Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, just like Czech and Slovak. It's nice when two nations understand each other and don't need translators. As far as Scandinavian languages are concerned, Swedish leads the way for me :)
You also don't need translators between Norwegian and Danish (just slower conversation). Norwegians are in general the best at understanding other Scandinavian languages and Swedes have the most trouble (but there are probably more factors at play than just the languages themselves!) The dialect continuum continues down to Denmark btw, so Northern dialects of Danish has three genders like west Norwegian (which also has the Danish r), and southern Swedish also has the guttural r and has a lot of Danish loan words and more danish sounding vowels. Bornholm Danish is VERY close to southern Swedish and so forth. This video is mostly talking about the dialects of the capital cities (which is also probably what a foreigner would be learning) but mind you that the reality is of course more nuanced. I would guess Oslo Norwegian/Bokmål is the most widely understood dialect in Scandinavia, because it is pronounced very close to how it is written and has a lot of influence from both Danish and Swedish. It is however also perhaps the most singsongy dialect, so other dialects/languages will make a bit fun of you haha
I learned some Danish as an exchange student over a summer, then got in a situation where my school dropped Danish instruction but still offered Swedish. So I took that. Then Danish came back and I was taking both for a couple years. I was very good (I'm told) at keeping them separate, but it takes constant practice. In the years since, as I've gotten busy with other things, I make far more mistakes when switching now. As you allude to, there are far more Swedish speakers (Swedes also tend to be better at promoting their national "brand" than Danes are) so I've gone from being equally good to being better at Swedish now. There are just more opportunities to practice it.
you will. odin will bless you, and you will be able to stand the smell of surstrøming. congratulations my brethren welcome to the scandinavian family. here have a cod and dont sit besides me.
I am Danish. If you want to learn a Scandinavian language, take Swedish. Why? Because the three of us understands each other, but speaking Swedish, you will do fine in Finland, too. Swedish is an official language in Finland, therefore many Finns speak Swedish.
As a northern swede I would say it's a bit generous to say that the three of us understand each other. Danes have to adapt a bit to be understood, I can read danish semi fluently, but as soon as potato mouth comes in it's over :D Most norwegian is very easy to understand though. I must admit, although I wish it was different, that I prefer swapping to english with danes. It would probably be quite easy with a little bit of exposure to get used to the danish sounds in order to understand spoken danish.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 I have Swedish friends, we meet about once each 2 years. The first 5-10 minutes I have to adjust my ears and brain. After that, we talk fine. It happens there is a word I don't understand, then I'll just ask. There are maybe 10 words or so, you need to learn, such as "rolig". It has completely different meaning in Swedish and Danish. "Taske" also has a different meaning 🙂
As a Finn I can say that ” by speaking Swedish You will do fine in Finland too” is a bit overexcarated. Altough technically Swedish is official language in Finland due to historical reasons, only about 5% of Finland’s population speaks it as their first language and the amount has been declining since the Finnish independence. I can definently say that you can do fine with speaking Swedish in Åland, around the city of Vaasa and in some smaller villages in Ostrobothnia and southern Finland. However for an example in the capital city metro area, where almost 1/4 of the whole Finland’s population lives you will be looked weird if you go to shops, restaurant etc… and start speaking Swedish. And It’s the same story in pretty much all the eastern and northern parts too.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 It’s not completly monolingual. Altough Swedish is definently the dominant language there, about 10% of the Ålands population speaks Finnish, and many people there have atleast some knowledge of Finnish because it was only recently removed from being mandatory to study at schools.
I am am a Swede with a lot of childhood time in northwest Skåne but most of my time has been in Stockholm. Skåne is the southernmost "landscape" of Sweden. During the time in Skåne I was exposed to some Danish as we could listen to a Danish radio station (which played more and better pop- and rock music (spoken Danish of course between the pieces of music) than the two Swedish radio channels at the time). This latter area (and also Blekinge and parts of two other neighboring landscapes) was part of Denmark until 1658. After that Danish was banned in these areas - the idea was to teach the former Danes to speak Swedish which resulted in a dialect group - essentially different versions of "skånska" which also includes some vocabulary that is distinct for this area. Today I spend much of my time in the western Blekinge (close to Skåne) and definitely recognize the similarities. With this background I still have to admit that I have much more problems understanding Danish than the two versions of Norwegian but there are Norwegian dialects (or individuals) that also can cause me problems. It feels embarrassing with the large problems I have with Danish and I usually stick to English whenever I visit Denmark. There are also some words which are entirely different from Swedish like - yes the word "different" in Swedish which is "olika". In Danish this is "forskellige" and in Norwegian "forskjellige" or "ulike". A Swede cannot just know the word "forsk(j)ellige" and therefore has to learn it and there are more such examples. Counting in Danish is still a mystery for me (probably learned some of it as a child but forgot it - I am 72 now). It is relatively easy for me to read Danish and but again - Norwegian is the easiest for me to understand. Icelandic is essentially not understandable but sometimes I have tried to read Icelandic texts and recognize a few of the words but the barrier is huge and would require a lot of studies and experience to overcome. There is however one advantage with Swedish that may be forgotten - that many Finns have a Swedish dialect as their native language and even more people in Finland have studied Swedish which helps a lot. There are however Finnish people who don't know any Swedish - Finnish is very different from Swedish - most Swedes will not understand Finnish. A few words here and there can be recognized - for example "street" is "gata" in Swedish and "katu" i Finnish (the letter "g" seems to be rare in Finnish - it is much more of "k"), a few more recent words are essentially the same as English ("golf" is also "golf" in Swedish and Finnish (not "kolf")) but one cannot build a conversation on just a few words like that... Finally it should be noted that Swedish is not native in all of Sweden: There are large areas in northern Sweden where there are two major groups of "Laplandish" (word?) which also stretch into Norway and Finland - I am not the right person to comment Laplandish but the average person from the southern half of Sweden will not understand any of that.
@@sayitinswedish it was hard to unprogram my brain from Norwegian to Swedish and I get by with numbers in Norwegian because they're close enough that people understand me
I really enjoy the singsong sounds of Swedish and its closeness to English. But this is a great explanation. I did wonder what the similarities to the three languages were.
I started off with Norwegian but the 2 written standards and the millions of dialects made me switch to Swedish. Swedish has twice the amount of speakers, the dialects are more similar and it's spoken in Finland so it was like a "gate" to 2 countries.
As a Norwegian, I would also say learn Swedish, and I would say that for two reasons. First because of the dialects in Norway. There are a crazy amount of dialects that can be hard to understand. Second reason is music. There is no language that is as beautiful when sung.
