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I am from Sweden, and I would like to know what people from other countries, in particular English speaking countries, thinks what Swedish sounds like besides the 2 sister languages Danish and Norwegian (which are mutually intelligible with Swedish). This question is obviously to those who dont speak Swedish, in particular to people in the English speaking world.
Many has said it sounds like German, some says it sounds like Dutch, and some even says it sounds like Russian.
Here you can listen to some major dialects of Swedish:
But seriously, I don't know. I don't think it sounds German at all, and I could not mistake Swedish for German. Swedish sounds a lot easier on the ears. I quite like it.
There is one particular Swedish dialect that I think could be mistaken for German very easly, it's called Gutamål, or Gutnish I think its called in English, from the island of Gotland
But standard Swedish is also commonly mistaken for German, especially in the US
I am from Sweden, and I would like to know what people from other countries, in particular English speaking countries, thinks what Swedish sounds like besides the 2 sister languages Danish and Norwegian (which are mutually intelligible with Swedish). This question is obviously to those who dont speak Swedish, in particular to people in the English speaking world.
Many has said it sounds like German, some says it sounds like Dutch, and some even says it sounds like Russian.
Here you can listen to some major dialects of Swedish:
It sounds like a language that I wouldn't be able to learn from phonetic point of view.
It sounds quite different from Russian because Russian has quite distinguishable vowels and consonants where Swedish doesn't seem to have consonants; I mean they are there, but you meet them only once in a great while. And since I can't keep up with all those interchanging vowels floating one into another, I don't see how I'd be able to learn Swedish, although it looks like its grammar is somewhere between English and German. The only thing in Swedish that reminds me of Russian ( or German for this matter) is some *umlaut* kind of vowels, but German is more guttural and very upfront about all its consonants whether you like them or not))))
Swedish is not a language I have heard very often. . In fact I have rarely ever heard it. Swedish does not sound like German to me at all. If I heard the language spoken in the videos in public. Then I might think it is one of the Scandinavian languages. However I don't think I would be able to distinguish it for certain as being Swedish.
Actually the intonation of Swedish actually reminds me of some accents of the north of England.
Coincidentally I think that some accents of northern England reminds me of Swedish/Scandinavian, like for example Yorkshire. And the Shetland Islands of Scotland reminds me of how it sounds like when people from Iceland and the Faroe Islands speaks English.
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Dutch, Frisian and English are all connected, they are all Germanic languages so it's actually not very strange that one might sound like the other, and as for the first 3 of these (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish), those 3 are so similar that if you speak 1 of them you will also understand the other 2. I'm a Swede and all my conversations with Norwegians and Danes are in our respective languages, without much problem.
Finnish is something completely different though, Finnish is often mistaken for being a Scandinavian (North Germanic) language because of the country's location on the map, but Finnish is not Germanic at all and does not have any similarities with the Scandinavian and other Germanic languages, infact it's not even Indo-European, it is an Ugric language and more similar to Estonian and Hungarian.
Finnish should not be confused with Finland Swedish, which is spoken by the large Swedish speaking minority (around 300,000 people) in Finland and is a dialect of the Swedish language. There is towns and regions in Finland that are exclusively Swedish speaking, these regions includes for example the Ã…land Islands where Swedish is the one and only official languge by local law, they dont even learn Finnish there.
West Germanic = English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans and Frisian
North Germanic = Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese
Yes it's no surprise since the area was part of Danelaw, and was very influenced by the Norse. Northern Scotland even moreso...in fact I heard until recently people in the Shetland and Orkney islands could communicate with Norwegians, dunno how true this is though. Genetically the area is very Norse.
Yes Finnish is another thing altogether, though it's been influenced by Swedish. Just looking at google translate, however, the Scandinavian languages seem just as intelligible as German.
Yes it's no surprise since the area was part of Danelaw, and was very influenced by the Norse. Northern Scotland even moreso...in fact I heard until recently people in the Shetland and Orkney islands could communicate with Norwegians, dunno how true this is though. Genetically the area is very Norse.
Yes Finnish is another thing altogether, though it's been influenced by Swedish. Just looking at google translate, however, the Scandinavian languages seem just as intelligible as German.
In Orkney and Shetland they actually spoke a North Germanic language for not so long ago called Norn, which went extinct in the 1800's. Norn was fully intelligible with Faroese and possibly Icelandic, which is alot different from Norwegian so I dont think they could communicate with Norwegians, but they could most likely communicate with Faroe islanders and Icelanders. For those who dont know, the Faroe Islands is that archipelago between Shetland and Iceland, it is an autonomous and self-ruling territory of Denmark but they speak Faroese which is a language of its own, and its unlike Denmark not a part of the EU, it also has its own Prime Minister.
Of course Finnish has been influenced by Swedish since Finland was a part of Sweden for hundreds of years, but we cannot commincate with each others if we use our own languages, the similarities are very, very small. Finnish has also been equally influenced with Russian, because it was part of Russia for over 100 years and borders populated areas of north-western Russia. But Finnish is neither a Germanic or Slavic language, it is Ugric and very similar to Estonian, and on long distance, Hungarian.
The Scandinavian languages are not intelligible with German, though many words are either the same or just spelled differently, but the language is NOT similar enough to have a conversation.
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