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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 ...
The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Romansh. [4] German, French, and Italian maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the federal administration of the Swiss Confederation, while Romansh is used in dealings with people who speak it. [5]
Swedish (endonym: svenska [ˈsvɛ̂nːska] ⓘ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. [2] It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the fourth most spoken Germanic language, and the first among its type in the Nordic countries overall.
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 ...
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.
A naming that stems from a completely different root is the one used in some Finnic languages, in Finnish Ruotsi, in Estonian Rootsi, in Northern Sami Ruoŧŧa, probably derived from various uses of rōþs-, i.e., "related to rowing" in Old Swedish, cf. Rus, probably through the old name of the coast of North Svealand, Roslagen, and to the fact ...
The Italian-speaking Swiss (Svizzeri italiani, see also Swiss Italian), traditionally speakers of Lombard language (Ticinese varieties, as well as the dialects of the Bregaglia, Poschiavo and Mesolcina valleys in Grisons) today partly assimilated to the standard Italian language, amalgamated from Raetians and Lombards.
The term Swedish is not mentioned specifically in any source until the first half of the 14th century, [10] and no standard spoken language had developed in either Sweden or Denmark before 1500, although some scholars argue that there may have been tendencies towards a more formal "courteous" language among the aristocracy.