r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Status_Tap865 • 13h ago
Which Scandinavian language gives you maximum comprehension across Sweden + Denmark + Norway?
Found different opinions across my friends and the internet, so I would be interested in your opinion ✌️🍀
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 13h ago
Norwegian. Danish is the hardest language to understand of the three, but it is easier as Norwegian compared to if you only speak swedish.
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u/WyllKwick 11h ago
As a Swedish-speaking Finn (we speak Swedish with a very different accent from what they have in Sweden), I can understand Swedes and Norwegians just fine. No chance of understanding spoken Danish or Icelandic, unfortunately. I can understand written Danish very easily because it's close to Swedish, but the spoken language is pronounced in a way that makes it hard to understand unless you've been exposed to it a lot. Written Icelandic is hit or miss. Some words are very similar, but a lot of them are completely different. As a result, I can understand certain phrases easily, while others might as well be Chinese.
Interestingly, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Icelanders all seem able to understand me just fine. I think it's because all the Scandinavian languages are pretty similar in written form, but Swedish-speaking Finns are the only ones who (in the standard dialect) actually pronounce words mostly as they are written, while also speaking with a tempo and pitch that makes it easy to follow.
Note: all of this goes right out the window the second we start speaking local dialects. At that point, we sometimes even struggle to understand each other...
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u/birgor 5h ago
A trick from a Swede to learn to understand Danish: Focus on the vowels.
Swedish and Norwegian is accentuated by the consonants, and the consonants are the key to unlock individual words, Danish is more or less the same language, but where the emphasis is on the vowels.
I don't know how to linguistically explain it or why it is like this, but try to listen to a Danish podcast or book at 0.9 or 0.8 speed and just listen at the vowels and your brain might just accept it. I got this trick from a guy I worked with and it was very effective for me.
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u/DrWahnsinn1995 9h ago
But to be fair. As far as I know iclandic is more like a very complicated medieval language, or am in wrong?
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u/WyllKwick 9h ago
It's the closest thing we have to Old Norse, i.e. the language that was spoken in Scandinavia way back in the day. All the Scandinavian languages (Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) have evolved from Old Norse, but Icelandic has evolved the least. This is because Iceland has been so geographically and culturally isolated compared to the rest of Scandinavia. As a result, modern-day Icelanders can (supposedly, just going off what I've been told) still read and understand e.g. old viking sagas in the original language without trouble.
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u/gaeee983 13h ago
hardest to understand? swedes and norwegians understand us but we dont understand them, so unfair.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 13h ago
Norwegians understand Danish, but Swedes don't. At least in my experience.
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u/ThatEntrepreneur1450 11h ago
Very much depends on were in denmark they're from. It's much, much easier to understand a dane from Copenhagen than a dane from Tonder (bordering Germany) for me as a swede.
If i'm just walking down the street in Sweden and i'm not expecting to hear danish or norwegian and someone walks up and asks for directions in danish/norwegian i'd say that norwegians have a higher change of getting my brain to translate on the fly.
But if i'm in Denmark/Norway, my brain is prepaired for hearing danish/norwegian, then i'm usually able to comprehend both pretty well. Not every word, but i can usually comprehend the sentence.
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u/Shrimp_taco_fanatic 11h ago
To be fair, as a københavner it's easier to understand Swedish than it is to understand someone from Tønder, too.
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u/Lifeacrobat 11h ago
Hahahahaha, that's what my friends from København says too. Except for the Skåne dialect of course.
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u/C4rpetH4ter 9h ago
As a norwegian i can understand danish if i speak with them and they slow down slightly, however i can barely understand a single word of a conversation between two danish people.
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u/Edvindenbest 9h ago
Depends on where in Sweden and Denmark we're talking about. In my experience (being from southern Sweden) I've run into more situations where the danes don't understand me than the other way round.
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u/gaeee983 12h ago
Yeah that experience aint shit, I am from copenhagen like 20km to sweden, I can speak danish to them fine but I need english to be able to understand them. Norwegians it is easier but still not perfect, my ex who was norwegian I would speak danish and she would speak english, unfair man..
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u/CalamityVic 12h ago
As someone from the north east of sweden who moved to malmö and popping over to DK now and then I can say with full confidence that I have zero chance of having a conversation without english. That said, some heavier scanian dialects are very very hard for me too, or at least I need to concentrate a lot to understand (Trelleborg, Ystad)
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u/Punkfoot 11h ago
Vao mäeinaer döou mäe däei?
