Could a Scandinavian language be developed that is mutually intelligable to all four?
I was first intrigued by this prospect when I was in high school and a girl from Upsalla, Sweden and a girl from Oslo, Norway were conversing – in which language I do not know.
They wrote down some lengthy word lists for me, and a girl from Denmark also added their words, Whereas there were some differences, the similarities were greater. As an adult, exchange students I have known have continued to express that the languages are different.
There are two dialects or versions of the Norwegian language, and then there is Swedish and Danish. Four languages. It is said that someone who learns Norwegian can comprehend written Danish and spoken Swedish moderately well. Finnish is a Baltic language and not Scandinavian; Icelandic is a far older language than the other Scandinavian languages.
To this untrained English speaker, I can see far more similarities than differences in the two Norwegian languages or dialects, spoken Swedish and written Danish. And, as an English speaker, I see our own English language as containing many variables, alternate words, dialects, foreign words, and loan words.
Whereas no single Scandinavian language is completely understood by all the others, how difficult would it be to develop a mutually understandable Scandinavian language?
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As you noted, they are close enough that native speakers can comprehend what is being said in one fo the other four.
They are as close as Italian is to French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Thanks—except for the accent I cannot really distinguish those, either. They all seem to be variants of Latin. But at least with them, we have Latin as a common denominator. What would be common Scandinavian?
The common ancestor is Old Norse, the closest modern language to which is Icelandic.
Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are all relatively close to one another, but Icelandic is further afield.
Italian, Spanish and French share Latin as an ancestor but they are generally not as close to each other as Danish, Norwegian or Swedish are to each other. Native speakers of the Romance languages can not understand the other languages without studying them.
Yes you could make a common Scandinavian language because those languages are already mostly understandable to anyone in Norway, Sweden or Denmark… but you couldn’t get them to agree on which words or pronunciations to choose because they enjoy their own versions and making fun of the other nations’ ways of talking (and their ways of doing other things).
It’s probably more accurate to regard Swedish, Danish and Norwegian as regional dialects than as separate languages. Icelandic has remained fairly isolated all these centuries and thus remains much closer to Old Norse than the rest. I’ve read that a modern Icelandic speaker can still read and for the most part understand the sagas that were written in Iceland nearly a thousand years ago. A modern English speaker, by comparison, would not at all understand something written in Old English (which, for that matter, is closer to Icelandic than it is to modern English).
I’m sure it could be done but then you’d have five languages instead of just four.
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