I am Norwegian, and my view is: Swedish and Norwegians understand eachother
better than Norwegians and Danish in spite of the fact that Danish and
Norwegian has more common words than Swedish and Norwegian. This is because
the Danish have a very different way of pronouncing the words. For a
Norwegian the Danish sound like they are trying to talk with a potato in
their mouths. I have been to Denmark a couple of times and I discovered that
many Danish had problems with understanding me, so I guess it's mutual. But
I don't know how Norwegian sounds like for someone from Denmark.
I have also heard that Norwegians understand Swedish better than vice a
versa, because most have Swedish television in Norway but the Swedish have
not Norwegian channels. But I'm not sure about this.
But though there might be minor problems, the speakers of the three
languages understand eachother pretty well, in my opinion.

Christine

>From: Josh Geller <dclxvi@...>
>Reply-To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
>To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [norse_course] Question About Modern Scandinavian Languages
>Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 00:04:54 +0000 (GMT)
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>How close to mutually intelligible are the various modern Scandinavian
>languages?
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>Are there any situations like with Portuguese vs. Spanish (where a
>Portuguese speaker can generally understand a Spanish speaker but not
>necessarily vice versa)?
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