages come from Latin (so most base words in all Germanic languages are cognates with most Latin words and most Celtic words, anyway) and most technical terms in English were modified from Latin words, most of the base words in English and in the other Germanic languages have the forms and meanings that are closest to those used in the ancient Norse languages, so it should be easy for one to recognize the cognates in Norse languages, for example, the cognates kaldur / kalt / koldt etc mean cold and the cognates at koma / komið / kommer etc mean at come (to come) in Germanic languages tho in Latin languages their cognates caldo / calor / caliente etc mean warm / warmth and comer / comida / comé etc mean to eat / food / eat etc, so most words are cognates, but the meanings of the cognates used in English are the same or closer to the meanings used in the other Germanic languages than they are to the meanings used in Latin languages!
Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word, so, it feels so good to realize that I can understand so many of the new Faroese words, and to realize that my level in Icelandic is quite advanced!
That was very interesting! I am an ex-librarian (found it funny it was one of the chosen word) with a B1 level in Icelandic, B2 for reading. At the beginning, I could understand maybe one word out of 10, then I started to pick up on a few phonetic differences and in the end could understand maybe one word out of 7. When I read it, I could understand a good 70%. I could also pick up on a few bits here and there in the other 3 languages, Danish being the one I understand the least.
Being someone speaking 7 germanic and latin languages, I really appreciate your channel and would love to see one with Icelandic as the main language.
Being a Dane when listening to Icelandic and Faroese if find it useful that i also speak English. Seems to really help with the pronunciation, words and the grammar. I would love to see how people from the English isles perceive Icelandic and Faroese.
Intressant! Fist time hearing Faroese. Can't make very much sense out of it, but with subtitles on I feel a bit ashamed not nailing most. Also the mic he's using ist really helping.
I'm curious how much can Icelandic and Faroese speakers understand each others cause the two looks more similar to themselves than to any continental Scandinavian speech (though Nynorsk is maybe exeption). Hope to see that comparison! And thx for this one
Personally: Written Icelandic about 75%, spoken Icelandic significantly less. And I even took Old Norse at university. However, I'm sure a few months in Iceland would totally remedy that.
Faroese spoken slowly 90%, spoken fast and slangy 40%. Written faroese 90-100%. That being said I also know danish so other Icelanders might understand less since faroese has a lot of danish loanwords and influence therefrom.
It’s great to have Faroese at last. It is the Nordic language that is the closest to Icelandic though it is probably only as close as most think. Based on how well they managed to understand him I suspect that Faroese sits right in the middle between mainland Scandinavian and Icelandic. But to correct one of the participants, Icelandic has the same double L sound as Faroese (the tɬ) and also the K pronunciation of Hv in all modern “dialects” of Icelandic though the southern dialect (when there really was one) used to pronounce it as spelled.
Færøysk ljodar sum ei blanding millom vestnorsk og nordnorsk.
R-ljudet i Färöiskan får en verkligen att tänka på någon nordnorsk dialekt :)
@@dan74695 høgnorsk brukar?
@@heinemann0074 Eg skriv landsmål sum heve litet hågnorsk i seg.
@@oskich Ja.
I really enjoy hearing Faroese. The í/ý diphthong really makes it stick out and sound kind of funny to me (in a good way!). It sounds so much to me like an Irishman learned Icelandic (OWN) but insisted on keeping the accent 😉, with the characteristic r and all the /t͡ʃ// & /d͡ʒ/ sounds. (Also the change from Þ to H and even Ð to glides.) I suppose it's the history. A very interesting language and another fun challenge!
Many dialects in Scandinavia have that diphthong.
Am feroisk
indeed, faroese is the product of gaelic influence on a scandinavian language xD
@@BarbarooTheKangaroo It just sounds like a weird mix between northern and western Norwegian to me.
@@BlueblueblueShark Hei! Eg er norsk.
I never thought I would live to see a danish speaker ”help” a swedish speaker understand a different language (by speaking danish)… Quite ironic! Cool video. 👍
but to be fair that danish guy doesn't speak so badly as many danish people. he doesn't pronounce only half words. :P
Would love to see more of Faroese and these lesser-known languanges.
yes me too.
hopefully he will do one gutnish and elfdalian
Faroe Islands has a population of 50000
Fascinating video! I'm a Norwegian speaking Englishman, can understand Swedish pretty well, can read Danish pretty easily (understand spoken Danish only if it's slow like Mikael said!), and have studied a little Icelandic. Faroese is a fascinating hybrid - looks like Icelandic to a degree, but sounds very different. Very obvious Celtic influences, which isn't a surprise considering the relative proximity to Scotland and Ireland.
What obvious Celtic influences did you notice?
@@explodingmonad4535 One example. English DUCK / Faroese DUNNA - Scottish Gaelic TUNNAG / Icelandic ÖND - Danish, Norwegian, Swedish AND
@@explodingmonad4535 I was thinking specifically of the phonology which sounds more like Gaelic than a Scandinavian language. Faroese looks Scandinavian but sounds Celtic.