As a Swede (with most of the background from Stockholm and Skåne/Blekinge (southernmost part of Sweden), I am aware of some dialects in southern Sweden which are quite extreme (includes a large glossary of "strange" words - some of these stem from German, others I don't know where they came from) compared to what most people speak in this area.
Oh, really? I'm learning all three (although I've resigned myself to the fact that I will only be learning to read and write in Danish) and Norwegian is definitely my favourite. I think it's beautiful
@@bjorncedervall5291 I have no problem understanding the Skåne dialect. It's weird and charming, but easy to understand. 1st person object pronouns (for instance the Swedish Jag) in different dialects in Norway are jeg, eg, ej, e, æg, æ, I, je, The sentence "I don't understand" in different dialects : -Oslo: jeg forstår ikke. -Bergen: Eg forstår ikkje. -Sunnmøre: Ej forstend'kje. -Oppland: Je' forstår itte. -Trøndelag: Æ forstår itj. And the the words themselves aren't the main differences, since the accents are very different.
I love the idea of mutually intelligible languages. English doesn't really have any, although some dialects are almost like different languages. I've heard Fresian is the closest, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.
Scots dorics and Frisian and Dutch are more closer in inteligibility. I guess in terms of inteligibility with English it's Globish and Ogden English,ISE another idiom out of these sphere today doesn't have inteligibility with hodiern current English. Frisian today is very far from english, English is very mixed and hibrid in higher level that any idiom can't follow today...
The only language like that that English has is scots and maybe east frisian. Unfortunately both languages have more Germanic vocabulary that English doesnt, and both languages are endangered. So they're not super easy to learn without moving to a place where it's spoken. Also some people dont even consider Scots to be its own language, just a dialect of English.
The hurdle with Danish language depends of which part of Sweden You come from. I live on an island outside Gothenburg. The dialect where I live is mixed Danish and Swedish due to trade and wars since Viking age. People from Stockholm dose not understand a word of what I say. However, when I go to Northern Denmark /Jylland/ Aalborg etc . I can speak my own dialect and all Danes understands me, ectcept for counting as they have another version of it.Well I manage now
I live in the south of Sweden (Skåne) and we get a tremendous amount of Danes here in the summer. I don't understand them any more than anyone else and in the local convenience store it's simply easier for them to speak English with the cashier than Danish.
Go for Norwegian. You get the written language of half of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Danish) and half of the spoken language of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Swedish). And no, you don't need to learn Nynorsk. The only reason for someone who wants to learn about Nynorsk is if you plan to move to a Nynorsk municipality. The majority of Norway uses Bokmål when it comes to the written language.
I’ve lived in Norway for most of my life, and you definitely don’t need to learn Nynorsk. It’s enough for a foreigner to know Bokmål, and then you’ll still be fed. I have tons of second and even third generation immigrant friends who are quite bad at nynorsk, and they’re doing well. Even many proper Norwegians don’t know Nynorsk, for that matter.
Bokmål and Nynorsk aren't just different writing systems, they are in fact standards of two separate languages, and while Nynorsk is distinctly West Scandinavian (eg/ek for I is one of the features, for example), Bokmål is indeed more of an assimilated version of Danish which is East Scandinavian.
Like I said in the video, they are different standards in writing, BUT nynorsk is more oriented towards dialects that have more of these traits that are seen as genuine Norwegian. That's true. Hence the difference in pronunciation in my example.
This Swedish guy is not biased at all. Clearly Danish and Norwegian is close to the same language, just pronounced differently, Add the two and you have 10 million people speaking it. So it is a tie. Norwegian is not to far away from German in many ways . Norwegians understand Danes and Swedes - sort of illustrating if you understand Norwegian - you understand all three languages - this is not the cases the other way around. Danes do not fully understand Norwegians and some Swedes also struggle. So given I do not believe we Norwegians are much more intelligent - I will assume that once you know Norwegian - both of the others are easy peasy.
I actually feel bad about how that UA-camr denigrates Denmark and the Danes and would like to teach you that the alliance between Denmark and Norway already started in the Viking Age between the Danish king Svend Tveskæg and the Norwegian king Magnus. An alliance that was maintained throughout the period after the Viking Age and the reason was an aggressive Swedish fraternal people who, under Baltic pressure, wanted to be bigger and more powerful. Historians agree that without that alliance there would be no such thing as Norway today... Norway would have been made Swedish already in the late Viking Age. So far so good. And then to the UA-camr's negative attitudes and condescending attitudes towards Danes, Denmark and our language. If you knew about the Nordic spirit and culture, you would know that by speaking condescendingly and badly about other people's language, culture, appearance, manners and the way they speak... well, you only reveal that envy and jealousy ravage your mind and it is unordinary to exhibit and expose one's weakness so dear youtubers and others who speak ill of our Nordic brothers and sisters... bite your tongue and don't reveal that you have "pain in the ass"!
As for a german / russian, the norwegian language is the easiest for me to pronounce, but having partly swedish heritage, I decided to learn swedish (also to be able to understand most of the scans) also the swedish course was a bit cheaper than the norwegian 😂
Its deep, funny and and cute for non nordics foreigners the first impression that danish rwegian and swede are the same idiom in writng and spell, only impressions 😅😅😅😅 Between nordics germanics natives norwegian and swedish are brothers and danish today seems the french nordic cousin, that talks eating the finals letters. Today i can understand and see that, but in past years i couldn't see clearly this phenomenon in the same cultural linguistic backstage.
Tycker det inte är nämnvärt svårare att läsa nynorsk, men vissa dialekter är givetvis svårare att förstå om man inte är van vid dem, precis som vissa svenska dialekter.
So, might be biased here, but I would go for Norwegian. You can understand both Danish and Sweedish, and because of all the different dialects, they are not so hard on the ears. You are also understood by Finns that speak Sweedish as the languages are really similar, even though you might have to slow down a bit. I have also found that I can read Faeroese and Icelandic quite easily, and if I sat down and learnt some of the peculiarities of them - I would be fluent in less than a year. So, yeah, thats my two cents 😅❤
Norwegian used to be a west Nordic language, but after the Black Death all people who could read and write it died, so at the time the Danish kings who controlled Norway would send danes to do administrative and church work so the Danish language was the prestigious language for few hundred years and so most dialects in the developed east would become more Danish like but would have its original Norwegian pronunciation thus out of this the Norwegian standard Bokmål would emerge. While in the west the dialects were more isolated thus they resemble the insular language more but are kind of in the middle between east and west Nordic and that’s how the Nynorsk standard would emerge a standardised language based on spoken language, but it would be drown closer to Bokmål over the decades and modern dialects mostly resemble the standards.
