Can most Norwegians, Swedes and Danes understand each others languages?
Norwegian, Danish, Swedish yes. The relationship is complex, but Norwegian is kind of between the two.The pronunciation sounds more like Swedish, but vocabulary leaning towards Danish. Norwegian itself has two main recognized standards, the one being closer to Danish, and the other being closer to older Norwegian. I spend some time in Norway and Sweden on separate times, and learned both Swedish and Norwegian, and often confuse them. I’m a native speaker of Afrikaans (South African version of Dutch) and even found these languages to be surprisingly close to my own. Icelandic for the most part cannot be understood by the other speakers, but still is quite close, and therefore still quick to learn. Icelandic is more conservative and complex, and related to Faroese, whom they can understand. Even Dutch and Afrikaans speakers can have a good go at understanding the above languages (about 20% understanding “out of the box”, depending on context and education). German and English speakers ha
