Germanic language mutual intelligibility (bank, country, places, people)
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Here is some other examples of North Germanic mutual intelligibility.
Interview with the Swedish House Mafia on a talkshow where the host is a Norwegian who speaks Norwegian, and the band members are speaking Swedish of course, this one also comes with English subs:
Norwegians (the ones who did The Fox song) interviews a Swedish James Bond fan, he speaking Swedish, and the 2 other guys (the Ylvis brothers) speaking Norwegian, except for the English greetings in the start:
Swedish politican (controversial right-winger from my town Sölvesborg) in a political debate in Denmark on Danish TV, he is speaking Swedish, and the other ones are speaking Danish:
Here is some other examples of North Germanic mutual intelligibility.
Interview with the Swedish House Mafia on a talkshow where the host is a Norwegian who speaks Norwegian, and the band members are speaking Swedish of course, this one also comes with English subs:
Norwegians (the ones who did The Fox song) interviews a Swedish James Bond fan, he speaking Swedish, and the 2 other guys (the Ylvis brothers) speaking Norwegian, except for the English greetings in the start:
Swedish politican (controversial right-winger from my town Sölvesborg) in a political debate in Denmark on Danish TV, he is speaking Swedish, and the other ones are speaking Danish:
I don't think any of this would be possible in Spanish-Portuguese-Italian-French or even Dutch-German. Or am I wrong? Feel free to correct me.
Wow, quite unbelievable. I thought they were actually less mutually intelligible than say Spanish-Italian. Could it be because of the stronger cultural ties - the whole Scandinavia thing? Or because their populations are smaller, they tend to do things together? (collaboration rather than competition)
Wow, quite unbelievable. I thought they were actually less mutually intelligible than say Spanish-Italian. Could it be because of the stronger cultural ties - the whole Scandinavia thing? Or because their populations are smaller, they tend to do things together? (collaboration rather than competition)
I don't know exactly why, but it's not a pan-Scandinavian thing since Icelandic and Faroese, which also are North Germanic, are very different from Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
It could be a mainland Scandinavia thing though, since the 3 mutually intelligible languages are all continental. And yes we have small populations, Sweden is the largest North Germanic country with it's 9 million citizens, Denmark has 5 million and Norway has 5 million. These 3 entire countries combined are just about 2 million more people than the Netherlands.
It could also have to do with the fact that our previous ancestor Old Norse was actually 1 language, and developing in 3 countries so close to each others it did not make much difference.
Sweden, Denmark and Norway also went through the French and Middle Low German influence at the same time. On the other hand, French and Middle Low German had very little to no influence on Icelandic and Faroese, so that may explain why those 2 languages are so different from mainland Scandinavian, and why the 3 mainland Scandinavian languages are so similar to each others.
Icelandic has about 330,000 speakers and Faroese has about 66,000 speakers, so those are very small languages and most of their speakers knows at least 1 mainland Scandinavian language (which is a mandatory subject in their education systems) so communicating with them will not be any big problem either. Communicating in a mainland Scandinavian language with a monolingual Icelander or Faroe islander will be next to impossible though.
North Germanic is the same thing as "Scandinavian", and is the official name and term for this northern group of Germanic languages.
Kind of misleading and confusing since the term "Scandinavia" only includes the countries Sweden, Denmark and Norway (excluding overseas territories), but the unofficial term "Scandinavian languages" (which is the same thing as North Germanic) also includes Faroese and Icelandic.
Last edited by Helsingborgaren; 11-18-2013 at 01:06 PM..
Does anyone know if Limburgish is intelligible with Dutch, or if it's even considered as a dialect? On wikipedia it says that it is a language. And how about Frisian? Sounds alot like Dutch to me, but with a few Scandinavian and English words. I would assume though that they all speak Dutch fluently since they live in the same country.
If you consider African-American Vernacular English to be a separate language (which there is a real case for), there is mutual intelligibility between that and Standard American English.
That would mean that southern American English is also a separate language since the vast majority of AAVE comes from that.
Norwegians (the ones who did The Fox song) interviews a Swedish James Bond fan, he speaking Swedish, and the 2 other guys (the Ylvis brothers) speaking Norwegian, except for the English greetings in the start:
I thought that Norwegians have 2 languages. Can you tell me please, which one they speak on TV? That Norwegian which is more like Danish language, or the other Norwegian language?
I thought that Norwegians have 2 languages. Can you tell me please, which one they speak on TV? That Norwegian which is more like Danish language, or the other Norwegian language?