@@sayitinswedish I'm a Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish) American who has studied both Danish and Norwegian (though not fluent in either). Also, I have become basically "fluent" in another language as well, so learning another language isn't alien to me, BUT what never ceases to amaze me is how well Scandinavians speak such fluent English, particularly American English. Even your last comment, "Pretty much!" was exactly the way an American would have responded and I know exactly what you meant by it.
I'm a bit confused, because I used to watch Scandinavian series and in some of them Swedish and Danish people meet and seem to understand each other quite well (like one is talking in Danish and the other one is answering in Swedish). It isn't true in real life?
if u live in øresunds area ( copenhagen and southern sweden). there is a lot exchange between both countries like people communting, police working together so on. so if u live in copenhagen u are exposed to alot of swedish.
Have you seen the "Islandic standup about nordic neighbors"? Its on youtube, from years ago. I still watch it from time to time because it doesn't ever get old 😂😂😂
So Norwegian has a lot of similarity to Swedish due to proximity, but it also has a lot of similarities to Danish because of previous Danish rule. By this logic, if someone's goal is to understand all three very well, wouldn't that makes Norwegian the best choice? Also, you talk about the dialects of Norway, but again if your goal is to understand everybody in Scandinavia, then studying Norwegian prepares you for understanding them better than studying Swedish does, right?
Yes! I'm fluent in Danish and Swedish, but Norwegian is most definitely the one to choose if you seek to understand everyone in Scandinavia to some extend. Danes generally have a much easier time understanding Norwegian than Swedish. It should be noted however that both Danish and especially Norwegian have many many dialects, and a Norwegian might even have trouble communicating with another Norwegian because of this. Similarly there are some dialects of Danish that I don't understand unless I know some context. The Swedish language also have dialects but they have mostly died out and are nowadays minor in comparison. I would say Oslo Norwegian is comprehensible for most Scandinavians (but it is unrealistic to learn to understand all of the dialects in the region)
Standard Norwegian (bokmål) has the pronunciation closest to Swedish while having the dictionary of Danish (to the point that most international food products will just merge the Danish and Norwegian ingredient list because there's so much overlap). Thus, if you learn Norwegian, you will only need to learn a few key differences in what words are used in Norwegian vs Swedish (e.g. "rolig" means calm in Norwegian, but means fun/funny in Swedish), and you still will struggle to understand wtf danes are saying because they have a potato in their mouth when they speak, but at least the vocabulary is so close that you're much more likely to understand them than a swede would. BUT! You need to completely abandon any idea of learning the dialects or the second written form. That stuff is nonsense and trust me, no one in Norway will ever judge a foreigner for not knowing the dialects.
Embodied by The Lost Vikings. The tiny vocal red-haired one is the Dane, the muscular serious blonde one the Norwegian and the frivolous fat blonde one one the Swede.
Either Norwegian or Swedish. They often say Norwegian is a good middle ground. Idk Bokmål writing is almost identical to Danish. But we do have a ton of different dialects that can be tricky. Both Sweden and Denmark has dialects, but overall Swedish has the least variance - while Danish suffers from being exceedingly hard to pronounce unless perhaps you're French or Dutch or something. Both Norwegians and Danes understand Swedish well enough, though. Norway hands down has the best scenery tho, but there aren't a ton of peeps in the mountains lol. Skål from Norway!
I feel like if you're up for a challenge, from a native English-speaking perspective, Danish is better because Norwegian and Swedish pronunciation(aside from the kj consonant) are much closer to English pronunciation than Danish. I have been casually learning Danish on and off for about 4 years(started as a COVID hobby), and I can understand Swedish and Norwegian at nearly the same level as Danish, simply because they are *almost* Danish but spoken how I would pronounce Danish if I didn't know how Danish pronunciation works. Basically, if you go hard, the easy stuff comes easy.
I learned the hard way that Danish is so incomprehensible to Swedes, that even if you do speak Swedish as a Dane, most Swedes outside of Skåne won't understand what you say if you have any accent. In fact, they understand an Arab that has studied Swedish for a week much better 😂 (no offense to my Arab friends)
If they are so close, would it be ok to learn Swedish and Norwegian together ? Ill need a year or 2 more on spanish but like to plan ahead. I would normally never study 2 languages at same time. But the way you speak of them makes me think it would be ok and wont delay the learning speed too much ? I would still try to speak in the best accent for the language I was speaking ect...
I think i will start learning some of these languages... I just dont know which of them. I also dont have any native friend from these countries. I need to think about it.
German here. I get the impression, Swedish and Danish is a bit like High German and Swiss German. As a German native speaker from Germany, you need extensive training to understand Swiss German dialects.
It's not like that. Swedish you say all the words and consonant etc.. Danish you do not. I can have a conversation with a Norwegian 99% I understand everything. 50% maybe understand a Dane. :/
Pretty much, you could even argue Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are just heavy dialects of the same language. As a Dane i sometimes have a harder time understanding some of the Danish dialects than i do with Swedish or Norwegian.
When I was a kid we had one Swedish channel on TV. With an extra antenna we could also watch one Danish channel. But only those of us who lived in southern Sweden. When the Swedish channel was boring we watched Danish TV instead. Maybe that's why I have no problem understanding Danish, that is "Copenhagen Danish". The Danish they speak in Jutland is more difficult to understand.
I lived in Vienna half my life, and I understand Bavarian quiet well. And Danish and Bavarian have some similarities in the pronouciation, besides the rolling Italian R sound.
I admire all the nordics langs, ancient and modern norse are good to use in all nordics regions culturally. Bökmal Norwegian is for east Scandinavian regions, Nynorsk is for west Scandinavian regions. Norwegian leads cos it's highly flexible and smart. But if you love nordic lirism, arts, passion, joyness, fun, games, tricks, pranks, inventivity, Swedish by far, cos it's very emotional, dengous and cherishful of all Nordic family. 🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻💛💛💛💛
Same, read and write Danish if you know Swedish is easy. But man they eat letters during pronunciation I can't understand what they're saying lol. Like English trying to understand the heavy Irish accent.
I think they say Norwegian is West Norse because it originally was, and that shines through in some elements such as diphthongs, the feminine etc - most of those being emphasized in Nynorsk. However, Bokmål (especially the conservative variation) is pretty much Danish, so East Norse.