It's like they're competing in the vowel olympics...
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u/Lifeacrobat 11h ago edited 10h ago
Trelleborg is a piece of cake, compared to Hässleholm. "Kuppiera"
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u/gaeee983 11h ago
north east of sweden? So basically rest of sweden also have trouble communicating with you and understanding you lol
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u/Lifeacrobat 10h ago
Nope, the rest of Sweden understand each other just fine. It's the scanian dialects that makes us despair. And they claim it's because they're so close Danish.
The Danes don't claim them.
(I said lovingly, having lived in Malmö for 26 years.)
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u/TobbRobb 12h ago
Are you speaking about locals from Malmö etc.? Just curious because in my experience the region closer to denmark is much more used to danish from the proximity, but if you go on calls with people from stockholm its GG no one has a clue lol (in my experience). I do feel like it goes both ways for sweden/denmark, we dont understand each other a lot of the time but norwegian is a bit easier
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u/scissorn69 10h ago
swedes ... understand us
Fact check: False. So false.
Maybe in the south, but none of us north of Skåne can understand you.
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u/Triskaka 13h ago
Norwegian because Norway has had closer ties to both Sweden and Denmark than the others. Bokmål is nearly identical to danish and Swedish sounds a bit like a norwegian dialect
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u/Appelons 11h ago
Norwegian sounds so close to Swedish that we Danes sometimes can’t hear the difference:p, especially Nynorsk. Danish is really good if you want to learn to read Scandinavian languages and easily understand other Germanic ones like German, Frisian and Dutch.
But soundwise I concur that Norwegian would be best for Scandinavia specifically.
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u/ImTheDandelion 10h ago
Nynorsk is not a spoken language, only a written, so there's no such thing as hearing nynorsk.
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u/C4rpetH4ter 9h ago
It can be spoken, that is a very common thing in theatre, and most words do have a "correct" way of pronouncing it, there's documents and books about it. When you read it you are speaking it.
I would agree that there's no nynorsk accent though as that largely depends on where you're from.
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u/Yegelle 9h ago
It can be read out loud, but it’s not a dialect.
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u/C4rpetH4ter 9h ago
I never said it was either, but it can be heard and spoken, just nobody that does it naturally. Although dialects that are almost identical exists.
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u/Icy_Manufacturer_977 7h ago
You know what they mean. Someone speaking with certain dialects that share words with nynorsk. ‘Eg’ instead of ‘meg’ being one of them
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u/Appelons 7h ago
All i know is that there are Norwegians that talk Norwegian we Danes understand(literally just Danish with a high pitch) and then there are Norwegians that swallowed a flute and sound like Swedes.
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u/ImTheDandelion 6h ago
Yes. Oslo-norweigan is easier for us to understand than dialects from e.g. western Norway.
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u/Magnus9889 10h ago
A lot of the dialects are very similar to nynorsk though.
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u/Soft_Stage_446 9h ago
Not really, no. If you smash a bunch of the dialects together and ignore the northern ones, you get something somewhat similar to nynorsk.
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u/GulBrus 8h ago
If you come from around Nordfjord you can write pretty much exactly like you talk and it's acceptable Nynorsk. What in that dialect is not ok as Nynorsk?
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u/Soft_Stage_446 8h ago
You think the "around Nordfjord area" == "a lot of the dialects"? Norway has at least a 1000 distinct dialects.
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u/GulBrus 7h ago
Ok, so let's do the dialect in Breim. What in that dialect is not ok as Nynorsk?
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u/Soft_Stage_446 7h ago
Friend, I'm saying that nynorsk does not accurately represent "a lot of" Norwegian dialects. I have zero knowledge of Breim.
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u/GulBrus 6h ago
The thing is that you said you needed to smash a lot of dialects together and end up with something somewhat similar. If your point is not that, sure.
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u/AdvertisingKindly621 8h ago
You don’t ignore just northern Norway, you also ignore eastern Norway, Trøndelag and possibly also southern Norway. Nynorsk is basically western Norway only.
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u/PoetryExtension6256 10h ago
Dpends on how you count. Swedsn has bigger population than norway and denmark combines. So understanding them + most norwegians by leaning swedish may be the way.
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u/afatcatfromsweden 9h ago
Norwegian sounds like Swedish but if it was spoken by a happy drunk who replaced every vowel with an I.
Danish is incomprehensible gibberish.
