I understand the Scandinavian languages are mostly mutually intelligible. I’m wondering exactly how similar are they? I also understand that many Scandinavians can speak English very fluently. So, say if someone in Sweden needs to talk to someone in Norway, both of them also very fluent in English, would it be easier for them to use their own languages or just switch over to English?
I have a friend from northern Norway and another from northern Sweden. The Norwegian speaks to the Swede in Norwegian and the Swede replies in Swedish. They both understand each other easily.
I speak Icelandic and Swedish fluently and pretty good Norwegian (after a few days there). Danish, however, I just can’t comprehend. And Fareoese sounds funny ;), but I understand it.
So in regards to the Scandinavian languages: I’d say Swedish and Norwegian are the most alike, Norwegians understand Danish better than Swedes and Danes get Norse better than Swedish.
Icelandic and Fareoese is not understandable by anyone but speakers of those languages, but they get the basics of the others.
Now I just hope that made any sense.
The only thing I know on ths subject is this. There was a pair of detective fiction writers, Maj Sjowall and her husband Per Wahloo. They were Swedish and their stories were set there. One of them took place across the channel between Malmo and Copenhagen. In the story, the chiefs of police of Sweden and Denmark had to collaborate. At some point, the narrator says that the two men, having something substantive to communicate, gave up the pretense that each understood the other’s language, and settled into English. This was fiction, of course, but there is no reason to doubt it reflects reality.
Given the fact that there are dialects of English I simply cannot understand (Cockney, Highland Scots, at least two Caribean dialects), I am inclined to distrust any claim that languages can be “mutually intelligible”. Of course, it can happen when one language has two names for political reasons (Serbian and Croatian or Dutch and Flemish).
It depends on how good the individuals involved are at English. While a large majority of Swedes (etc.) are capable of communicating reasonably well in English, most are considerably more comfortable expressing themselves in their first language, especially older people and those without university-level education.
For the average Swede, understanding English may be slightly easier than understanding Norwegian (with emphasis on “may” and “slightly”), but speaking Swedish is definitely much easier than speaking English. Understanding Danish is trickier, but I think most would still prefer speaking Scandinavian to English.
It’s a weird triangle of relationships.
Danish and Norwegian are very close when written, but are markedly different when it comes to pronunciation. I lived in Denmark, so my info about the other two languages is a bit shady. Danes are generally not understood when they try to speak in Danish to Norwegians and Swedes. Swedes are generally easily understood, as are Norwegians by all parties. You won’t get very complicated discussions, but you can get some mutual understanding out of each other.
When I worked in a bar in Denmark, I clearly was able to speak Danish to customers etc, but what was hilarious was that occasionally we’d get the Norwegian or Swedish group. I have blonde hair, so I could pass for a Dane easily. Now my Danish was never to the point where it allowed me to understand Swedish (and to a lesser degree Norwegian) all that well. I could probably take a few simple orders in either language but little more.
But what would happen is that (usually older people) would come up, start speaking Swedish or Norwegian, and I would ask them to speak English. To which, one guy responded, “Men jeg taler godt Norsk!” which means, “But I speak good Norwegian!”
Another hilarious story. I remember having Danish and Norwegian friends when I lived in Germany and somehow they met one night. My then girlfriend was sitting talking to my Norwegian friend for a half hour or so. After talking to both of them individually, they privately confessed to not having understood what the other was saying!
But as a general rule, people under fifty or so would probably speak English to their Scandinavian counterparts. Older people will get by using their language. As an example, my Danish friend studied in Sweden and spoke little Swedish while he was there. He mainly conversed in English with his friends.
The level of English for a typical Dane is usually very high. And of course everyone understands English better than they speak it because it is the language of most television programs. Although you will sometimes notice a Scandinavian watching TV at an almost inaudible level and not notice it.
The general point is that Danes are SOL when it comes to speaking their own language and having people understand it. It’s really difficult to describe to an English speaker what it’s like to have a language close to your own. The closest we have is Dutch (or Friesish to be more precise) but that’s not intelligible to your normal English speaker.
ETA: From what I can tell, Icelandic is too different to be considered in this relationship.
Thanks everyone for your quick replies. They are very informative.
Merkwurdigliebe, it probably didn’t help that people in a bar might be a little tipsy. 
Finnish, of course, is completely unrelated to the other Scandinavian languages - indeed to any other major language except Hungarian and Estonian.
I lived in Denmark for a year as a teen and got to where I could speak pretty well. I could read Norwegian and a lot of Swedish, and I could understand most Norwegian and very very little Swedish. Danish TV, at that time anyway (late 80’s), would run Swedish children’s TV with no subtitles, with the assumption that it would be comprehensible. Like for example the old Pippi Longstocking movies–I remember being really annoyed that I coudn’t understand them at all, but my host family could.