There is not 2 Norwegian spoken languages. What there is though is 2 official WRITTEN versions of it: Bokmål and Nynorsk. The most common written form is Bokmål, which is more like Danish when written. Then there is Nynorsk, which is a very conservative way of writing in Norwegian, using different spellings that are designed to not look like Danish, but to look more like the original Norwegian language there was before the Danish occupation. An example of spelling differences is that in "one" in Bokmål is "en", but in Nynorsk it is written as "ein". Some few parts of Norway has Nynorsk as the official written standard, but most parts agrees on writing in Bokmål. It's kind of like in Serbia, some writes in Cyrillic and some writes in the Latin/Roman script, but it's still the same language.
As for other languages in Norway, there is Sami and Finnish speaking minorities in the north, just like in Sweden. But those langauges are Uralic and not Germanic. They have a pretty high official status in the northern regions they are spoken in though. Swedes and Norwegians cannot understand those Uralic languages unless they learnt them. In Kirkenes near the Russian border there is also some Russian spoken. In northernmost Norway there also used to be a Norwegian-Russian pidgin language called Russenorsk (Руссено́рск), but that is extinct today.
The Ylvis brothers in the video speaks Bergensk, the Norwegian dialect they speak in Bergen, most parts of Norway has their own dialects. In Bergen they write mostly in Bokmål.
As for the written versions of the Norwegian language, I can read Bokmål without any problems at all, and I can also read Nynorsk but it's a bit harder than Bokmål, still not any major problems. It's not often you get to read Nynorsk, it's written by less than 1 million people and most Norwegians agrees on writing in Bokmål.
Written Norwegian (Bokmål) is very similar to Danish, but spoken Norwegian is alot more similar to Swedish. It is easier for most Swedes to understand Norwegian than it is to understand Danish. Allthough down here in Southern Sweden most people also understands Danish very well, and the Danes understand us.
Here is a Wikipedia article about Norway written in Nynorsk, I do not have any major problems reading what it says, but Bokmål is easier to read http://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noreg
Last edited by Helsingborgaren; 11-19-2013 at 08:49 AM..
There is also as I mentioned before some particular close similarities between Swedish (North Germanic) and German (West Germanic), even if they are not mutually intelligible.
First part of the Swedish version of Silent Night:
Quote:
Stilla natt, heliga natt.
Allt är frid.
Stjärnan blid
skiner på barnet i stallets strå
och de vakande fromma två
Kristus till jorden är kommen,
Oss är en frälsare född
Stora stund, heliga stund
Änglars här slår sin rund
kring de vaktande herdars hjord
Rymden ljuder av glädjens ord:
Kristus till jorden är kommen
Eder är frälsaren född
Swedish version of Silent Night, but translated directly to German with machine translation:
Quote:
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.
Alles ist Frieden.
Der Stern sanfte
scheint auf das Kind im Stall Stroh
und das wachsame frommen zwei
Christus auf die Erde gekommen ist;
Uns ist ein Retter geboren
Großer Moment, heiligen Moment
Engel hier Schläge seinen rund
rund um die Bewachung Hirten Herde
Raumfahrt Klänge der Freude Worten:
Christus auf die Erde gekommen
Ihr ist der Retter geboren
Not sure if it's a 100% correct translation, but you can see the similarities. There is also an intresting but close false friend there. The word "stund" exists in both Swedish in German, but in Swedish it means moment, and in German it means hour. So in this direct translation, stund translates to moment. And of course the German word moment is the same as in English.
And here is the same text directly translated to English with machine translation:
Quote:
Silent night, holy night.
All is peace.
The star gentle
shining on the child in the stable straw
and the watchful pious two
Christ to the earth is come;
Us is born a savior
Great moment, sacred moment
Angels here hitting their round
around the guarding shepherds herd
Space sounds of glad words:
Christ has come to earth
Your savior is born
The Swedish words stilla, natt, allt, stjärnan, helig, skiner, strå, vakande, två, Kristus, kommen, oss, änglars, här, rund, hjord and ord shares a common pattern with both German and English.
The word glädjens shares a common pattern with English only.
The words en, frid, herdars, vaktande, stall, sina and slår shares a common pattern with German only.
Then there is of course a few words like frälsare (savior), jorden (earth) and kring (around) that did not share any pattern with English or German, but most words did in some way.
Words like Swedish "kommen" is more similar to German "gekommen" than English "come", but you can still see that the words has obviously the same origin, "come" is not very different at all from "kommen". And yet there is still ignorant people who insists that English is somehow not Germanic...
Germanic is a language group of it's own just like Romance and Slavic, some Germanic languages has gotten more Romance influence than others, but that does NOT make them non-Germanic.
Last edited by Helsingborgaren; 11-19-2013 at 02:25 PM..
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