Yes, but even the more conservative dialects have "Swedish" traits. It's just not that simple. All the classification is good for is, as you say, to describe some sound changes.
@@sayitinswedish Exactly, the whole West Norse thing is essentially just stuff like "ben" vs "bein" or "rök" vs "röyk", and very few of these forms are actually mandatory in Bokmål. What I do find interesting though is their feminine, which is also optional and I hear is slowly disappearing, especially around Oslo: ei kvinne - kvinna instead of en kvinne - kvinnen. More conservative languages such as Icelandic or Faroese f course also keep it
Det er dejligt, bedstefar! Swedes are always so busy criticizing how Danes don't enunciate..... and then go on and pronounce "sj" like ✨THAT✨ WHAT EVEN IS THAT, JOAKIM. I hold you personally responsible.
“Norwegian” is actually two languages. Bokmål is a variety of Danish and East-Nordic. This is not real Norwegian, as spoken in dialects and written in Nynorsk. Swedes do not in general understand Norwegian. This is a misconception many Norwegians have. They do not. Swedes can with a lot of difficulty and practice understand the East-Nordic dialect of Danish spoken in Oslo.
Well, I guess not. The point I was trying to make is that if you want to understand everything written in the language, books etc. you would need experience in both, which includes learning new spellings and idiomatic constructions.
I actually feel bad about how that UA-camr denigrates Denmark and the Danes and would like to teach you that the alliance between Denmark and Norway already started in the Viking Age between the Danish king Svend Tveskæg and the Norwegian king Magnus. An alliance that was maintained throughout the period after the Viking Age and the reason was an aggressive Swedish fraternal people who, under Baltic pressure, wanted to be bigger and more powerful. Historians agree that without that alliance there would be no such thing as Norway today... Norway would have been made Swedish already in the late Viking Age. So far so good. And then to the UA-camr's negative attitudes and condescending attitudes towards Danes, Denmark and our language. If you knew about the Nordic spirit and culture, you would know that by speaking condescendingly and badly about other people's language, culture, appearance, manners and the way they speak... well, you only reveal that envy and jealousy ravage your mind and it is unordinary to exhibit and expose one's weakness so dear youtubers and others who speak ill of our Nordic brothers and sisters... bite your tongue and don't reveal that you have "pain in the ass"!
@jazibee8269 I blame lenition and the germans and their gutteral R's :p After all we border them, and not our fellow Scandinavian brothers D: By land that is, ofc ;) No Øresund bridges back then D:
Swedish is what happens when a Dane gets a terminal case of the hiccups. But joking aside, Swedish is the most versatile. I speak Danish, but honestly if you're starting out and don't have a preference (family or friend connection) you should start with Swedish. The learning resources are most abundant (movies, books, etc...). You will be able to speak to Danes, Norwegians, and many Fins. Also, Swedish has a single language standard unlike Norwegian, which is a mess.
For starters is Danish in fact the odd kid out? The soundshift of what is today the Scandinavian languages already began during the 800 and the major soundshift of Danish happend during the 1100, long before any of the Scandinavian languages was influenced by middel low German. Old norse had stress accents and neither Faroes or Icelandic, the closest spoken languages to old Norse today, is classified as tonal/musical languages which is the case with Swedish and Norwegian. So Swedish, and in particular Norwegian, quite simpley took a diffrent path evolving into having tonal / musical pronunciation, although it differs throughout Norway from less to very pitchy. In Swedish it seems more stabil throughout the country as less pitchy and in certain regions the pronunciation / soundscape is quite nasal. Danish on the other hand, in particular the varies Jutish dialects and accents, leans more towards western Germanic languages like Dutch, Frisian and northern English. As far as the written standards Swedish is the one that differs the most, Swedish has a significant amount of wotds that differs completly from Danish / Norwegian.
The Danish dropping of consonants and letters is not THAT old. There is written testimony of that by sailors and merchants explaining how odd Danish was beginning to sound.. But this is only as far back as the 16-17 hundreds.. Even from when the R became guttural instead of rolled in the front of the mouth comes from the 16-17 hundreds when French was beginning to dominate the continent...
And if you understand German *and* English, Swedish may be the best choice. Imho Swedish is a mix of both these two languages. Compared to Norwegian which is more similary to Danish and v.v as far as I know.
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Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, just like Czech and Slovak. It's nice when two nations understand each other and don't need translators. As far as Scandinavian languages are concerned, Swedish leads the way for me :)
You also don't need translators between Norwegian and Danish (just slower conversation). Norwegians are in general the best at understanding other Scandinavian languages and Swedes have the most trouble (but there are probably more factors at play than just the languages themselves!)
The dialect continuum continues down to Denmark btw, so Northern dialects of Danish has three genders like west Norwegian (which also has the Danish r), and southern Swedish also has the guttural r and has a lot of Danish loan words and more danish sounding vowels. Bornholm Danish
is VERY close to southern Swedish and so forth.
This video is mostly talking about the dialects of the capital cities (which is also probably what a foreigner would be learning) but mind you that the reality is of course more nuanced.
I would guess Oslo Norwegian/Bokmål is the most widely understood dialect in Scandinavia, because it is pronounced very close to how it is written and has a lot of influence from both Danish and Swedish. It is however also perhaps the most singsongy dialect, so other dialects/languages will make a bit fun of you haha
I learned some Danish as an exchange student over a summer, then got in a situation where my school dropped Danish instruction but still offered Swedish. So I took that. Then Danish came back and I was taking both for a couple years. I was very good (I'm told) at keeping them separate, but it takes constant practice. In the years since, as I've gotten busy with other things, I make far more mistakes when switching now. As you allude to, there are far more Swedish speakers (Swedes also tend to be better at promoting their national "brand" than Danes are) so I've gone from being equally good to being better at Swedish now. There are just more opportunities to practice it.
What do you think of the grotesko joke
I'm starting to learn swedish and it seems like I will unlock powers if I become fluent in it.
you will. odin will bless you, and you will be able to stand the smell of surstrøming. congratulations my brethren welcome to the scandinavian family. here have a cod and dont sit besides me.
You'll unlock the superpower of not being able to understand Danish any more than you do now.
I am Danish. If you want to learn a Scandinavian language, take Swedish. Why? Because the three of us understands each other, but speaking Swedish, you will do fine in Finland, too. Swedish is an official language in Finland, therefore many Finns speak Swedish.