@@Farerets That’s actually the worst example as it is disputed. Better examples are: drunnur, grúkur, tarvur, blak, and ærgi.
@@Farerets tarvur in old celtic tarb
Very interesting video. As a Norwegian from the western parts of East-Norway I actually could understand alot more of the Faroe Island language then expected, especially in writing. It might have do to with my dialect (Valdres) wich have more in commen with Nynorsk then Bokmål, at least in spelling.
A funny thing i noticed was that the Faroe word for potato "eple", also is the word for potato in my dialect and older people here use it, while younger people tends to use "potet".
That's interesting, the French also use apple to refer to the potato - pomme de terre.
In my dialect of swedish, we often use 'pära' for potato, which is norwegian pære/english pear. But we use 'päron', the standard swedish version of the word, when referring to pear, the fruit.
In French it's the same word too. Pommes and pommes de terre. The root of "eple" is a word for any fruit not just what we call apples today. Maybe they thought of potatoes as a kind of fruit in the old days.
I learned Faroese and Danish over 20 years ago when I lived in Denmark and the Faroes and even though I haven’t really used either of them very much in the past 20 years I understood everything perfectly in all of the languages. It’s amazing how languages just stay dormant somewhere in my brain until I need to access them again.
If one learns the words automatically by seeing / revising / hearing each word many times over a longer period of time (spaced repetition method) until each word is instantly processed and automatically remembered, the words become permanent! By the way, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an 🐂 ox / bull! I had to pause the video to share this comment, as I am trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! (I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!)
@@FrozenMermaid666 most Icelanders understand around 60 percent of Faroese or even more when it’s written down, but spoken they understand very little. Knowing Norwegian will help immensely as well considering Faroese is heavily influenced by western Norwegian dialects from a couple hundred years ago. Knowing Danish helps, but knowing Norwegian Bokmål essentially means you understand written Danish as that’s basically what it is :-). There are many loan words from English now as well so I would venture to guess that you would understand most written Faroese soon enough. There are some interesting words that are Faroese and perhaps even have some Celtic influences even in the pronunciations of some words. Once you become fluent enough though you won’t recognize individual words as much as you will hear phrases and sentences and they begin to come from your language center in the brain and not your memory. Once I switch my mind over to my Faroese language center the words almost come out in their own and sometimes I second guess myself if I used the correct word, but as long as I just trust myself I find that the words are usually correct 90 percent of the time. This is the same with Danish for me as well now.
I cannot understand many words in Danish and Faroese when spoken most of the times, though sometimes I can understand quite a lot of words, but if I see the written text / subtitles I can understand almost every word - I noticed that I even understand many full sentences in Faroese when seeing the subs, and, I think I shall be fluent in most of the Nordic languages in a few years, as I am in the process of learning!
Many times, I understand full sentences in Faroese, for example, the sentence ‘Tað sum vit so nú fara at gera er, at eg fari at... vit fara at hava fimm orð og eg fari so á Føroyskum at lýsa ella geva klú um, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru, og so skulu M, A and G gita, hvat... hvørji hesi orðini eru’ which literally means ‘that as (that / it which) we so now fare at do (go / are going to do) is, i fare at (am going to) ... we fare at have (are going to have) five words and i fare so on Faroese at describe (i am going to describe in Faroese) or give clues about, what... which these words are, and so shall M, A and G guess what... which these words are’ and many other sentences as well, so I could understand every single word, without looking at the English subs, and I also didn’t look at the Icelandic subtitle yet, because first I want to see how many words I can understand and how many new words’ meanings I can figure out from the context, and after that I will read the Icelandic subs and the English subs, to check if I got all the meanings right, and, I also know that sum probably means as because sem means as in Norse and Icelandic tho som in Swedish etc can also be used in cases wherein the words which or that or who would be used in English, and, I think the word that means so in most Norse languages can also be used with the meaning then, so the Faroese word so could probably be translated to then in some of these cases - in many cases I can also tell the meaning of some new words from the context, for example, I haven’t seen the verb at gita before, but from the context I can tell that it means að giska / at gissa / to guess because I recognize / know all the other words in the sentence and I also know that the verb að geta in Icelandic can also mean to guess tho its normal meanings are to get and can / could etc when used together with the past participle of another verb, and it’s most likely cognate with gita!
By the way, re the LL sound in Norse languages, in Icelandic the LL is usually pronounced TL, and in Faroese the LL is usually pronounced DL or TL or the D sound can even sound between a D sound and a T sound and then the L sound right after it, and, the aspired letter combinations like the TN in vatn are pronounced by adding a bit of an H sound in there and in a slightly nasal way, but it’s the good type of nasal sound which is kinda closed and projected towards the inner part of the nose or under the nose or somewhere around that area, which sounds cool, so the Norse nasals are not the same type of nasal sounds as those used in French which are very open and projected towards the outside that can sound too nasal, so, in Faroese and Icelandic and Norse the nasal sounds like TN and the other aspired consonants are very subtle and elegant and romantic, which makes them very cool-sounding and unique!
