{"id":689,"date":"2010-11-30T23:58:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T23:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/?p=689"},"modified":"2010-11-30T23:58:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T23:58:52","slug":"norwegian-danish-and-swedish-mutually-intelligible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/norwegian-danish-and-swedish-mutually-intelligible\/","title":{"rendered":"Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish-mutually intelligible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people give me a very strange look when I tell them that I speak Norwegian.\u00a0 They give me an even stranger look when I say that one of my majors was Norwegian.\u00a0 After the look sets in for a few seconds, they typically ask, “why?”\u00a0 A simple, straight-forward and fair question, although I get quite sick of explaining myself because I think most people still wonder “why” even after hearing my answer.\u00a0 Why learn German if you are not going to live in Germany or be in business, or the literature or history field, for example?\u00a0 Why learn French if none of the above apply to you?\u00a0 We can always ask each other why we learn the languages that we do.\u00a0 Most of my classmates in high school learned Spanish (which I regret not doing-I took French), which makes perfect sense considering we had<\/span> to learn a foreign language and the MN (and the U.S. in general), has a very large number of hispanics.\u00a0 Still, I would be willing to bet the the large majority of my classmates that took Spanish do not currently use it in their personal lives or in business.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My theory on learning foreign languages is that no matter what, it is a good thing.\u00a0 I believe children should be required to start learning a foreign language at a very early age.\u00a0 It is scientifically proven that the processes and the skills involved in\u00a0second language acquisition are highly beneficial to a child’s brain development and communication skills, to name a couple.\u00a0 It doesn’t necessarily matter if you are going to use the second language on a daily basis or once a year on vacation.\u00a0 It’s simply healthy and advantageous to learn a second (third, or perhaps eighth language…).\u00a0<\/p>\n

This topic came to my mind now because last night at a business dinner party, I had a fantastic experience involving my ability to speak Norwegian.\u00a0 This is my first business trip with my current company and so the night was filled with new names and faces.\u00a0 I met a number of Dutch colleagues, as well as folks from the U.K., Belgium, Finland, and Denmark.\u00a0 When I was introduced to the Danish man, someone whispered in my ear that I should speak Norwegian to him.\u00a0 So I did, and we had a great conversation that no one in the vicinity could understand.\u00a0 The Danish man was so pleased that he could communicate with me in his own language because for the 20 years that he has worked for this company, it has always been him that could not understand the Dutch people when they would speak amongst themselves.\u00a0 Finally, someone who could speak a Scandinavian language!<\/p>\n

Later on in the taxi ride back to our hotel, the Danish man, myself, and a Finnish woman were sitting in the back of the van together.\u00a0\u00a0The Finnish woman piped\u00a0up in Swedish\u00a0(most Finns\u00a0can speak Swedish\u00a0because there is an area of Finland that is Swedish-speaking), so we were having a mutually intelligble conversation in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish.\u00a0 They are all very similar that most people from the three countries can understand each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it was a lot of fun to be having this private, very interesting conversation.\u00a0 And…it just goes to show that even an obscure language like Norwegian can be extremely relevant at times:)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most people give me a very strange look when I tell them that I speak Norwegian.\u00a0 They give me an even stranger look when I say that one of my majors was Norwegian.\u00a0 After the look sets in for a few seconds, they typically ask, “why?”\u00a0 A simple, straight-forward and fair question, although I get…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4904,3684,3446],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-language","tag-danish","tag-norwegian","tag-swedish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions\/690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}