As a northern swede I would say it's a bit generous to say that the three of us understand each other. Danes have to adapt a bit to be understood, I can read danish semi fluently, but as soon as potato mouth comes in it's over :D Most norwegian is very easy to understand though.
I must admit, although I wish it was different, that I prefer swapping to english with danes.
It would probably be quite easy with a little bit of exposure to get used to the danish sounds in order to understand spoken danish.
@@alexanderjohansson8133 I have Swedish friends, we meet about once each 2 years. The first 5-10 minutes I have to adjust my ears and brain. After that, we talk fine. It happens there is a word I don't understand, then I'll just ask.
There are maybe 10 words or so, you need to learn, such as "rolig". It has completely different meaning in Swedish and Danish. "Taske" also has a different meaning 🙂
As a Finn I can say that ” by speaking Swedish You will do fine in Finland too” is a bit overexcarated.
Altough technically Swedish is official language in Finland due to historical reasons, only about 5% of Finland’s population speaks it as their first language and the amount has been declining since the Finnish independence.
I can definently say that you can do fine with speaking Swedish in Åland, around the city of Vaasa and in some smaller villages in Ostrobothnia and southern Finland. However for an example in the capital city metro area, where almost 1/4 of the whole Finland’s population lives you will be looked weird if you go to shops, restaurant etc… and start speaking Swedish. And It’s the same story in pretty much all the eastern and northern parts too.
@@1h30minsmusic2 Yeah, Åland is monolingual swedish, so you wouldnt do fine with finnish there :D
@@alexanderjohansson8133 It’s not completly monolingual. Altough Swedish is definently the dominant language there, about 10% of the Ålands population speaks Finnish, and many people there have atleast some knowledge of Finnish because it was only recently removed from being mandatory to study at schools.
I am am a Swede with a lot of childhood time in northwest Skåne but most of my time has been in Stockholm. Skåne is the southernmost "landscape" of Sweden. During the time in Skåne I was exposed to some Danish as we could listen to a Danish radio station (which played more and better pop- and rock music (spoken Danish of course between the pieces of music) than the two Swedish radio channels at the time). This latter area (and also Blekinge and parts of two other neighboring landscapes) was part of Denmark until 1658. After that Danish was banned in these areas - the idea was to teach the former Danes to speak Swedish which resulted in a dialect group - essentially different versions of "skånska" which also includes some vocabulary that is distinct for this area. Today I spend much of my time in the western Blekinge (close to Skåne) and definitely recognize the similarities.
With this background I still have to admit that I have much more problems understanding Danish than the two versions of Norwegian but there are Norwegian dialects (or individuals) that also can cause me problems. It feels embarrassing with the large problems I have with Danish and I usually stick to English whenever I visit Denmark. There are also some words which are entirely different from Swedish like - yes the word "different" in Swedish which is "olika". In Danish this is "forskellige" and in Norwegian "forskjellige" or "ulike". A Swede cannot just know the word "forsk(j)ellige" and therefore has to learn it and there are more such examples. Counting in Danish is still a mystery for me (probably learned some of it as a child but forgot it - I am 72 now).
It is relatively easy for me to read Danish and but again - Norwegian is the easiest for me to understand. Icelandic is essentially not understandable but sometimes I have tried to read Icelandic texts and recognize a few of the words but the barrier is huge and would require a lot of studies and experience to overcome.
There is however one advantage with Swedish that may be forgotten - that many Finns have a Swedish dialect as their native language and even more people in Finland have studied Swedish which helps a lot. There are however Finnish people who don't know any Swedish - Finnish is very different from Swedish - most Swedes will not understand Finnish. A few words here and there can be recognized - for example "street" is "gata" in Swedish and "katu" i Finnish (the letter "g" seems to be rare in Finnish - it is much more of "k"), a few more recent words are essentially the same as English ("golf" is also "golf" in Swedish and Finnish (not "kolf")) but one cannot build a conversation on just a few words like that...
Finally it should be noted that Swedish is not native in all of Sweden: There are large areas in northern Sweden where there are two major groups of "Laplandish" (word?) which also stretch into Norway and Finland - I am not the right person to comment Laplandish but the average person from the southern half of Sweden will not understand any of that.
I speak a little Norwegian and it's pretty good for when I visit Sweden as they're quite close but then I get them mixed up
I can imagine that it's easy to mix up. I mean I mix up Danish and Norwegian.
@@sayitinswedish it was hard to unprogram my brain from Norwegian to Swedish and I get by with numbers in Norwegian because they're close enough that people understand me
@@Letthice are you living in sweden?
I really enjoy the singsong sounds of Swedish and its closeness to English. But this is a great explanation. I did wonder what the similarities to the three languages were.
It's just scratching the surface!
I started off with Norwegian but the 2 written standards and the millions of dialects made me switch to Swedish. Swedish has twice the amount of speakers, the dialects are more similar and it's spoken in Finland so it was like a "gate" to 2 countries.
As a Norwegian, I would also say learn Swedish, and I would say that for two reasons. First because of the dialects in Norway. There are a crazy amount of dialects that can be hard to understand.
Second reason is music. There is no language that is as beautiful when sung.
AWWW thats like the best compliment you can give a language in a sense.
Thanks! /tack söta bror
As a Swede (with most of the background from Stockholm and Skåne/Blekinge (southernmost part of Sweden), I am aware of some dialects in southern Sweden which are quite extreme (includes a large glossary of "strange" words - some of these stem from German, others I don't know where they came from) compared to what most people speak in this area.
Oh, really? I'm learning all three (although I've resigned myself to the fact that I will only be learning to read and write in Danish) and Norwegian is definitely my favourite. I think it's beautiful
@@bjorncedervall5291 I have no problem understanding the Skåne dialect. It's weird and charming, but easy to understand. 1st person object pronouns (for instance the Swedish Jag) in different dialects in Norway are jeg, eg, ej, e, æg, æ, I, je,
The sentence "I don't understand" in different dialects :
-Oslo: jeg forstår ikke.
-Bergen: Eg forstår ikkje.
-Sunnmøre: Ej forstend'kje.
-Oppland: Je' forstår itte.
-Trøndelag: Æ forstår itj.
And the the words themselves aren't the main differences, since the accents are very different.
@Ugleseth Can you recommend nice Swedish music, sung in Swedish?
Keep going man , thanks a lot
I love the idea of mutually intelligible languages. English doesn't really have any, although some dialects are almost like different languages. I've heard Fresian is the closest, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.
Fresian should be the closest, yes, but is still pretty far away in terms of mutually intelligibility.