@@FrozenMermaid666 you sound like you are doing very well and I was very similar to you when I learned then initially. I first learned Icelandic when I lived in I lceland, then moved to the Faroes and learned it fluently, then moved to Denmark and learned it fluently. After those 3 I watched a lot of Norwegian and Swedish movies and I am like you in that I understand 90 percent of them simply by making educated guesses. I can even understand a good amount of Dutch and some German as well, but German is much different it seems. The Faroese have a language called Gøtudansk that they use to communicate with all of the Nordic countries and it’s a more intelligible mix of the languages and sounds close to Danish but without the harsh Danish sounds and without the Norwegian singing (even though the Norwegians will fight to the death to prove they don’t sing, they say the Swedes do 😂). My older two sons are Faroese and live in the Faroes and I still use it from time to time but I really haven’t even tried it much in 20 years until this past summer when my oldest son visited me in the states. I was still just as fluent it seems. Once you learn the languages you are learning now I have no doubt you will be able to understand all of the Nordic languages for the rest of your life. 😊I myself have decided to take up leaning Russian now after not having learned a language in over 20 years now so it’s been very interesting. I was spoiled with the Nordic languages all being so similar and relying on that, now I have to learn completely different words, but the grammar is similar to Icelandic and Faroese so that helps. 😊
As a native Dutch and Frisian speaker who learned Swedish at university, I was surprised how much Faroese I could understand. It definitely helped that everything said here was spelled out, but even without the subtitles I was able to understand quite a bit more than I thought. The first word was the only one I guessed wrong :) This was also pretty much the first time I could understand Danish without any problems at all, but as Michael said, understanding Danish is much harder when it's spoken at a faster, more regular pace. Great video!
Been waiting for this one to come out! I always love lesser-known/lesser-spoken languages being featured on this channel.
Of all the interesting features of Faroese phonology & orthography, the most intriguing to me is the shift of the sound represented by the letter eth (Ð ð), which is overwhelmingly pronounced as some sort of dental fricative in most of the languages that have it (including neighboring Icelandic), but in Faroese it usually represents /j/, /w~v/, or isn't pronounced at all. Does anyone have more info on how this sound shift took place?
Faroese definitely has its own unique "lilt" to it…it's a treat listening to it spoken casually. I echo the sentiments of those in this comment section who hear its similarity to the phonology of Irish and Irish English-the approximant /ɹ/ sound really contributes to that!
Well, the fricative ð and fricative g were both completely lost in Faroese so to avoid a hiatus we compensate by adding a glide. But the glide depends on the preceding vowel so if the vowel is a i/y or í/ý it will be a /j/ and if it's a u or ú it will be a /v~w/.
@@johanpeturdam Fascinating! Definitely results in a more etymological orthography…I've heard Faroese and Icelandic have a fair amount of mutually intelligibility in written form due to this. Takk!
Most Norwegian dialects, but not all, have had a similar shift of the medial dental fricative, and more varyingly of the the voiced velar fricative. There are glides in most places were they were for us as well, though like I mentioned, there are exceptions.
Thank you very much!
I have to say I had a hard time understanding spoken Faeroese, but the text helped a lot.
As an Englishman who speaks Danish and Swedish, I found them all relatively easy (with the advantage of being able to read), but like Gustaf, I was initially somewhat torn between 'veska' being a Danish 'væske 'or a Swedish 'väska', but the next sentence cleared that up.
In Norway "Veske" is purse, while "Væske" is liquid. They are pronounced the same; one of the few instances the æ isn't really pronounced like æ. Just to make it more difficult LOL
@@SebHaarfagre In swedish it is "vätska" for liquid. 😛
I am German and don't speak any of those languages. But as I have been to all of the 4 countries and know some basic scandinavian words and expressions, I could understand quite a lot. Most of my guesses were pretty close :D Highly interesting video!
This was really interesting Norbert!
As a swede, some words and sentences were oddly familiar but some f it was harder to figure out than Icelandic. Really cool nonetheless
Færøysk er myket lettare fyre meg å fata en islendsk.
it sounds like he is speaking icelandic in a stockholm accent
This setup is incomplete without an Icelandic speaker. Being a B2 Icelandic speaker, I was able to vaguely grasp the general meaning of the sentences without subtitles (but then again, I know Faroese phonetics thanks to Eivør!)
Eivør and I do speak very similar dialects. In fact, we are from the same island but about 30 km away. However, our dialects are pretty different from the capital's. If you listen to the songs that Týr sing in Faroese, you will hear Heri Joensen's voice and he has more of a Tórshavn dialect (but not quite either as I believe he grew up in several places).
Faroese is closer to Norwegian. It sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
@@dan74695 I'm not personally a fan of saying that a language is closer to this one or that one or that a language is older than this one or that one but it is however true that Faroese takes a sort of middle ground with Icelandic being on one side and (West) Norwegian being on the other side.