The pronunciation of Danish is quite different than the other two. It hasn’t got that trademark ‘Swedish’ sound at all, and a lot of sounds come from the back of the throat.
Swede here. WormTheRed pretty much nailed it. I spent a week in Norway this summer and understood probably most of their language. Communication was made in the native language of each speaker; they speak Norwegian and we speak Swedish.
This works out very well, with only a few problematic words or expressions. Those can easily be routed around though by reformulating the sentence or using synonyms. Even for two speakers who are very fluent in English, I believe they would communicate in Swedish/Norwegian, at least it felt that way for me. With Danish people we would likely turn to English, but some people try anyway like with Norwegians. I think the Danish can understand Swedish better than we understand them, as they have some nasty phonology.
The Danish… well… what can I say… get those hot potatoes out of your mouths so we can hear what you’re trying to say :p. Norwegians do have an easier time to understand Danish though, as they are more closely related. According to this Norwegian comedy clip, even the Danish seem to be having problems understanding each other nowadays ;).
Here’s a chart that seems to make sense to me: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/1/11/250px-NGmc_relations.png
I’ve heard others express it this way: “Norwegian is Danish spoken in Swedish”.
I think this rule mostly applies when there are Danes in the picture, not between Norwegians and Swedes.
I used to work in Norway, and one of the guys I worked with was from Hammerfest (waaaay up in the North). His accent was so thick that he had to speak in English to other Norwegians. :eek:
I’m Finnish and my first language is Swedish. I can read a Danish or Norwegian text pretty well and understand most of it. For me to understand both in conversation, the speaker must talk slowly and pronounce clearly. Usually i just start speaking English.
I am reminded of a line in National Lampoon many years ago: Swedish is the silliest-sounding language east of the Urals. Any truth to that?
Well, considering that we are west of the Urals, I don’t see how that works ;). Secondly, after changing east to west, I am certain that Norwegian is sillier, but doubtfully the silliest in that hemisphere relative to the Urals. Finnish should rank higher on the silliness scale also, but I am too tired to do any detailed analysis of language silliness right now, which is required to find the definitely silliest.
Why don’t you judge for yourself.
A woman speaking Swedish. Link
A Swedish stand up comedian. Link
A Sweden Finn speaking Swedish. Link
A Swede and a Finn talking. The man with glasses is Finnish. Link
Heh. You do know that’s what Danish people say about Americans, right? 
That sounds about right to me.
Oh, I didn’t know that. It makes little sense, since English appears much “clearer” to me, with little obfuscating throat sounds.
I am fluent in Norwegian as a second language.
Three of my coworkers, including my boss, are Swedish, all of them from southwestern Sweden near Göteborg. All have lived and worked in Norway for some time. When they speak to the rest of us they speak “svorsk” - which is just a humorous name for something in between Swedish and Norwegian. I understand all of them perfectly. When they speak among themselves they revert to Swedish, and if I happen to overhear I usually understand everything. Some vocabulary is a bit different, but if I want to understand I can usually get it from context.
I work at a kindergarten and one of the children has a Norwegian father and a Danish mother. I generally understand the child’s mother okay, but she’s the only one of the Scandinavians I know well who I sometimes have to ask to repeat herself in English. :o
In the wild, so to speak, I understand most Swedes okay, especially if they know I’m not really Norsk and slow down a bit. I understand some Danish dialects reasonably well (certain Jylland dialects start sounding a lot like southern Norwegian dialects…), others not at all. In general I’ve found Scandinavians are charmed and impressed that I’m trying to speak Norwegian to them rather than insisting on speaking English, so they are more than willing to help me out by speaking slower and explaining unfamiliar words, which is deeply appreciated.
Norwegians in general say that understanding spoken Swedish is easier than reading written Swedish, and reading written Danish is easier than understanding spoken Danish! (The more common written form of Norwegian, bokmål, is largely based on written Danish. It’s a long story.) So they will watch Swedish TV shows and movies more readily than Danish ones, and read Danish books more readily than Swedish ones.
The general trend of the answers so far is confirmed by recent (and not so resent) research. The most recent report was published in 2005 by the Nordic council (Available in Swedish) and got mostly the same results as one done in the mid 70s.
I very rarely have to switch to English to make myself understood when speaking to a Swede, although I might have to use my knowledge of particularly missunderstandable* words. Switching to English happens more often when communicating with Danes, but most of the time Danish and Norwegian work fine.
The junior high I worked at two years ago had two Swedish teachers, and they pretty much spoke Swedish, with the most missunderstandable of words switched out.
*In particular false friends and unfamiliar words for familiar things. E.g. the word “må” means ‘must’ in Norwegian, and ‘may’ in Danish, and the Swedish word for pillow cover is just absurd.