Are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian the SAME language?
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#shorts
In this clip I talk about whether Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are actually the same language, and how they COULD be considered such (not by linguists, but by the general populace).
This is a new version of an older Youtube short with upgraded footage and audio.
Nej, ask any of them
if you ask people from Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia if they speak the same language, they’d probably say they don’t, even though they do
@tomsmithok Yeah, the difference in those languages are smaller than those of Arabic dialects
@@GeorgeLarryMIBU and the differences between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are akin to that of German dialects, but those are all considered German, and the Scandinavian languages are apparently “different languages”
@@GeorgeLarryMIBUAnd Chinese dialects too
@Black-And-WhiteWorldview8488 this is wrong. just because the PRC has classified languages other than Mandarin as dialects, does not mean they are mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers cannot understand each other if they haven’t learned the other’s language. Tibetan is also its own language and Tibetan speakers don’t just “know” Mandarin if they never learned it. Most people even if they speak their local languages like Taishanese, Fouzhanese or others that I don’t know of, tend to know some Mandarin or Cantonese, depending on the region they’re from, because Mandarin is the official language or “pŭtōnghuà” meaning “common language”
If they were all one language, the variation in dialects would be crazy diverse, Northern Swedish pronunciation compared with Danish pronunciation
Yeah, but English is like that at the extremes as well. But most people tone down their dialects when they’re talking to people who speak differently. Having the same standard language gradually causes convergence of dialects.
I suppose it’s more or less like in Germany. I’m from northern Germany and I don’t speak dialect, I speak standard German. If someone speaks in a Bavarian or Austrian dialect, I need subtitles to understand them. I can understand some dialects spoken nearby, but the further south, the more difficult it becomes to understand people when they speak in their local dialect. Of course, practically everyone can speak standard German, and so I can understand the Austrian news on TV, because “standard Austrian German” just has a few different words and the pronunciation is slightly different.
@@bibliotheksweItThe same is true for Swiss German
@@bibliotheksweIt as a spanish speaker it baffles me that within the same language people can’t understand each other
I mean brazilian are there speaking a completely different and still we understand each other to some extent
@@bibliotheksweIt Plattdeutsch was kinda beaten out of school children in North Germany during the 1950s, from what I understand. I was in Germany in 1989 studying for a semester at Uni Mainz, and all of us who were there from my college in the US spoke of the dialects with some trepidation.
From what I understand, Pälzisch is disappearing, along with almost all of the other German dialects. Except for Bavarian — they’ll die before they give up Bairisch! 😆
Meanwhile English and Icelandic are so removed from their brothers…
Well if we’re talking about the groupings of language families, English is a west Germanic language so tbf English isn’t a brother per se. Maybe more like a first cousin I guess? English is removed from her Dutch and German siblings though lol
Our language is very francophone-ish . Ofc , the ancestor of Icelandic, old Norse, did impact the English language quite a bit during the Anglo-saxon period
English is closer to Frisian and Dutch.
@@C_In_Outlaw3817 Modern english only counts as west germanic language because of the origin of the grammar but its really far from the other. Even german and icelandic are closer to each other than english to the other germanic lanugages because it had to many influences by the romans and celtics.
There are some whole sentences in Dutch and even German that I can understand as a native English speaker. But they are rare, and usually using simple words. Like if I hear a German say “das ist gut” I hear it as “that is good” and know what they’re saying, for example.
@@geistescrashednana933 There is an old saying: You can hold a conversation using only words of Old Anglo-Saxon origin, but you cannot put together more than a few canned sentences using only words of French origin.
The Core Vocabulary of English comes from Proto West Germanic.
Sweden and Norwegian maybe. Danish is completely unintelligible.
@zuhanii Seems like a Nynorsk and Bokmol difference but bigger
Yea that’s what I’ve heard. Danish pronunciation often trips up Swedes and Norwegians a lil. But my Norwegian friend told me that he can get thru written danish pretty well
No. Try and go to Copenhagen and you’ll meet a lot of Swedes and Danes talking with each other in their own languages.
And written Danish and Norwegian is basically the same.
@@C_In_Outlaw3817 yeah written Danish is very similar but when spoken it’s a bit harder, still possible its not completely unintelligible but its harder than reading
@heinedenmark Skanians and Danes may understand each other all though other Swedes can’t understand the Danes. Written language doesn’t make the spoken language understandable.
We can generally communicate using our own tongues, but trying to understand say a dane that lives further south close to the german border is almost impossible. Whereas a Norwegian from the northern region you could be excused for thinking he was speaking an ever so slightly peculiar swedish.
And then you have the Scanian dialect which is basically an in-between Swedish and Danish
I used to have a Danish roommate and he had no problem reading Swedish and Norwegian, and would generally say they all spoke the same language.