I kind off agree that an Icelander was missing… I would have thought that was an unfair game before seeing this episode, as I considered Faroese closer to Icelandic than the Scandinavian languages… but, based on how much they understood it is probably more half way between West-Norwegian and Icelandic like Johann Peter said. I’m not sure that an average Icelandic speaker would have done any better than the rest of the crew.
@@sgjoni Færøysk er nærare norsk en folk tru. Når folk skulla samanlikna færøysk med norsk samanlika dei det næsta alltid med bokmål, sum er dansk, ikkje norsk.
As a Slavic language speaker, I always find Germanic languages brutal in terms of pronunciation. I like the fact that both Icelandic and Faroese remain untouched for 1000 years, there are some changes in pronunciation, but I like the fact you guys can read the old sagas, at least you can understand what is written there.
You guys have a wonderful culture and history. Iceland and the Faroese islands saved the spirit of the Vikings who lived centuries ago. I hope your culture will remain the same for the next centuries or even thousands of years as well.
As a west-coast Norwegian, I understood:
* 70 % of the Faroese,
* 100 % of the Norwegian,
* 100 % of the Danish, and
* 100 % of the Swedish
in this video. Admittedly, I played it at 50 % speed.
Faroese can sometimes be a bit similar to the dialects of Western Norway, such as pronouncing "hv-" word as "kv-" and pronouncing "ikki" (or "ikke" as I would spell it) as with a voiceless palatal fricative (or something like that) with some plosive in front of it, something like /'itçə/ (I'm not an IPA expert).
Phonetically, the thing that seems most different with any dialect in my region is that Faroese uses a kind of American-sounding R. This also seems to get retroflex in some situations, which in Norwegian is associated with East-Norwegian dialects. I'm going to guess that this aspect developed separately.
Ma nigga from the West Coast yo
As a west coast Swede, (only listening, not reading the subtitles):
40 % of Faroese
100 % Norwegian
70 % Danish
Faroese sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
@@dan74695 It's a lot like Icelandic. If I hear and I'm not listening it sounds familiar - like I should be able to understand it. Once I start listening I find that I can't really understand all that much.
Faroese has a North Norwegian r sound. Faroese just sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
The calmest conversation ever :)
I'm a native English speaker, but I know bits of Swedish, German and Norwegian. It's interesting being able to pick out some random common words between all the languages here, usually with different spelling or slightly different pronunciation.
Also awesome Týr poster Johan, that's where I initially learned about Faroese and some of the stories and mythological stuff they sing about.
In my western Norwegian dialect we say «Vatn» to Water!
As a Swede I hade no trouble of understanding Faroese. The Faroese I have met before I thought they were Swedish for a short moment. As they remove their diphthongs when they speak "Danish" and the vowel sounds are very close to Swedish. Which would place them in a triangle of dialects in east Uppland, Gotland and Åland area.
hade... inte? ;)
Du hade inga problem? Det är slående måste jag säga. Jag är dansk och förstod inte ens en fjärdedel av det.
Lätt är nog lite överdrivet, men i sammanhanget var det inte svårt att lista ut vilka ord det var. Vissa meningar var helt omöjliga att förstå vid första försöket, men det blev lättare när man kunde läsa Färöiskan ovanför. Är rätt stolt över att jag lyckades förstå att tjuren blev ilsken av färgen röd på första försöket.
Färöiska är lite enklare att förstå än Isländskan i den tidigare videon. Intressant att det finns många likheter (t ex Mjölk, vatten) med uttal och ord i svenskan :-)
@@oskich
Det är vettigt.
@@oskich Precis, både ljud och text hjälper stort i detta fall. De färingar jag träffat tidigare talade "danska" (berättarröst: det var inte alls danska). Som du säger är ljudbilden väldigt lik svenskan, det som försvårar är diftongerna. Det var inte svårt för mig att lista ut vad orden var.
Arbetar mycket med folk från hela norden som talar vitt skilda dialekter. Så vissa drag finns i olika dialekter av olika språk. Vilket bara visar att det är ett spektrum av olika dialekter. Skånska har fler likheter med danska och sydliga norska dialekter än andra dialekter av svenska. Svenskan i Österbotten har fler likheter med norrländska mål som bondska än andra finlandssvenska dialekter i Nyland. osv osv. Färöiska har likheter med svenskan som saknas i danskan och norskan. Som kanske och mjölk, istället för måske och melk. För att ta två exempel.
Finally Faroese is getting attention. That makes me so happy
A good and cozy video, getting to practice listening to other nordic languages, it was great and many thanks you all of you good folk, may you bet sheltered from cold on many a winter and bask in the sun of summer on as many!
I tried not to read the english translation, and I understood surprisingly much by listening. Love from Denmark 🥰🇩🇰. Lene
Interesting about the word "vøllur" because in Swedish we have the word "vall" as a synonym to "fotbollsplan". We have, for example Vångavallen in Trelleborg and Ryavallen in Borås and both of them are football fields.
We have "voll" in Norwegian. Same meaning and usage. It's from Old Norse "vǫllr".
Vold exists in Danish, too. It usually means violence but can also mean a slope or a bank.
