Like the romance languages, Scandinavian languages have much in common.\u00a0 Danes and Norwegians can understand each other and so can Norwegians and Swedes.\u00a0 Swedish and Danish do not have quite as much in common.\u00a0 Norwegian seems to be the common denominator.\u00a0 You might wonder why this is?<\/p>\n
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have a complicated relationship.\u00a0 Historically it has been quite a scene of power-swapping and power sharing.\u00a0 The three countries were politically united from 1397-1523 in the Kalmar Union.\u00a0 Shortly thereafter Denmark ruled over Norway for nearly\u00a0three centuries (1536-1814), after \u00a0which point Norway fell under Swedish rule.\u00a0 During the Norway-Denmark union, Danish\u00a0was the standard written language and the spoken language of the Norwegian elite.\u00a0 By the time Norway was in a union with Sweden, Norwegians united in a\u00a0nationalist movement to develop their own\u00a0language.<\/p>\n
In Norway there are two standard written languages: bokm\u00e5l<\/strong> and nynorsk.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Children learn both languages in school.\u00a0 Bokm\u00e5l <\/strong>is the written language of the majority of the population, but most people speak their own local dialect.\u00a0 If you learn bokm\u00e5l<\/strong> and Norwegian is not your first language (morsm\u00e5l= <\/strong>essentially mother tongue), you will be able to understand Norwegians in Oslo forsure.\u00a0 Chances are you’ll understand people in Bergen and other big cities, but once you move into the rural areas, it’s tough.\u00a0 Some Norwegians can’t even understand each other.\u00a0 The high mountains and deep valleys prevented people from interacting with others outside of their village so hundreds of different dialects evolved.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nynorsk is actually a language that a man named Ivar Aasen set out to develop.\u00a0 During the middle of the 19th century, he travelled all around Norway to collect grammatical and phonetic information about Norwegian dialects.\u00a0 He basically created a folk-language (nynorsk)<\/strong> that\u00a0shares less characteristics with Danish and more\u00a0with Old Norwegian and the\u00a0many dialects that were formed\u00a0during Norway’s several unions with Sweden and Denmark.<\/p>\n Here is the relationship between the three languages that all of this history has created:\u00a0 Written Danish and Norwegian are very similar, spoken Swedish and Norwegian are very similar, and Danish and Swedish have the least in common.\u00a0 Many people think Danes sounds like Norwegians with potatoes in their throats.\ufffd\u00a0 Bottom line-if you learn Norwegian, you will be able to get by in Sweden and Denmark too!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like the romance languages, Scandinavian languages have much in common.\u00a0 Danes and Norwegians can understand each other and so can Norwegians and Swedes.\u00a0 Swedish and Danish do not have quite as much in common.\u00a0 Norwegian seems to be the common denominator.\u00a0 You might wonder why this is? Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have a complicated relationship.\u00a0…<\/p>\n