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Generally, speakers of the three largest Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) can read each other's languages without great difficulty. The primary obstacles to mutual comprehension are differences in pronunciation. According to a scientific study of the three groups, Norwegians generally understand the other languages the ...
Although Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have diverged the most, they still retain considerable mutual intelligibility. [10] Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, particularly if speaking slowly.
As such, spoken Danish and Swedish normally have low mutual intelligibility, [1] but Swedes in the Öresund region (including Malmö and Helsingborg), across the strait from the Danish capital Copenhagen, understand Danish somewhat better, largely due to the proximity of the region to Danish-speaking areas.
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10.23 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forms a dialect continuum.
One source claims that while Norwegians understand almost 90% of spoken Swedish, Swedes understand only about 50% of spoken Norwegian. Sounds quite preposterous to me. While it may actually be based on some truthful and serious research, my experience say that I (a Swede) understand considerably more than tiny 50%.
Swedish belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic sub-family of the Indo-European languages.As such, it is mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish.Because most of the loanwords present in Swedish come from English and German (originally Middle Low German, closely related to Dutch), and also because of similarities in grammar, native speakers of Germanic languages usually ...
The differences in dialects within the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark can often be greater than the differences across the borders, but the political independence of these countries leads continental Scandinavian to be classified into Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish in the popular mind as well as among most linguists.
Scandinavian studies principally focuses on Danish, Norwegian and Swedish philology, especially linguistics, history and cultural studies.Denmark, Norway and Sweden form Scandinavia according to the definition prevalent in Scandinavia itself and their majority peoples are Scandinavians in the ethnic sense who speak Scandinavian languages in the linguistic sense.