Yes, even in German we have this word: Feld (pronounced "felt") and you can also say "Fußballfeld" (football field).
Having studied a bit of Danish, I caught a bit more than I thought I would have.
Norbert, make one on Portuguese dialects and Portuguese-based creoles ! Your job is getting wider and wider
“Dance, monkey, dance!” :)
Much respect to Johan for having Nightwish, Tyr and X files posters on the background 😁 Tyr came to my city Almaty, Kazakhstan for a tour back in 2018. A little bit of nostalgia :) Faroese sounds very unusual, even in comparison to Icelandic
Norbert! It would be super interesting if you could get a Finnish speaker, an Estonian speaker and maybe a Karelian speaker together to see if they understand each other! Thanks for the content!
fun fact, the amount of people who watched this video is around the same amount of people who speak faroese natively
13:00
In Russian language we have a word “Букварь” (Bukvar) which means «Alphabet book”.
you should make a video with Faroese, Icelandic, Orkney, English, Shetlandish and North Scottish.
As a native Icelandic speaker I could understand what everyone was saying! Didn't even need to use English captions or subtitles!
Even the Danish?
@@deaganachomarunacathasaigh4344 yes because we learn danish in school, So I can speak the language ok
@@MarinoMoons Ohhhh ok
I could understand almost everything from all these languages, even lots of the Danish words! Re the five words, I immediately guessed the first word, as I could understand almost every word - an animaI that gets angry when seeing red, and the female version of that animal is an animal that ppl take milk from, which is a cow, so, the animal that had to be guessed is an ox / bull! I first had to pause the video to write this part of the comment, as I was trying to determine how many words in Faroese I can understand at the moment, because I am advanced level in Icelandic and Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and upper intermediate level in Norse and German and Swedish etc, so, even though I am beginner level in languages such as Faroese and Gothic and Danish, I can understand most new words that I see! I also guessed the apple and the stadium and the water, and I could also understand most words used to describe the 3rd word, but I didn’t guess it, as I was thinking that the building would be more something like a bank or a huurhuis or something like that, where there is lending and leasing etc, and someone that lends dollahs rather than books, so I was close, but not 100% correct, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think and fully process every word, and I must have missed a keyword that was referring to books, but I’m happy to see that I could guess four out of five words, even at a beginner level in Faroese, because most words are the same or almost the same as the Icelandic word!
By the way, there is also a language called Norn which seems to be very similar to both Norse and English, at least when it comes to words / vocab, though its aspect is not like the Norse / Faroese / Icelandic aspects, but speakers of Icelandic and Faroese and Norwegian and Danish and Swedish and English might understand a lot of words - and, there are two extra versions of Norse, namely East Norse and Greenlandic Norse, which are a bit different from normal Norse aka West Norse, being different languages, but they are very close tho, and, there’s also the earliest version of Norse aka Proto Norse which is also a different language, but it’s probably easy to understand many of the words or most of the words if one is a speaker of Faroese or Icelandic etc, and, the Middle versions and the Óld versions of Norwegian / Danish / Swedish etc are also different languages with different spelling rules, but they are also very close, so it would be nice to see all of these languages compared, so hopefully ppl that have learnt or studied those languages can participate in some of the language-related challenges in the near future, and hopefully all the ancient Germanic / Celtic languages can be brought back in the near future, as they are so pretty and should still be spoken and used, being so artistic and poetic, so, I am trying to learn all these languages, and I would recommend learning them / as many of them as one can!
8:22 come on, ‘okse’ are probably the most use work for that in Danish. In works like ‘oksekød’ especially, ‘okse’ were mainly used when they back in the days were used to pull a plow or something like that.
I started learning Norwegian and it's really interesting to look at the difference between Scandinavian languages and see familiar words. I'm fascinated!
I think it would be a good idea to discuss why for the first word nobody understood the klue with color reed.
being a Dane, the most difficult thing was understanding what the colour red did to the bull.
I think they moved too much their attention to the milk, hence they started thinking about the cows or the cattle.
I've never heard Skånska before. That was an experience.
TARAVUR, first word. In English, Bull, but in Scottish Gaelic spellt TARBH, but pronounced TARAVF !
(BH is our way of making the V sound)
It's fascinating, how Danish and Norwegian suddenly become perfectly understandable for a learner of Swedish, compared to Faroese.😄
Thank you for this interesting video . Languages and their interactions are so fascinating.
Amazing content. Jeg elsker den skånske fyrs accent! And I was surprised how much of Faroese vocabulary was intelligible to me as a dane as well
As a C1 Swedish speaker (native French speaker), I guessed 4/5 right, the bull was really hard to understand. I sort of cheated and was reading the Faroese transcription throughout, though. Otherwise I think I would have understood much much less 😂
Well faroese has some words that derive from Irish and Scots (Gaelic) and Tarvur (bull) is one of those originally Tarbh in Irish.
This is interesting; I come from Ostrobothnia in Finland and I can hear some resemblance to the dialects of Swedish that are spoken natively in that area.
