Quote:
Originally Posted by Self Infanticide
Danish and Norwegian share more vocabulary in common than either has with Swedish but Norwegian and Swedish share more phonology features. So in a way, Norwegian can be considered 'in between' the two.
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Very true. In spoken form I think its Danish that sticks out the most of the 3, with a guttural pronounciation that is much more like German than Scandinavian, allthough the vocabulary is Scandinavian, largely the same as in Norwegian. As the pronounciation is so different, it makes Danish hard to understand to many Swedes and Norwegians in spoken form.
And then we have Swedish vocabulary, which is largely the same as in Danish/Norwegian but with some different spellings and a few own words and a couple of different letters. Written Danish/Norwegian is easily understood by Swedes, as the differences are very small. The grammar in the 3 languages is largely the same. I read Norwegian and Danish online tabloids every day without any problem.
Spoken Norwegian is extremely similar to spoken Swedish, and easy to understand in both ways. I doubt any unexperienced foreigner would hear any difference between the 2. When it comes to spoken Danish, I think an unexperienced foreigner could easily mistake it for German or Dutch.
In spoken form, its Danish that sticks out
In written form, its Swedish that sticks out
So yes, as you said, Norwegian truly is in between.
Faroese and Icelandic uses a pronounciation remisent to that of Norwegian/Swedish, but lets not get those involved here as those 2 are not understandable to any speakers of the 3 intelligible mainland Scandinavian langauges.
There is absolutely, without any doubt, no such thing as any English equivalent to the Scandinavian mutual intelligibility, unless you count Scots as a seperate language. There is no seperate language (other than Scots) that an English-speaking person would understand as much as say a Swede understands Norwegian without having learnt it.
Swedish:
Det var en fuktig, grå sommardag i slutet av juni.
Norwegian:
Det var en fuktig, grå sommerdag i slutten av juni.
Danish:
Det var en fugtig, grå sommerdag i slutningen af juni.
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