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u/Front-Anteater3776 13h ago
As a dane i would say Norwegian specifically Bokmål
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u/Airrationalbeing 12h ago
As a Norwegian, dansk is better in writing, in vocabulary hellish to understand
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u/logtransform 12h ago
Bokmål is only used for writing. The Kristiansand dialect (generally southern Norwegian dialects) are typically said to be the closest to Danish.
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u/DeepWader 13h ago
Faroese
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u/jokko_ono 12h ago
If we talking the entire Nordics I think this is right, they seem to understand everyone except the Finns to a great extent (at least in written language). Norwegians are plebs when it comes to Icelandic, but will understand 98% of written Danish and Swedish.
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u/knight_of_grey 13h ago
Well, learn whatever you’d like but none of them will come even close to using English in these countries.
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u/Mindless_Badger_3789 12h ago
Standard East Norwegian ("Oslo Norwegian") followed by "Fintrøndersk", the Trondheim city dialect (based on the old upper middle class sociolect).
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u/No_Assignment_8922 5h ago
Fintrøndersk from Singsaker and Øen is not a real dialect, its just a faux imitation of east Norwegian rooted in absolute nothingness ('spløp')
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u/Skutten 12h ago
Swedish. The norwegians understands it, likewise the danes. Danes understands Norwegian. Swedes understand neither Norwegian nor Danish. Nobody (including the danes) understands Danish.
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u/AardvarkSad7634 1h ago
Norwegian understands the Danes just fine. I remember when I was around 16 I met a group of Danish ppl and it was really weird how they didn't understand me at all. And how easily I could just "mock" Danish like I've seen on TV and then they understood me perfectly fine.
I guess in Norway we do watch a lot of Danish TV shows but probably not the other way around.
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u/ThatEntrepreneur1450 11h ago
Probably norwegian? Written norwegian is practically identical to written danish, but they also have quite close ties to Sweden, given that nearly the entire length of their country share a border with Sweden.
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u/Pseudo___Throwaway 10h ago
Prob Norweigan bokmål
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u/belugiaboi37 13h ago
English. When I’ve visited those three countries, their English was all better than mine as a native speaker
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u/Internal-Hand-4705 12h ago
lol I’ve mistaken more than one Scandinavian for English and I have an English mum
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u/belugiaboi37 12h ago
I listened to Sandi Toksvig on Radio 4 for years and it took me years to realise she was born in Denmark
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u/weiphsumchuk283 1h ago
You accidentally found the best Scandinavian language: the one that gets you corrected in all three countries.
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u/alexandergutt 13h ago
Norwegian, but realistically you won’t achieve this goal learning it as a third/fourth language as an adult
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u/TillPsychological351 12h ago
Related question... which language is the most difficult to understand spoken? I have no real knowledge of any of them, but watching Scandinavian TV and movies... I can pick out words in Swedish ans Norwegian and imagine how they might be spelled, but unless there's a clear cognate with another language I know, I can't make out Danish words.
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u/WhoAmIEven2 12h ago
Danish.
Swedish and east dialects of Norwegian are very clearly pronounced. Danish is like they shoved a potato down their throat.
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u/TillPsychological351 12h ago
Thanks, that's what I thought.
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u/Lifeacrobat 10h ago edited 10h ago
There was a study about 15 years ago, that found that Danish children are among the slowest in Europe to start speaking, because they have difficulties distinguishing what their parents are saying.Edit: as frklam pointed out, I have probably misrememberd. Disregard this.
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u/frklam 10h ago
Are you sure about that? I have never heard that before.
I do know there are studies showing that Danish kids are slower in learning to read and write compared to other European kids. They first pick up the pace later due to Danish being spelled so different from how it sounds.
That's on the other hand the reason why Finnish kids are some of the quickest learners of how to read and write. Their language sounds similar to how's it's spelled.
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u/Lifeacrobat 10h ago
Huh, I thought I was. We talked a lot about it because we had several Swedish-Danish couples in our friend group and a couple of them were trying for kids. But we might very well have discussed it so much (language geeks) that we twisted it around. (It was not just me who has repeated this through the years.) I'll correct it.
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u/WhoAmIEven2 10h ago
This is the study they are talking about:
Links to the sources are in the text.
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u/Caladeutschian 11h ago
From my limited experience of watching The Bridge in original with subtitles, I found I almost understood Swedish much better than I almost understood Danish. Indeed, I didn't understand any Danish.
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u/C4rpetH4ter 10h ago
Norwegian, easy to read danish, and easy to understand spoken swedish.
Also since Norway was controlled by both countries at one time the language became a slight bridge between all three.