Och nu först ser jag att min namne Johan också kan svenska XD
It is very interesting to hear, how Faroese has many of the same palatizations as English with its "ch" and "j" sounds.
Im from Møre og Romsdal(Norway). i didn't expect faroese to have so many similar words, grammar and even pronunciation in common with some of the dialects here.
I know right, I noticed many things in common with Faroese as well.
Something about this conversation between the other Scandinavian languages, it feels similar, like elements of it I understand, even if the pronunciation isn’t what I’m used to.
I was waiting for this video thank you
As a native Swedish speaker I did try and just listen to the last two words and I managed to pick up enough words to piece together what word it was, but it was right on the edge. Reading is easier than listening. I enjoyed this a lot, thank you. Also thanks to the Danish gentleman for making it easier for us mere mortals. :P
This is fascinating. Im a faroese person whos spoken danish and norwegian since the age of 4 due to family. (Godan dagin, eg havi tiverri eingilskt knappabord) I find it amusing called out our apple logic to be similar to french, haha. I adore the scandinavian languages for having a lot of similarities and the same roots dating back to the viking age.
It would be great to make video with someone who speaks Saami language.
Then you’d have to combine it w languages from the uralic family
I know that.
Yeah this would be interesting to see with Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian!!
@@mohamadmosa8116 Remember also that Saami is not a single language. Ecolinguist could try to pit North Saami against South Saami, against Pite Saami, against Lule Saami, etc.
Bad idea. Estonian and Finnish make a common group. Sami and Hungarian are different beasts. Call some Mansi for Hungarian, at least. And call another Sami for the first one )))
Interesting! Would love to have an elaboration video, on:
1. Vocabulary. Some 30% of Scandinavian words are of Low German origin (the Medieval Hansa merchants left huge footprints). Few of them reached Iceland, what about the Faroes?
2. Grammar. Scandinavian grammar is simple. Icelandic grammar is very complex. What about Faroese grammar?
Faroese seems almost as complex as icelandic grammar. My guess is though that it might be even a bit simpler and easier.
The Hansas left their mark indeed on our language. Compare to landsmaal/nynorsk, we mostly have the same vocabulary. If I recall correctly, we had regular trade with Bergen up till til 1600s, a city very much influenced by low german.
Also it differs from language (and dialect), how much low german has influenced the languages. I think standard danish has up to 50%? Of their vocabulary from plat?
Either way, that's how we got words like "smal" and "små", in the same language. Same words, but different meanings.
Btw, "radio" in faroese is called "útvarp". "Varpa" is to throw, coming from low german. High german has "werfen".
I was an exchange student (from the US) to Denmark for six months in 1993. I am all sorts of proud of myself for how much of these languages I still understood!!! 😁
Well they're all relatively grammatically tame and easy yo remember, faroese and Icelandic are the only ones who still have grammatical genders and cases
I was an exchange student in Sweden two years before and yeah, still understand a lot, even some of Faroese. Though because I lived further north in Sweden, I actually found the Swedish guy a bit difficult to understand as the Skånska accent is quite different to a more northern Swedish accent.
As a native English speaker who has studied Swedish a bit, there were sentences in every language that I understood and many words in each I did not. For my first time hearing Faroese, I was surprised at how familiar it was.
I think the words chosen were a bit too easy.
As a Swedish person who lived on the Faroe Islands for almost a year (even though it was around 15 years ago) this was such a fun video to watch and brought back a lot of great memories!
Man, I love your vids Norbert. They’re like asmr
18:31 - I know he's Swedish and all, but Gustaf just _nailed_ it with that pronunciation of Danish *hvid* , even Michael smiled. 😁
He's from Skåne, so it's cheating ;-)
@@oskich Oh well, no wonder he nailed it, then! 😁
Awesome job, Johan. This was a great video. :)
Thank you, @Mina McVinnie. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I love the Faroe islands and their people, I will go visit
Great video and great project :)
You should do the same video with people from different places along the coast of Norway (not east) where the dialects are more similar to old norse. That would be so interesting, because you would recognize the same words i.e «Hvussu hevur tú tað» Would be very simililar to «Koss he du det?» I think there is a lot of links there 😊
I’m from Finland and I have visited Faroe Islands in June 2016.
I love seeing the ones where they all just speak to each other in their native language the whole time. Like, they might not be guessing the words perfectly, but the fact that they can all communicate with each other without switching into a common language means they're already pretty mutually intelligible languages! Like, the fact that they were able to work out the distinction between "learn" and "borrow" despite how similar they sounded, just by discussing the meanings in their native languages, was astounding to me.
I'm Gustaf, from the video, and I can tell you that i only understand danish since I'm born and raised in Helsingborg, which is just a 20 minute ferry ride from Helsingør in Denmark. Swedish people from the very south may understand some Danish, but the rest of the country usually don't understand more than a word here and there. They sometimes say that Danish sounds like somebody trying to speak with searing hot porridge in their mouth 😆
@@gyrran Oh, very interesting! As a native speaker of English, I definitely had to work really hard to properly pronounce my one Danish friend’s name. XD
Geat to see Faroese - really interesting. Surprised to see 'tarvur' which souds similar to Wesh 'tarw' (bull). As a Welsh speaker who speaks no Scandinavian language, Norwegian seems to be the easiest one to 'hear' and pick up words which I may be familiar with from my limited German.
