They will probably use English - unless the Finn demonstrates that he is comfortable speaking Swedish. You see, about 5% of the Finnish population are native Swedish speakers (i.e., they grew up speaking Swedish at home). For the 90% of the Finnish population who grew up speaking Finnish at home, Swedish is a second language (taught in schools) and many of these Finns do not speak it well, or speak it unwillingly.
Finnish is a uralic language most closely related to Karelian, Estonian, the Saami languages, and Veps. More distantly, it is related to Hungarian and the Samoyedic languages. It is incomprehensible to Swedes, Norweigans and Danes (unless they happen to speak it as a second language, of course).
No one speaks nynorsk. Nynorsk is one of two written standards for Norwegian, the other of which is bokmål. Bokmål is the larger of the two. It most closely resembles the spoken dialects of the Oslo region, and is used in all the main cities of Norway. Nynorsk was based on a number of rural dialects, particularly from the West Country, so it’s no surprise that it still most closely resembles those dialects.
It is used primarily in rural districts and in some smaller towns.
Teacher mode OFF.
Some dialects, including some from nynorsk areas, are hard for Swedes and Danes to understand. I’ll let you in on a little secret, some of them are hard for other Norwegians to understand (Indre Sogn, anyone?).
As for Danish and mutual intelligibility, I can tell you that as a foreigner who speaks fluent Norwegian, I find the dialects of the Copenhagen region to be very difficult - like listening to a radio where there’s so much static that maybe every third word comes through clearly, and trying to work out the context from that. Some Jylland dialects, though, aren’t too bad, particularly after I’ve had a little time to get used to them. I’ve also noticed that when Danes find out they’re talking to a Yank who is trying to communicate in Scandinavian, they consciously or unconsciously change their speech - they speak more slowly, enunciate more clearly, and use simpler language, so I can follow. Then they turn to my Norwegian husband and speak normally again, meaning that sometimes I understand them better than he does
Speaking of intelligibility, I speak fluent Swedish and basic German and I find written Dutch to be fairly easy to understand (even though I have never studied Dutch or spent much time amongst Dutch speakers). I can’t read Dutch quickly, but with some thought I can understand most sentences. To me, it looks like a mix of Swedish and German (it is not, but that is the way it appears to me). Spoken Dutch, on the other hand… There is no way that I can decipher it when spoken. However, I can understand fragments of spoken Afrikaans, as the pronunciation appears a lot more “clear” to me than Dutch. From what I understand, Dutch and Afrikaans is mutually intelligible for native speakers, but perhaps someone else can tell us more about that.
On the other hand, I mentioned to a Swedish friend that I thought Dutch and Afrikaans texts are easy to read, and he looked at me like I was crazy. So it may be a minority opinion…
Yes, Dutch and Flemish are the same language, just small differences in pronounciation and a few words.
Afrikaans and Dutch diverged 200 years ago, but they’re mutually intelligeble and both would have no trouble with written texts in the other language.
Suriname, our former Dutch colony, has just .3 million inhabitants. It is a deeply tropical country. One mid sized city and then it’s pretty much dirt roads into the jungle. Yet deep in the jungle people speak a very neat, cultured, somewhat oldfashioned Dutch. My brother works there now, and he says the combination is very striking.
When I went to Holland I was extremely surprised at how EVERYONE spoke nearly perfect English, usually without much of an accent either. Go into an ice cream store, convenience store, you name it - even the lowliest clerk spoke perfect English. Can’t say the same for Mexico or Russia or most other places. I’ve never been to Scandinavia but I’d like to go there one of these days.
In Amsterdam pretty much everything was written in both English and Dutch.
My inlaws are Dutch, and have lived in the states for nearly 35 years now.
My father-in-law was totally incomprehensible to me when we first met. Now that I know him better (going on 8 years now), I can understand him about 80% of the time, and his English word choices are occasionally odd, but not ever incorrect. His accent is killer, tho. My mother-in-law is exactly the opposite - she’s always spoken with a barely-noticeable accent, unless she’s stressed out or tired.
When we’re doing joint family togetherness things, either I or my husband have to “translate” back and forth between them and my very southern insular family, because the respective accents are impossible for the other to get past.
On a bizarre related note, my husband, who has lived in the US his whole life and can’t speak Dutch (but understands it, and curses in it), swears that he can’t hear an accent at all when his father talks.
The first two points are also true of the German speaking milieu of Europe (Germany, Austria, parts of Switzerland). I’ve personally found that while native German speakers often speak English with a non-native accent, they speak it very well and can easily communicate in it.
Interestingly enough, German has had a significant impact on American English. Many regional idiomatic/slang expressions of the Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania are calques from German, including “Do you want to come with?” (cf “Kommst du mit?”) and “stupid-head” (cf “dummkopf”)
What is correct? I once had a Dutch post-doc. Like nearly all Dutch, his English was superb. But once he heard me say, “I will …” and asked me about that. He said he was drilled for hours learning to say, “I shall, you will, he will,…”. Why was that, he asked, if even native speakers don’t make that distinction? I explained that it was merely some idiot’s phony rule that had caught on for some incomprehensible reason on the other side of the pond, but not much here. I went on to give him a dissertation on how this rule had screwed up a useful distinction (between simple future and command). Finally, I explained that they drilled it because it was easy to drill.