Scots dorics and Frisian and Dutch are more closer in inteligibility.
I guess in terms of inteligibility with English it's Globish and Ogden English,ISE another idiom out of these sphere today doesn't have inteligibility with hodiern current English. Frisian today is very far from english, English is very mixed and hibrid in higher level that any idiom can't follow today...
i would say probably scots and english
That's not really true. I understand about 80% of Scots, and I'm a native English speaker.
The only language like that that English has is scots and maybe east frisian. Unfortunately both languages have more Germanic vocabulary that English doesnt, and both languages are endangered. So they're not super easy to learn without moving to a place where it's spoken.
Also some people dont even consider Scots to be its own language, just a dialect of English.
2:11 AAHHAHAHAH THE YOUNG ROYALS FANDOM GATHERR.. HE HAS FIGURED OUT WHY WE ARE HERE
The hurdle with Danish language depends of which part of Sweden You come from. I live on an island outside Gothenburg. The dialect where I live is mixed Danish and Swedish due to trade and wars since Viking age. People from Stockholm dose not understand a word of what I say. However, when I go to Northern Denmark /Jylland/ Aalborg etc . I can speak my own dialect and all Danes understands me, ectcept for counting as they have another version of it.Well I manage now
I live in the south of Sweden (Skåne) and we get a tremendous amount of Danes here in the summer. I don't understand them any more than anyone else and in the local convenience store it's simply easier for them to speak English with the cashier than Danish.
2:47 "Bæstefar, jeg kan ikke snakker Dansk!", "Det kan jeg ikke heller, høhøhø."
Go for Norwegian. You get the written language of half of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Danish) and half of the spoken language of Scandinavia (Norwegian and Swedish). And no, you don't need to learn Nynorsk. The only reason for someone who wants to learn about Nynorsk is if you plan to move to a Nynorsk municipality. The majority of Norway uses Bokmål when it comes to the written language.
I’ve lived in Norway for most of my life, and you definitely don’t need to learn Nynorsk. It’s enough for a foreigner to know Bokmål, and then you’ll still be fed. I have tons of second and even third generation immigrant friends who are quite bad at nynorsk, and they’re doing well. Even many proper Norwegians don’t know Nynorsk, for that matter.
Bokmål and Nynorsk aren't just different writing systems, they are in fact standards of two separate languages, and while Nynorsk is distinctly West Scandinavian (eg/ek for I is one of the features, for example), Bokmål is indeed more of an assimilated version of Danish which is East Scandinavian.
Like I said in the video, they are different standards in writing, BUT nynorsk is more oriented towards dialects that have more of these traits that are seen as genuine Norwegian. That's true. Hence the difference in pronunciation in my example.
Love that you sneaked Grotesco and Kamelåså in there ;D
Of course!
Kamelåså is the best kind of food.
I got my potatoes and ready to learn some Danish 😊
Thank you for the explanation.
This Swedish guy is not biased at all. Clearly Danish and Norwegian is close to the same language, just pronounced differently, Add the two and you have 10 million people speaking it. So it is a tie. Norwegian is not to far away from German in many ways . Norwegians understand Danes and Swedes - sort of illustrating if you understand Norwegian - you understand all three languages - this is not the cases the other way around. Danes do not fully understand Norwegians and some Swedes also struggle. So given I do not believe we Norwegians are much more intelligent - I will assume that once you know Norwegian - both of the others are easy peasy.
Tag bare på dig at nordmænd er sprogligt dygtigere end svenskere og danskere... det er min erfaring.. danelove❤
I actually feel bad about how that UA-camr denigrates Denmark and the Danes and would like to teach you that the alliance between Denmark and Norway already started in the Viking Age between the Danish king Svend Tveskæg and the Norwegian king Magnus. An alliance that was maintained throughout the period after the Viking Age and the reason was an aggressive Swedish fraternal people who, under Baltic pressure, wanted to be bigger and more powerful. Historians agree that without that alliance there would be no such thing as Norway today... Norway would have been made Swedish already in the late Viking Age. So far so good.
And then to the UA-camr's negative attitudes and condescending attitudes towards Danes, Denmark and our language. If you knew about the Nordic spirit and culture, you would know that by speaking condescendingly and badly about other people's language, culture, appearance, manners and the way they speak... well, you only reveal that envy and jealousy ravage your mind and it is unordinary to exhibit and expose one's weakness so dear youtubers and others who speak ill of our Nordic brothers and sisters... bite your tongue and don't reveal that you have "pain in the ass"!
Icelandic is the one for me, the one I wanna do after much consideration
As for a german / russian, the norwegian language is the easiest for me to pronounce, but having partly swedish heritage, I decided to learn swedish (also to be able to understand most of the scans) also the swedish course was a bit cheaper than the norwegian 😂
Its deep, funny and and cute for non nordics foreigners the first impression that danish rwegian and swede are the same idiom in writng and spell, only impressions 😅😅😅😅
Between nordics germanics natives norwegian and swedish are brothers and danish today seems the french nordic cousin, that talks eating the finals letters. Today i can understand and see that, but in past years i couldn't see clearly this phenomenon in the same cultural linguistic backstage.
Som svensk, hur svårt är det för dig att förstå nynorsk jämfört med bokmål? Och de olika norska dialekterna? Jag är nyfiken
Tack för videorna Joakim!
Tycker det inte är nämnvärt svårare att läsa nynorsk, men vissa dialekter är givetvis svårare att förstå om man inte är van vid dem, precis som vissa svenska dialekter.
So, might be biased here, but I would go for Norwegian. You can understand both Danish and Sweedish, and because of all the different dialects, they are not so hard on the ears. You are also understood by Finns that speak Sweedish as the languages are really similar, even though you might have to slow down a bit. I have also found that I can read Faeroese and Icelandic quite easily, and if I sat down and learnt some of the peculiarities of them - I would be fluent in less than a year. So, yeah, thats my two cents 😅❤
Norwegian used to be a west Nordic language, but after the Black Death all people who could read and write it died, so at the time the Danish kings who controlled Norway would send danes to do administrative and church work so the Danish language was the prestigious language for few hundred years and so most dialects in the developed east would become more Danish like but would have its original Norwegian pronunciation thus out of this the Norwegian standard Bokmål would emerge. While in the west the dialects were more isolated thus they resemble the insular language more but are kind of in the middle between east and west Nordic and that’s how the Nynorsk standard would emerge a standardised language based on spoken language, but it would be drown closer to Bokmål over the decades and modern dialects mostly resemble the standards.