The Faroese word tarvur (as well as Icelandic tarfur) is actually a borrowing from Middle Irish. I know that the Scottish Gaelic modern form is tarbh and it's probably a cognate to Welsh tarw.
@@johanpeturdam Also cognate with Latin taurus, Greek ταυρος, and possibly Hebrew שור (shor, ox), where the /ʃ/ was originally /θ/. It's suspected that PIE borrowed the word from Proto-Semitic or they both borrowed it from the same other language.
But honestly you can see the similarity between tarvur and tjur or words like that. It's the same root.
@@ShishiSonson Yes, it is. Faroese has retained the Germanic root too in the form of tjórur and tjórneyt both of which are archaic ways of saying oksi.
@@johanpeturdam I was reading that in old Faroese they said tjórur more than tarvur, but I wonder where the pronunciation would be similar.
I'm a native English speaker and I've always felt a bit guilty that my first language is the one other people have to learn to talk to people across the world, particularly given that's largely the case because of my own country's historical colonial past. So I always try to learn as much as possible of the main or one of the main languages of any country I go to on holiday so I'm not just expecting the locals to speak English to me. I usually spend a few months on it beforehand. Sometimes, it works well. For example, on holiday in Prague with my 6yo son, I took him to the Lego place and had an exchange with a cashier there who was not very confident in English and she looked so relieved that I could manage enough Czech to complete our transaction and general chat. So I really do try. However, this all broke down last year when I went to Iceland for the first time. I tried. But an Icelander friend of mine told me in advance: "we really prefer you speak in English rather than halting Icelandic". It's true that Icelandic is bloody difficult for foreigners to learn to speak fluently, and I couldn't. So I swallowed my pride and spoke in English, just keeping a couple of tiny phrases like "I don't speak Icelandic" and "I'm Scottish" in my back pocket to impress the locals with. Then, one evening, I met a few lovely Icelanders in a bar. One of them had lived and worked in the Netherlands and I explained my take on not wanting to assume people would just speak English to me wherever I went and he actually looked quite stern and declared "EVERYONE should speak English." As if he were quite annoyed that not everyone had made the effort. I laughed. Anyway, why am I saying this? Because Faroese sounds like a cute version of Icelandic to my foreign ears, that's all.
Guilty??? Come on
Guilt complexes are never good
What sound corresponds to "ð" in Faroese? I hear no sound at all, maybe a slightly longer vowel before "ð". in Icelandic it's a clear "ð" sound, like in English.
I heard it more like the "w" in English, but Idk if it is always pronounced like this.
@@mohamadmosa8116 Yes, sometimes it's a slight "w", but more commonly nothing at all.
This letter is (almost) silent in Faroese. Like many occurrences of "d" in Danish.
Well, no sound corresponds to it. Ð is completely lost in Faroese but in cases where no consonant would leave a hiatus, we compensate by adding a glide. This is usually a /j/, /v/, or /w/ depending on the preceding vowel.
Great video! It would be interesting if you could get together someone who speaks Elfdalian (a language spoken by 2000 people in Sweden) with someone who speaks Icelandic or faroese and see if they can understand each other!
I'm Icelandic and have observed it, i find a lot of mutual understanding.
@@andriandrason1318 Awesome! That's fascinating! I'm a native swedish speaker and I can't understand much elfdalian at all even when it's written.
i adore it when the nordic circlejerk appears. i think that dansk is the most beautiful language in the whole world, and my sentiments towards that statement will never change, but on the other hand it is the fist time a lad from the Faroese islands speaks at really slow speed so me, for instance, has a chnace to enjoy it, feel it, actuallt try to bear it, understand it, thus grand great big and vast thank you Johan, you're amazing!
Norbert, we love you! Hilsen fra Sibirien.
Thank you. And I'm glad you liked it.
And your circlejerk comment made me rofl so hard. :D
I totally agree with you about the beauty of the Danish language. Especially when it's pronounced the way Michael or Jacob Matthiesen (from the Norwegian video) do it.
@Mikael Brink Frederiksen oh yeah, 've been there, heard it all :D They just dont get the melody as I umm.. call it.
@@johanpeturdam It was quite a lovely and nice experience and I'm really happy now :D
I taught myself old Norse and I read quite often. I also speak Norwegian (not natively) and I'm amazed of how much of this that I understood. It's amazing how similar all these languages are. I was able to guess all of these.
As a German Native Faroese is very difficult to understand just by listening but I have to say that reading doesn't help so much then.
The other scandinavian languages are good to understand especially reading them. I can understand Norsk also by hearing because I have learned it for a time. But I think I forgot the most
Interesting, Icelandic is probably the language most related to Faroese, but still different enough, that as an Icelander, I had to listen really closely to understand what Johan was saying. Faroese also seems to mix in some Danish, Swedish, or simply Scandinavian words.