Bear with me while I tell another (absolutely true) story. A friend of my wife’s is native of a small town in NW Germany in an area called East Frisia. Her native tongue is Plattdeutsch. She grew up here, thoroughly trilingual. She spoke French with her ex and she speaks native English. I think she was about 10 when her parents moved here. Not making it, she decided recently to move back to her original home town where she has plenty of relatives and assumed she could get a job as an ESL teacher. She is really qualified. She has a master’s in comp lit and has worked as a translator. It turns out there is no demand for ESL teachers since everyone there is fluent in English. What she is doing is German SL (what is that? DZT?) for immigrants. And German has a much larger spread that Dutch or any Scandinavian language. There are plenty of places whose language is just as restricted in area that don’t have a large number of fluent speakers of English. Hungary, whose language is essentially one off, for example.
As evidence of this, I might mention that there was a series of Detective stories written by a Swedish couple. His name was Per Wahloo, I have forgotten hers. One of their last books involved a murder that took place in Malmö and the murderer escaped to Copenhagen (or maybe vice versa). As a result, the heads of the Danish and Swedish police forces had to discuss this. As described in the story (it was only fiction of course, but presumably reflected linguistic reality) they had known each other for a long but now that they had a real reason to talk, they gave up the pretense that each understood the other’s language and settled down to speak English.
On the other hand, I know a Norwegian married to a Swede who claims they each speak their own language at home. I don’t know what was his dialect. He grew up in a place (called Kirkenes) that is actually east of Sweden and just north of the Russian border, so it might have more heavily influenced by Swedish.
At some point in my life I was bilingual in English and Spanish and fluent in French and Italian. It isn’t any weirder than riding a bike, just something your brain does automatically.
I speak slightly more English on a daily basis, Spanish about 40% of the time. I don’t translate, that would be terribly inefficient, instead I switch “modes”. My biggest problem is switching between languages and sometimes I don’t there’s been a change and answer or write back in the wrong language. I wonder if I am alone.
BTW, when my Danish husband and I visited Sweden he spoke English, even when I wasn’t part of the conversation. Swedes say Danes speak with a hot potato in their mouth.
It’s certainly not effortless, but I think for Dutch/Scandinavian/German speakers the structures and pronunciation seem to come a fair bit easier than for e.g. speakers of Italian or Spanish - similarly I believe e.g. German is easier for someone from Holland to learn than something like Spanish. Limburgers, naturally, have it even easier
Well, depending on where they’re from it’s entirely possible that the story is true in much the same way that ‘He speaks Vancouver and she speaks Seattle’ is true. A lot of the swedish/norwegian dialects have more in common with one another than with whatever is spoken in ‘their’ capital city, which is hardly surprising since they have been dealing with their neighbours regularly for centuries while some chump from the big city would turn up once in a blue moon.
I live in Oslo, where there are lots of Swedes, and I can confirm that Norwegians and Swedes can (and do, on a daily basis) have conversations, work together, hook up, get married and spend their lives together, all the while with the two parties speaking what are supposed to be two different languages. It does make you wonder how different they really are, doesn’t it?
As for Danes and Swedes finding it hard to understand each other: As a Norwegian, I’ve always found this slightly bizarre, since I understand both Swedish and Danish fine, although he Danish pronunciation does cause problems at times (headaches, vertigo and mild hallucinations have been reported among Norwegians listening to Danish for too long ;)). However, it does indeed appear to be true a lot of the time. I suppose the thing is that Swedish-Norwegian-Danish are sort of on a continuum, with the two far ends finding it harder to understand each other than either end and the one in the middle (OK, that’s simplifying it a bit, but that’s the gist of it).
It does vary between individuals, though, and I’ve observed Swedes and Danish carry on conversations just fine, each in their own language (as well as Swedish-Norwegian-Danish three-ways). I guess it has to do with the amount of exposure, as well as the amount of effort put in and shit given. I’m pretty sure that pronunciation is most of the problem, much more so than vocabulary or grammar.
Just to address this as well: Icelandic is a completely different story than Danish or Swedish. I can at best understand tiny fragments of written Icelandic, and when spoken it might as well be Klingon. So, yeah, unless the Icelander in question has picked up one of the other Scandinavian languages at some point, it’ll be English, baby.
Which is weird, since it’s in the Scandinavian family, and pretty much the same now as the Norse language which was the ancestor of them all, but there you go.
Same here. Every multilingual person I know does it; to me it’s one of the markers of “thinking in a language”, that it becomes so natural you don’t notice which language speech or documents are in unless you actively think about it. Your grammar may be lousy and you may never get the phonetics right, but you do think in it.
Also, IME we’re most likely to butcher both grammar and pronunciation when dead tired or just after switching; times when we’re switching back and forth would drive a grammarian into hysteric fits.
In Norway, at least, while the local lingo is in absolutely no danger whatsoever of dying out (in spite of what the alarmists will have you believe), English is so omnipresent that Norwegians (especially the younger generations) will often tend to insert English words and phrases into their conversation, because the English way of putting things often just comes more quickly and naturally to mind. Sometimes so much so that it’s a case of proper code-switching. It is usually considered a bit informal or “sloppy”, though, and not really something you’re supposed to do in polite company.
Hell, English is my first language, and I have trouble understanding some comments on youtube…
My best buddy in EVE Online is Norwegian and I didn’t realize it because he speaks flawless US English. Absolutely no accent at all. [I love teamspeak:p] [though I admit I am slightly disappointed, I love a nice accent in a guy, and uniforms … I have a thing for military guys … ]