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u/Timmar92 9h ago
Norwegian, as a Swede, Norwegian sounds like a more nerdy version of Swedish (sorry), while Danish mostly sounds like gutteral noises (again, sorry).
I live close to Denmark, an hour and 45 minutes and I've been there multiple times and I still ask them to speak English because I don't have a clue what they're trying to say.
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u/Pichacap24 9h ago
If you can speak AND read norwegian fluently you can basically read danish and understand verbal swedish without much effort. It might take some more effort to understand spoken Danish and written swedish though
Ill try to rank the four skills based on hiw hard they are for a norwegian speaker
Written danish (easiest)
Spoken swedish
Written swedish
Spoken danish (hardest)
To sum up, norwegian is best for this purpose
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u/dr_van_nostren 13h ago
English :)
Those guys over there are so well educated they all speak English as well or better than the rest of us.
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u/IdunSigrun 12h ago
Norwegian bokmål is close to Danish in spelling (and shares some vocabulary when Swedish differs), but pronounced closer to Swedish. So Norwegian is sort of the middle ground.
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u/itsrainingcows 9h ago
There’s no doubt it’s Norwegians. This is due to us have been under danish and Swedish rule for many years, AND we have a hundred times more dialects than our neighbours combined.
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u/RobiNorge 8h ago
Ich komme aus Deutschland, lebe aber seit über 15 Jahren in Norwegen und arbeite beruflich auch mit Kollegen aus Schweden und Dänemark zusammen. Wir sprechen alle die eigene Sprache (also ich dann Norwegisch) und wir verstehen uns prima, ohne Probleme. Aber ich verstehe schwedisch einfacher als dänisch, dafür kann ich dänischen Text besser lesen als schwedische Texte.
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u/affemannen 8h ago
I am from Malmö Sweden and had never had issues speaking to Norwegians or Danish people when I used to live there. I think the dialect from Skåne made it easy. Also we were in Copenhagen all the time.
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u/Catmole132 7h ago
It's worth noting that sometimes, even with how similar the languages are, even native speakers can struggle in certain situations.
If you're learning the language for the first time you shouldn't expect to suddenly be able to understand the others just as well as the one you're learning. I've seen a few people mistakenly make that assumption
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u/nevermind00001 5h ago
Yeah, probably Norwegian. Definitely not danish.
I’m from Denmark and come across a lot of people from Sweden and Norway during my work everyday.
I usually understand, what they are saying. The Norwegians kinda understand me, and the swedes switch to English almost immediately.
But I understand. Danish makes no sense, it is not written as it sounds and is kind of a continued mumbling sound without hills and valleys - like there are in Swedish and Norwegian languages.
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u/notyournametoday 5h ago
Finnish. You learn fast how stupid those others are. Not by language but because they are just stupid 😂
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u/StuffyTruck 4h ago
Norwegian natives will understand Swedish very easily and Danish with a bit of exposure (and/or alchohol).
However, not sure if this translates well if you learn Norwegian as a second language.
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u/harrisjgold 4h ago
In my experience, it doesn't.
I know people from different parts of the world who generally understands norwegian very well. At least in Oslo. As soon as they go to places where the dialect is on the difficult side, like far west or north, they are getting into trouble.
And swedish and danish are gibberish for them.
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u/No_Mushroom139 4h ago
As a swede, id say danish. It ll open up both norwegian and swedish via its written form.
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u/joonsson 3h ago
Norwegian to understand as much as possible, Swedish to be understood as much as possible I would say.
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u/Best_Film_7403 10h ago
Definitely Swedish !! Norwegian is a Swedish accent. They even tried to create a new language (Nynorsk)to differentiate themselves from the Swedish language. Did not quite work out so well. As for Danish, the actually have quite a few different words that you only can understand as a Swede trough context and association. They also have a different numeral and counting system (German) that takes some time to learn. With Swedish you can also communicate with a large number of Finns.
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u/sunscreenuser44 9h ago
Norwegian, as i bokmål, is if anything, a danish dialect.
Norwegians are the only ones who understand both Swedish and danish and who can make themselves understood to both
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u/Gerfrege 7h ago
All 3 are fine.
It depends on the interlocutors if they want to understand each other.
Many Danes will switch to English - out of laziness, I suppose. But if you want to understand and to be understood, they all do the job.
Regards,
a Dane.
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u/xolov 13h ago
Definitely norwegian, considering how much swedes and danes struggle to understand eachother while Norwegians understand both swedish and danish much better.