This conversation is fascinating. I know English and Spanish. I came here to hear Faroese and to get a glimpse of what it sounds like. Not sure exactly which language each person is speaking all the time.
Number 5 in Norwegian can also be just like the Faroese word Vatn, we have two writing systems in Norway, Nynorsk, wich is very similiar to Faroese and Swedish and Bokmål wich is very similiar to Danish
I was looking at TROM in which Faroese is spoken. I was astonished that there were people speaking Danish (of whom I suppose they ARE Danish). But Faroese is so strange and different from the other languages, which I myself being West-flemish do understand quite well. Especially Norwegian . And Danish and Swedish more or less but I do read all of them easily and I almost always know what the texts are about. There is a lot of Ingveonic resemblance between our dialect and those languages. For example. Old English and our dialect is quite similar. As is Afrikaans. Can anyone explain the mutual understanding between Danish and Faroese?
Faroese people learn Danish in school which is why they understood the Danes in the show. As for the two Danes in the show:
1. The woman had lived in the Faroes for years, had a husband and children there and understood Faroese by now. It’s very common for Danes who have moved to the islands to continue speaking Danish despite having learned Faroese fluently, because it’s easier for them.
2. The guy was Faroese but had apparently lived in Denmark for most of his life which is why he now spoke Danish rather than Faroese. And why he understood Faroese.
If a Dane hasn’t learned Faroese, they generally don’t understand much.
Kem (who?) , ka (what?), kor (where?) is commonplace in large parts of Norway. In Oslo, Kristiansand, Hamar "hvem, hva, hvor"
The faroese R is almost the same as in polish RZ and north-coast norwegian R + small parts of Sweden
As an English speaker not knowing any of these languages I was surprised to be able to follow the conversation at times by listening and reading. I recognized "cow, bull, ox, stud, gelding" and the words related to Latin "taurus." I also guessed "apple" before they showed it because I picked up "fruit" and "green." It was a lucky guess because I didn't think the Faroe islands would have a word for lime.
It was apple
@@TheRedleg69 Yes, I guessed it correctly because I thought of a fruit that was green.
Latin taurus? Why not Lithuanian turas? It's a common IE-feature, not separate Italic or Baltic or Slavic (and so forth).
@@vlagavulvin3847 because the commenter is an English speaker and Latin influenced the English language more than Lithuanian did (sorry)
Obviously ;)
Tarvur, tarfur á íslensku eru tökuorð úr fornírskunni/ gelískunni: tarbh. En samt er einnig þetta orð í raun og veru komið frá sömu indóevropsku rótinni og tyr, tjur eða einnig þjór á íslensku. Einnig taurus og torro. Tarvur, tarfur in Icelandic are borrowed words from Old Irish/Gaelic: tarbh. But even this word actually comes from the same Indo-European root as tyr, tjur or also þjór in Icelandic. Even taurus and torro.
*Jeg kan lese norsk, og når jeg ser på en færøysk tekst kan jeg forstå ganske mye av den. Men når jeg hører talespråket er det like uforståelig for meg som islandsk!*
Ert tù suringur
Really? I would have thought you would be the best one of them all to understand Faeroese. Written it seems close.
I haven't heard this language before,but it sounds melodic to me.I think that because the Faroe Islands are isolated,Faroese has a different accent from other Scandinavian languages.
The accent sounds similar to northern Norwegian.
Hello! Do you think you could get an elfdalian speaker on the show? Really nice video btw, greetings from Sweden
Now that would be a lot of fun!
@@MarkRose1337 Yes holy shit. Get a Swede, Icelandic and Dutch or Afrikaans person on it.
Maybe someone speaking Närpes dialect as well.
As a German I could guess all words, but honestly I only got some catchwords right, not whole sentences. He choose pretty easy things to guess, but many words are similar to German words.
Didn't know I understood Faroese. Sounds like a combo of Swedish and Icelandic. SOOOOO frustrating when they didn't get that he meant BULL, and took so long to get it. Hahaha! Fun challenge.
Thanks Norman and all participants! I guessed "cow, grapes, author, n/a, n/a" using my intermediate German and A1 Swedish (native English speaker)
2:28
WTF
Ser rødt, is a normal thing to say in Danish and is often used regarding bulls. Though bulls don’t see colors.
I think it’s the same in Swedish and Norwegian
I love these challenges:
the ones with Nordic languages - I'm danish
the ones where German is involved - I've German as a second language
the one with English in different versions
So keep them coming please, it's such fun.
Yes. I agree. It is really entertaining. DR, SVT and NRK should make some shows like this together.
@@Pracedru Ja, det ville være så oplagt - især hvor danskere og svenskere kan finde på at snakke engelsk med hinanden GRRRRRRH
Men dansk TV har jo efterhånden det princip at kun keendisser må medvirke i udsendelser, hvor man udfordrer hinandens viden - eller mangel på samme :-((( .