Can people from Sweden who have only learned Swedish understand any Norwegian or Danish?

Question

The same goes for monolingual people from Norway and Denmark...Which two are most alike?..Can you give some examples?

Answer 1

I was just talking about this yesterday. These three languages are very much alike with many connate words and I think the grammar is pretty much a like too. Swedish may a little more different than Danish and Norwegian are to each other. But, I feel sure to say that they can get the idea of what the other is saying without much trouble.

Answer 2

Well, depends on what you want to use it for. German is by far the language spoken by the most people of the languages you mentioned but it's also grammatically the trickiest for an English speaker. Knowing German would help a lot when learning Dutch, and maybe a little to learn Swedish and the others, but vocabularywise they're quite different languages. Swedish does have a vast amount of Low German loanwords, though, as a Swede, I find I can read quite a lot of Dutch without actually knowing it. Knowing Swedish helps a lot when learning Danish and Norwegian and vice versa, and Danish and Norwegian are very close since they've shared their basic written language for a long time. However, when it comes to speaking any of the languages mentioned, or understanding it spoken, it's a whole different matter. As a Swede I can find it quite difficult or close to impossible to understand, for example, a Danish speaker, even though reading Danish can be a piece of cake. On the other hand, Norwegian is far easier. There are Swedish dialects that are harder to understand than Norwegian, for other Swedes. Icelandic is a wholly different story. And to get the terms right. They're all Germanic languages, just different twigs of the same branch. English is also a Germanic language, even though the vocabulary nowadays is mainly loanwords from French and Latin. The skeleton of the language is still Germanic, though.

Answer 3

If written (or spoken very slowly and clearly) then yes (probably 70-90%).
When spoken normally it gets trickier...
My personal experience is that Swedes often have a harder time understanding Danes than the other way around (kind of like Spanish-Portuguese).
People from southern Sweden are more likely to understand Danish than those from the North, etc. As dialects vary through each of the three countries it depends to a degree on where the person lives.

Answer 4

These three languages are very similar. Danish and Norwegian have similar spelling although the words are pronounced differently. There are also many very distinct dialects within each language. Some Swedes and Norwegians may understand each other better than some people from other regions in their own countries.

Answer 5

The Scandinavia languages are often classified as belonging to either an East Scandinavian branch (Danish and Swedish) or a West Scandinavian branch (Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese).

Most dialects of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are mutually intelligible, and Scandinavians can easily understand each other's standard languages as they appear in print and are heard on radio and television. The reason why Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are traditionally viewed as different languages, rather than dialects of one common language, is that they each are well established standard languages in their respective countries. They are related to, but not mutually intelligible with, the other North Germanic languages, Icelandic and Faroese, which are descended from Old West Norse. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian have, since medieval times, been influenced to varying degrees by Middle Low German and standard German. A substantial amount of that influence was a by-product of the economic activity generated by the Hanseatic League.

Norwegians are accustomed to variation, and may perceive Danish and Swedish only as slightly more distant dialects. This is because they have two official written standards, in addition to the habit of strongly holding on to local dialects. The people of Stockholm, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark, have the greatest difficulty in understanding other Nordic languages. In the Faroe Islands Danish is mandatory, and since Faroese people this way become bilingual in two very distinct Nordic languages, they find it relatively easy to understand the other two Mainland Scandinavian languages.

The Scandinavian languages are (as a language family) entirely unrelated to Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages which as Finno-Ugric languages are distantly related to Hungarian. Due to the close proximity, there is still a great deal of borrowing from the Swedish and Norwegian languages in both the Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages.

Answer 6

My fiance is danish and he knows all three languages. A lot of their words are exactly the same, only spelled with one or two different letters.

Answer 7

Yes...to some extent, since the three languages are related to some degree.

Answer 8

Yes, they can.
It's fascinating, bearing in mind that there are countries in which dialects of the same language are not necessarily mutually intelligible...

Answer 9

I have a friend who is Swedish and he says he can understand them.

Answer 10

Yes - just so long as the speaker talks VERY LOUDLY. It's just like English in that respect.