I have recently read that Norwegian is like "a Swede trying to speak Danish". I don't know if that's true, but it sounds plausible (and fun) to me.
Pretty much!
@@sayitinswedish I'm a Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish) American who has studied both Danish and Norwegian (though not fluent in either). Also, I have become basically "fluent" in another language as well, so learning another language isn't alien to me, BUT what never ceases to amaze me is how well Scandinavians speak such fluent English, particularly American English. Even your last comment, "Pretty much!" was exactly the way an American would have responded and I know exactly what you meant by it.
I'm a bit confused, because I used to watch Scandinavian series and in some of them Swedish and Danish people meet and seem to understand each other quite well (like one is talking in Danish and the other one is answering in Swedish). It isn't true in real life?
Not so much with Danish and Swedish, no. As a Swede, you need quite a lot of exposure to understand spoken Danish.
if u live in øresunds area ( copenhagen and southern sweden). there is a lot exchange between both countries like people communting, police working together so on. so if u live in copenhagen u are exposed to alot of swedish.
Have you seen the "Islandic standup about nordic neighbors"? Its on youtube, from years ago. I still watch it from time to time because it doesn't ever get old 😂😂😂
I have 😉
So Norwegian has a lot of similarity to Swedish due to proximity, but it also has a lot of similarities to Danish because of previous Danish rule. By this logic, if someone's goal is to understand all three very well, wouldn't that makes Norwegian the best choice? Also, you talk about the dialects of Norway, but again if your goal is to understand everybody in Scandinavia, then studying Norwegian prepares you for understanding them better than studying Swedish does, right?
Yes! I'm fluent in Danish and Swedish, but Norwegian is most definitely the one to choose if you seek to understand everyone in Scandinavia to some extend. Danes generally have a much easier time understanding Norwegian than Swedish. It should be noted however that both Danish and especially Norwegian have many many dialects, and a Norwegian might even have trouble communicating with another Norwegian because of this. Similarly there are some dialects of Danish that I don't understand unless I know some context. The Swedish language also have dialects but they have mostly died out and are nowadays minor in comparison.
I would say Oslo Norwegian is comprehensible for most Scandinavians (but it is unrealistic to learn to understand all of the dialects in the region)
@@kristianemilpaludan1653 Kul, takk for svar 🙂
It's the old story: You say _Jantelagen_ , I say _Janteloven_ ... But we both say _berg_ (and even the Dutch all the way to the Icelanders)
Danish accent sounds more like German or Dutch accent
There is a big difference in prosody there.
Standard Norwegian (bokmål) has the pronunciation closest to Swedish while having the dictionary of Danish (to the point that most international food products will just merge the Danish and Norwegian ingredient list because there's so much overlap). Thus, if you learn Norwegian, you will only need to learn a few key differences in what words are used in Norwegian vs Swedish (e.g. "rolig" means calm in Norwegian, but means fun/funny in Swedish), and you still will struggle to understand wtf danes are saying because they have a potato in their mouth when they speak, but at least the vocabulary is so close that you're much more likely to understand them than a swede would.
BUT! You need to completely abandon any idea of learning the dialects or the second written form. That stuff is nonsense and trust me, no one in Norway will ever judge a foreigner for not knowing the dialects.
Embodied by The Lost Vikings. The tiny vocal red-haired one is the Dane, the muscular serious blonde one the Norwegian and the frivolous fat blonde one one the Swede.
Can swedes, danish, and Norwegians understand Icelandic?
Either Norwegian or Swedish. They often say Norwegian is a good middle ground. Idk Bokmål writing is almost identical to Danish. But we do have a ton of different dialects that can be tricky. Both Sweden and Denmark has dialects, but overall Swedish has the least variance - while Danish suffers from being exceedingly hard to pronounce unless perhaps you're French or Dutch or something. Both Norwegians and Danes understand Swedish well enough, though. Norway hands down has the best scenery tho, but there aren't a ton of peeps in the mountains lol. Skål from Norway!
I feel like if you're up for a challenge, from a native English-speaking perspective, Danish is better because Norwegian and Swedish pronunciation(aside from the kj consonant) are much closer to English pronunciation than Danish. I have been casually learning Danish on and off for about 4 years(started as a COVID hobby), and I can understand Swedish and Norwegian at nearly the same level as Danish, simply because they are *almost* Danish but spoken how I would pronounce Danish if I didn't know how Danish pronunciation works.
Basically, if you go hard, the easy stuff comes easy.
I am Norwegian and i have no problem with Swedish and Danish language.
I learned the hard way that Danish is so incomprehensible to Swedes, that even if you do speak Swedish as a Dane, most Swedes outside of Skåne won't understand what you say if you have any accent. In fact, they understand an Arab that has studied Swedish for a week much better 😂 (no offense to my Arab friends)
4:15
One or two words, _TOPS_ 🗣🗣🗣
Good to know that my random decision was a good decision
If they are so close, would it be ok to learn Swedish and Norwegian together ? Ill need a year or 2 more on spanish but like to plan ahead. I would normally never study 2 languages at same time. But the way you speak of them makes me think it would be ok and wont delay the learning speed too much ? I would still try to speak in the best accent for the language I was speaking ect...
I think i will start learning some of these languages... I just dont know which of them. I also dont have any native friend from these countries. I need to think about it.
I'm from Brazil 🇧🇷 you just gained a subscribe in your channel account.
German here. I get the impression, Swedish and Danish is a bit like High German and Swiss German. As a German native speaker from Germany, you need extensive training to understand Swiss German dialects.
It's not like that. Swedish you say all the words and consonant etc.. Danish you do not. I can have a conversation with a Norwegian 99% I understand everything. 50% maybe understand a Dane. :/
Pretty much, you could even argue Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are just heavy dialects of the same language. As a Dane i sometimes have a harder time understanding some of the Danish dialects than i do with Swedish or Norwegian.
When I was a kid we had one Swedish channel on TV. With an extra antenna we could also watch one Danish channel. But only those of us who lived in southern Sweden. When the Swedish channel was boring we watched Danish TV instead. Maybe that's why I have no problem understanding Danish, that is "Copenhagen Danish". The Danish they speak in Jutland is more difficult to understand.
I lived in Vienna half my life, and I understand Bavarian quiet well.
And Danish and Bavarian have some similarities in the pronouciation, besides the rolling Italian R sound.
3:13 this makes me want to hear Danish people rap
this man is so beautiful omg
The best nordic language is Icelandic, because it is very close to old viking language.
all three languages are fascinating
I admire all the nordics langs, ancient and modern norse are good to use in all nordics regions culturally.