Similar to Croatian and Serbian.
As a dane, every encounter I’ve had with Norwegians or Swedes have been in English. I think that tells you what you need to know.
Yeah, as a Swede, it’s been that way MOSTLY but it depends a lot on regional dialect. Some Danes and Norwegians I can understand pretty easily, some not at all. But English always tends to be easier.
English has become easier for (most of) us because we’ve become more proficient in and accustomed to it in recent decades. Meanwhile the three languages have evolved slightly in different directions, become more affected by vernacular, and education has dropped its focus on the neighbouring countries. So yes, that makes it easier and more efficient to switch to English in order to just get the messages across sometimes, but on the other hand by just learning how to adjust our pronunciations and vocabularies a bit we could be having much higher quality conversations – letting the shared Scandinavian culture do half the talking and add much more personality; kind of like the difference between speaking your local dialect and doing a professional presentation.
Danish is actually pretty distinct.
In terms of pronunciation it’s definitely the outlier.
Danish also sounds somewhat like German
As a southern Dane – Nonsense.
Some dialects/languages are intelligible only one way: A understands B, but B doesn’t understand A.
Norwegians and Swedes usially make fun of Danish and don’t understand it. What about Danes? Do they understand their northern neighbours?
I remember a comedian saying they all are already taught danish as a form of standard norse, yet it’s treated more like latin in italy, spain, portugal, and… (do they study latin in romania?) so more like a dead thing you don’t plan to use.
this languages vs dialects thing is so funny to me as a brazilian, because we can understand everything in galician, 90% of spanish of its not spoken fast enough, and get the gist of something in italian, but i tried listening to an european portuguese tv show once and i genuinely couldn’t understand anything!! the stress-timed nature of european portuguese makes it sooo much different from other romance languages and yet it’s still a dialect of portuguese
Interesting insight bro! I speak Spanish and Italian and can understand a bit of Brazilian Portuguese if spoken slowly… but when it comes to Portuguese from Portugal, it sounds like Russian or some Slavic language
@@Cooldude-g1gi would have expected nothing less from the honorary Balkan county that is Portugal
@@fallendown8828 🫡
@@Cooldude-g1g pff yeah absolutely
What about gøtudanskt, the Faroese dialect of Danish. Which follows more of the Faroese pronunciation. There are some folk songs that use this such as “ Ramund hin unge”
the fact the speakers consider it different languages is really all that needs said.
Dialect vs language really isn’t a linguistic question but a social one. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes all have separate, even if related, identities and thus as a result have evolved separate standard forms
Even if they bleed together at the edges, that means little. Dutch and German bleed together at the edges as well but nobody ever tries to suggest German and Dutch are the same language
Of course they are. As are Czech and Slovak or Serbian and Croatian. Most languages have dialects that are far more divergent that are standard varieties of these language groups.
I would say standard Norwegian and Danish are the same language, in written form it’s almost identical, but the pronounciation makes it almost unintelligible, especially for Norwegians to comprehend Danish. Swedish I consider a different language from Norwegian and Danish as the vocabulary is different enough for it to be considered an independent language.
I really got surprised when I entered the video and listened to you speaking in my native language, since Im really used to listening to you speaking in English, it was kinda offbeat. 😂
Are you using automatic dubbing? I only spoke English in the video.
@Langfocus Yeah, But even though that, it was kinda weird, Haha.
The issue is just that “standards”. Norwegian has no standards, while Swedish and Danish do (similar to how German has High German across different countries with vastly different dialects).
Norwegian only has a standard when it comes to writing and even then it had to be reformed so much that it is full of exceptions. This is specially apparent in cases such as mel and mjøl, vet and veit, vei and veg. In addition to this we have dialects that get real creative with some stuff such as the use of pronouns and the conjugation of different word classes. One example is how words ending in -ing should have -inger ending for plural, yet some dialects allow for -inga. Not to mention that the threshold for experiencing a different dialect is about every 20km at most.
Norwegian is a big problem when it comes to unifying the three languages because it is a very good middle ground but it is also highly unstable due to the lack of regulations. An example of this could be the following experience I had. There was a video of 3 teenagers speaking their respective languages in a meeting. I understood the Swedish speaker more than the Norwegian speaker. The reason was mainly the dialect. However, the dialect was in a way closer to Danish in sound but closer to Swedish in vocabulary (which is very typical for Southern and Western Norwegian). If you add to this isolation, meaning that the speaker is not from a city, then it becomes impossible to comfortably understand.
Bottomline is that until Norwegian isn’t properly regulated, we cannot unify the three languages. However, when it comes to Norway and having standards, I wouldn’t be holding my breath. It takes effort to be worse than Danish especially when you are a much more accessible language.
Same same. Just like spanish french italian Portuguese is basically the same language.