Out of both Norwegian and Swedish, which language sis more useful in the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere?
June 3, 2010 by
Filed under swedish language
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and minority pockets elsewhere. Thinking on taking one of the two up. I’m fluent in French, German, and conversational in Arabic. Lived on an American property in Saudi Arabia for 8 months.
Nobody is interested in those languages, let alone some philologist. They’re not worth a second of your time.
Norwegian, probably. But we do understand English.
Written Norwegian (bokmal) is very similar to written Danish
Spoken differs though
Swedish is also a national language in Finland but they refuse in majority to speak it (because they are forced to learn it in school)
In Iceland students are forced to learn Danish in schools
Finnish is not a germanic language.
The “majority” of the people speak english here anyways.
From personal experience Swedish is easier.
Danish: Hvordan har du det?
Norwegian: Hvordan har du det?
Icelandic: Hvað segir þú?
Swedish: Hur mår du?
Finnish: Mitä kuuluu?
I would say Swedish, but it’s a close run thing. I have seen sociolinguistic researches report that Swedish is the most commonly understood of the Scandinavian languages, but of course it depends on where you want to use the language. Danish people probably understand Norwegian slightly better, whereas Finns surely understand Swedish better. By the way, it’s an exaggeration to say as many do, that you can’t use Swedish in Finland – it’s true many people don’t want to speak Swedish, especially in Eastern Finland, but as long as you stay in the bigger cities and along the West coast you will always be able to find someone who is willing to use his school Swedish (and around 4-5% have Swedish as their first language).
One reason Swedish wins the race is ironically the unwillingness among Swedish people to even try to understand especially Danish. Both Danish and Norwegians are usually more exposed to Swedish language than Swedish people to Danish and Norwegian languages, for example on TV. I hope this is changing, since it seems plainly silly to speak English when you meet other people who speak languages so closely related as the Scandinavian languages. Still, this is what many Swedish people do.
See more in my answer to this question: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080420054408AAR9zxt
Useful? You can get by quite well with English — unless you plan on some serious time travel (back to the mid 1900s) or to some really remote places.
On the other hand, you will perhaps enjoy learning one of the Scandinavian Languages. Norwegian (bokmål) has the advantage of SOUNDING like Swedish, but LOOKING like Danish.
From a linguist’s perspective, the interrelationship among the dialects and the standard written languages, and the historical development, is fascinating.
Ask me if you have some questions. My Ph.D. is in historical Germanic Languages. And I teach Norwegian at a college in Minnesota.
I wouldn´t know for sure, but i´ve been told that as Norwegian is in the middle, you can understand more Swedish and Danish than the other 2 can understand each other. I think the 3 are equally important, however Sweden has 9 million people, it´s like the double of the other 2.