The other day I meet a Faroe Islander, and one of the things we talked about was mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian languages.
I was under the impression that Faroese and Icelandic were closely related, and assumed that there would be quite a bit of mutually intelligibility between them.
She told me that this is true to some extent – if you know Faroese, you can understand written Icelandic quite well, but spoken Icelandic is more difficult to follow.
I also thought that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are more or less mutually intelligible. I’ve been learning Swedish for a while now, and can make some sense of written Danish and Norwegian, and understand the spoken languages to a limited extent.
Everyone in the Faroe Islands learns Danish, which is very close to Norwegian, so they can understand both languages. According to my Faroese informant though, Swedish differs more from the other Scandinavian languages and is more difficult to understand.
If you speak one or more of the Scandinavian languages, how much can you understand the others?
I learnt some basic norwegian after living there for a year. I can now eavesdrop on swedes and danes at more or less the same level of comprehension as my norwegian, and I can also guess a large number of words in those three languages.
I don’t speak any of these languages, so my opinion is based on hearsay. Most people tell me that there is some degree of mutual intelligibility between Danish and Norwegian, but that although Danes can understand Swedish Swedes have great difficulty understanding Danish. A bit like Spanish and Portuguese: Portuguese people can understand Spanish, but Spaniards cannot understand Portuguese at all (Portuguese Portuguese, anyway: Brazilian is not quite so impenetrable). In all cases I’m referring to the spoken languages: written Portuguese is much the same as Spanish with weird spelling. I think Swedes have no trouble reading Danish or Norwegian. Icelandic is another matter.
Based on two years in Sweden, of which i had eight months in SFI classes for formal instruction, I’d say that Norwegian is considerable easier to understand, like an American listening to a Scottish accent. Danish on the other hand is still quite foreign. Both can be read with some ease.
yes I’d say danish is the outlier of three, to me it sounds more closed-mouth, monotonous and mushed together than SE and NO.
I find that I can make even non-native speakers of Swedish understand me when I speak Danish, but I have to speak really slowly and clearly and I have to phrase sentences carefully, picking words that I know also exist in Swedish (or English).
It works more or less like that with Portuguese and Spanish: if Portuguese is spoken slowly and carefully enough, and including vowels, Spanish speakers can make sense of it. However, they also have a special version called Portuñol, that is not only spoken slowly and carefully and including vowels, but also replaces common endings like -ção with their Spanish equivalents, -ción in this case. My understanding is that the difference between Portuguese and Danish is that one sounds to foreign ears as if they leave out the vowels, and the other as if they leave out the consonants.
A few years ago we took a taxi from Lisbon Airport to Oeiras. Initially the driver tried to converse in Portuguese, but when he realized that neither I nor my wife (who is a native Spanish speaker) could understand anything he switched to Portuñol, and after that it was easy. Do Danes have anything equivalent for talking with Swedes?
Well, there are many names for speaking “Scandinavian” i.e. when Scandinavians speak to each other mostly in their own languages: skandinavisk, blandinavisk (blande means to mix), Öresundska, Skavlan-svenska (I’ll let you google that one), etc.
But most Danes are blissfully unaware of what exactly makes Danish difficult to understand for other Scandinavians. So generally they just speak slowly (initially at least) and avoid any false friends that they happen be aware of.
Although I don’t speak any Scandinavian language your question reminded me of a funny sketch about Danish that I had seen a while ago. I don’t personally know the source, though I had read that it was from a Swedish television comedy show, which the subtitles hint at. And the dialog being in English was unexpected. I wonder what the reaction of Danes and Swedes to this is.
Being a Danish expat in another Nordic country I regularly meet people saying: “Oh, you’re from Denmark, you have to see this sketch, it’s hilarious”. It was funny the first three times…
It’s from a Norwegian TV show.
And while Danes don’t actually have any problems understanding each other (assuming they speak standard Danish which most Danes do), it’s not so far from the truth when it comes to interscandinavian communication. A Norwegian walking in to a shop in Denmark might well experience something like this despite the fact that you could reasonably consider Danish and Norwegian to be two regional varieties of the same language.
It does happen that people just pretend to understand to avoid embarrassment.