Heh. Or unintelligible, if you decide to be obstructive.
The relationship between the various Nordic countries is a bit like the England/Scotland/Wales thing (with Finland substituting for Ireland). They all spend a fair amount of time being snide about each other’s accents, habits, landscapes, diets and whatever, and are only united by mutual disdain of the other neighbours.
Personally I find Swedish reasonably OK in both a written and spoken form, Danish looks like Norwegian with extremely wayward pronunciation, and sounds like someone gargling porridge. Mind you my norwegian is so rusty these days I sometimes struggle with that.
Sort of, for instance 20 is tjugon in Swedish, tjue in Norwegian (or tyve where I grew up). Milk is melk in Norwegian or mjolk in Swedish. If you didn’t know already you would figure it out from context pretty quickly, but as has already been pointed out most people have that level of exposure from TV, radio and meeting people from over the border.
Once you get out in six-finger country though, all bets are off and you sometimes have to resort to hand signals.
I suspect it describes a similar problem - some American speakers of English can have trouble understanding British speakers of English (especially when on TV rather than face-to-face). Likewise, even within Britain some people find particularly strong regional accents difficult to understand.
They’d speak Danwegian or Svorsk, as you put it, even while performing their official duties? They wouldn’t be required to speak proper Bokmal or Nynorsk (or the local dialect) while speaking on the radio or otherwise dealing with the public?
Yeah, for whatever reason some people find accents easy, others struggle really badly. Some bloke with a monster geordie accent stopped me in Trafalgar square once to ask for directions. I sent him off to wherever he needed to go and the person I was with said “I didn’t know you spoke German”.
:smack: Ah well, it is better to try and fail and all that…
I think it used to be the case that you had to stick closely to ‘official’ useage, especially with regards to the whole Nynorsk/Bokmal thing, but nowadays they’ve slackened off on the Language Police. In much the same way the BBC is happy to make anyone who can string a sentence together a prime-time presenter, whereas they used to insist on Received Pronunciation. I guess it’s the same in the US.
In both the United Kingdom and the United States, restrictions on what accent you use has loosened, but you would still be required to use standard language as a broadcaster, especially of something like a government weather service, certainly not a language that any member of the English-speaking public could claim to not understand.
I’d love to know what it feels like to have a language that is close enough to other languages as to be partially intelligible; I can’t help thinking that the accent analogy is going to be inaccurate, because accents typically change the shape of nearly every word, but not so much of the grammar.
Well, with languages that are so close it’s very hard to get it completely right. Takes slaphead’s examples for instance. “Tjue” and “melk” is standard bokmål, but, “tjuge” is common in dialects, and “mjølk” is not only standard in nynorsk, it’s a standard “side form” in bokmål.
There are lots of examples that are actually different (Swedish “örngott” = pillowcase, Norwegian “putevar” = pillowcase), and some that can cause serious confusion (Danish “må” = may, Norwegian “må” = must). But as long as a Dane or Swede is aware of such words, and makes an effort to use words and enunciation understandable to Norwegians, there’s little extra benefit from the comparatively difficult effort to weed out your native … language melody, or words that are just slightly different but mean the same, or words that exist in many dialects or…
But it’s not like there are lots and lots of Swedes and Danes in the radio, just that you wouldn’t be totally surprised if you heard one, and most people would have no problem understanding him or her.
Maybe it’s like an English person listening to someone speaking broad Scots? You can tell they’re speaking something closely related to English, and get the gist of what they’re saying, but there are grammatical differences in addition to differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.
I’m harbouring a wish that one of our gracious Scandinavian contributors will get the opportunity to watch this movie and explain precisely what the situation is.
After acsenray’s nice request that someone Scandinavian see the movie I went down to 7-11 and rented the DVD. By the way acsenray, you owe me $8.
The guys go to a weather bureau, that doesn’t actually exist*, and told to speak to an intern. The intern is Sara, played by Danish actress Iben Hjejle. She speaks Danish throughout the movie, nice and enunciated Danish, but definitelly Danish. When the guys explain they want to know when there will be waves, she asks them to listen to the radio, specifially the weather report for the North Sea. They don’t understand that, which is perfectly understandable, cause neither do I. The North Sea weather has a lot of talk about wave heights and wind, but it’s related to the fishing banks and areas of the ocean, such as the Dogger bank and “Jutish reef”. I definitelly wouldn’t have any idea how this translated to waves and wave heights at any specific part of the Norwegian coast.
So that’s one question answered. Speaking regular Danish as Sara does she would not get a speaking job in broadcasting, but she’s an intern for a meteorological company, not someone who’d be on radio or TV.
Sara (Iben Hjelje) and Skip (Kim Bodnia), who teaches the main character (Even) surfing, speak Danish throughout the movie. They’re not subtitled in any way for the Norwegian audience, and the characters seem not to have a problem with understanding them. And neither did I, or at least it wasn’t significantly harder than understanding anyone else.
The exception is when Even and his buddy Bjørklund are driving to the beach and talking about Sara. The conversation goes thus:
Bjørklund: She’s in love with me, Even.
Even: Did she say that?
Bjørklund: No. Well not in so many words, but it’s a bit hard to understand what she’s saying, her being Danish and all.
Since she (tiny spoiler alert :D) isn’t in love with him, he’s obviously just talking nonsense trying to justify his own perception of her feelings.
Additional fact: Most of the Norwegian characters speak the dialect of South Western Norway where the movie takes place. It’s my least favourite Norwegian dialect, for no good reason. Just chauvinism.
*Arriving at the weather bureau they are met by Siri Kalvig who founded and leads Storm Weather Center, Norway’s “other” meteorology institution, the “real” one being the government funded Norwegian Institute of Meteorology.
Sheesh. I forgot the essense of that footnote. The point was the Storm Weather Center is in Bergen, which would be a long drive for those guys to get some weather info.
Also here are the fishing areas that Norwegian Radio reports the weather for:
Maybe the analogy with estuary English and broad Scots is particularly apt here, if må is cognate to English may and Scots maun. The same semantic split you noted is found there, as I learned from reading Thomas the Rhymer– “That is the road to fair Elfland where thou and I this night maun gae.” (‘must go’)
So as far as this word goes, English takes after Danish more while Scots takes after Norwegian more–which isn’t at all surprising given the patterns of Norse colonization in the British Isles. England had the Danelaw while Scotland had Norn.
Is there a dialect continuum between Norway and Sweden? I’m assuming Denmark wouldnt be part of that continuum due to the water crossing involved, but maybe I’m wrong about that…?