Bökmal Norwegian is for east Scandinavian regions, Nynorsk is for west Scandinavian regions. Norwegian leads cos it's highly flexible and smart.
But if you love nordic lirism, arts, passion, joyness, fun, games, tricks, pranks, inventivity, Swedish by far, cos it's very emotional, dengous and cherishful of all Nordic family.
🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻💛💛💛💛
Same, read and write Danish if you know Swedish is easy. But man they eat letters during pronunciation I can't understand what they're saying lol. Like English trying to understand the heavy Irish accent.
Swedish is not only the easiest nordic language to learn, (still pretty difficult tho)
But it's also the most spoken one
I think they say Norwegian is West Norse because it originally was, and that shines through in some elements such as diphthongs, the feminine etc - most of those being emphasized in Nynorsk. However, Bokmål (especially the conservative variation) is pretty much Danish, so East Norse.
Yes, but even the more conservative dialects have "Swedish" traits. It's just not that simple. All the classification is good for is, as you say, to describe some sound changes.
@@sayitinswedish Exactly, the whole West Norse thing is essentially just stuff like "ben" vs "bein" or "rök" vs "röyk", and very few of these forms are actually mandatory in Bokmål. What I do find interesting though is their feminine, which is also optional and I hear is slowly disappearing, especially around Oslo: ei kvinne - kvinna instead of en kvinne - kvinnen. More conservative languages such as Icelandic or Faroese f course also keep it
Nobody ever mentions the fact that Dutch is the language that most resembles Swedish .
Because it doesn't really. Sometimes it can sound similar but it's more like German in that sense. It's not intelligible like Norwegian and Danish.
I understood the "best salmon" bit!
Det er dejligt, bedstefar! Swedes are always so busy criticizing how Danes don't enunciate..... and then go on and pronounce "sj" like ✨THAT✨ WHAT EVEN IS THAT, JOAKIM. I hold you personally responsible.
Don't forget how much Swedes also reduce without being aware of it and then blame Danes for not enunciating 😜
“Norwegian” is actually two languages. Bokmål is a variety of Danish and East-Nordic. This is not real Norwegian, as spoken in dialects and written in Nynorsk. Swedes do not in general understand Norwegian. This is a misconception many Norwegians have. They do not. Swedes can with a lot of difficulty and practice understand the East-Nordic dialect of Danish spoken in Oslo.
Correction, you do not need to learn Nynorsk if you wanna learn Norwegian
Well, I guess not. The point I was trying to make is that if you want to understand everything written in the language, books etc. you would need experience in both, which includes learning new spellings and idiomatic constructions.
great video allthough i havent watched it yet
2:11 HE KNOWS….
Alv, yo elijo el Islandes xd
I guess it would make sense to learn Norwegian if your out to learn them all :P You already gotten over half the way if you learn it hehe
Danish looks like dutch
"shhvenska"???
finnish
You will have little use of Finnish if you're goal is to understand several Nordic languages at once.
I actually feel bad about how that UA-camr denigrates Denmark and the Danes and would like to teach you that the alliance between Denmark and Norway already started in the Viking Age between the Danish king Svend Tveskæg and the Norwegian king Magnus. An alliance that was maintained throughout the period after the Viking Age and the reason was an aggressive Swedish fraternal people who, under Baltic pressure, wanted to be bigger and more powerful. Historians agree that without that alliance there would be no such thing as Norway today... Norway would have been made Swedish already in the late Viking Age. So far so good.
And then to the UA-camr's negative attitudes and condescending attitudes towards Danes, Denmark and our language. If you knew about the Nordic spirit and culture, you would know that by speaking condescendingly and badly about other people's language, culture, appearance, manners and the way they speak... well, you only reveal that envy and jealousy ravage your mind and it is unordinary to exhibit and expose one's weakness so dear youtubers and others who speak ill of our Nordic brothers and sisters... bite your tongue and don't reveal that you have "pain in the ass"!
Danish sounds like horses speaking
That's not a very nice thing to say about horses.
I think the official description is "like a drunk person with a potato in their mouth".
@@sayitinswedish lol
@@sayitinswedishMy danish heart felt that, but my face is smiling lol all over, even chuggled a little, that was a good one haha :D
@jazibee8269 I blame lenition and the germans and their gutteral R's :p After all we border them, and not our fellow Scandinavian brothers D: By land that is, ofc ;) No Øresund bridges back then D:
EDVIN
Swedish is what happens when a Dane gets a terminal case of the hiccups. But joking aside, Swedish is the most versatile. I speak Danish, but honestly if you're starting out and don't have a preference (family or friend connection) you should start with Swedish. The learning resources are most abundant (movies, books, etc...). You will be able to speak to Danes, Norwegians, and many Fins. Also, Swedish has a single language standard unlike Norwegian, which is a mess.
For starters is Danish in fact the odd kid out? The soundshift of what is today the Scandinavian languages already began during the 800 and the major soundshift of Danish happend during the 1100, long before any of the Scandinavian languages was influenced by middel low German.
Old norse had stress accents and neither Faroes or Icelandic, the closest spoken languages to old Norse today, is classified as tonal/musical languages which is the case with Swedish and Norwegian. So Swedish, and in particular Norwegian, quite simpley took a diffrent path evolving into having tonal / musical pronunciation, although it differs throughout Norway from less to very pitchy. In Swedish it seems more stabil throughout the country as less pitchy and in certain regions the pronunciation / soundscape is quite nasal. Danish on the other hand, in particular the varies Jutish dialects and accents, leans more towards western Germanic languages like Dutch, Frisian and northern English.
As far as the written standards Swedish is the one that differs the most, Swedish has a significant amount of wotds that differs completly from Danish / Norwegian.
I just meant it's the odd one out comparing to the other two _modern_ siblings. The way getting there is another story.
The Danish dropping of consonants and letters is not THAT old. There is written testimony of that by sailors and merchants explaining how odd Danish was beginning to sound.. But this is only as far back as the 16-17 hundreds.. Even from when the R became guttural instead of rolled in the front of the mouth comes from the 16-17 hundreds when French was beginning to dominate the continent...
*Promosm*
And if you understand German *and* English, Swedish may be the best choice. Imho Swedish is a mix of both these two languages. Compared to Norwegian which is more similary to Danish and v.v as far as I know.
That is not true. Danish and Norwegian are similar, but Swedish is not.
Haha!
Du scnacker dansk? Lyder hyggeligt...