Talk:North Germanic languages

Citation needed

Would we really need citations for all these statements? A lot of them seem rather uncontroversial to me. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:46, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree, and have removed them all in preference to a single {{refimprove}} tag at the top of the section. I've also removed some of the most egregious bullshit, such as the idea that German speakers can understand Danish better than Swedish, while English speakers can understand Norwegian better than Danish (or something, I forget the exact wording now). Neither German speakers nor English speakers can understand any of the North Germanic languages at all unless they've learned them, or unless the sentence is very simple and coincidentally very similar to one's own language. For example: I saw a Swedish movie once where someone calls up to a man on a balcony, Kan vi kom' upp?, which I understood as "Can we come up?" even without the benefit of subtitles. But that doesn't mean English and Swedish are even remotely mutually intelligible. +Angr 10:15, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Good job on removing that sentence. I was going to delete it earlier, but I figured that since there were "citation needed" tags everywhere else in that section, I could hardly justify removing just one portion of it. Indeed, while there are many cognates in English and the North Germanic languages, they are far from being mutually intelligible. Hayden120 (talk) 10:59, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

East and West Scandinavian

It would be great if someone with access to relevant sources could add some info on what linguistic changes distinguish East Scandinavian from West Scandinavian. Especially since there's a common perception that Norwegian shares its phonology with Swedish and its lexicon with Danish, but Swedish and Danish share neither with each other, it would be interesting to know why historically Swedish and Danish are considered to belong to the same subbranch of NGmc while Norwegian (at least Nynorsk) belongs to the other branch (together with Faroese and Icelandic). +Angr 13:43, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

It's assumed that there's been a parallel evolution historically, as far as I've understood it. Yet, that influence has been really weakened after 500 years of Danish rule over Norway and a century of significant Swedish impact. (I think since the 1800's, the main source for loanwords in Norwegian have been English and Swedish.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:25, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Old Norwegian was closer to Old Norse and therefore also Old Icelandic and Icelandic. As far as I know Swedish and Danish did not go this route, and were slightly more close to German and English at this point. But when Norway came under Danish rule, the official written language of Norway became Danish, which severed some of the ties to Old Norwegian. However, when we came under Swedish rule later on there was a fear that the Swedes would force the official written language to be Swedish, which caused a bit of an uproar. Therefore they ended up gathering words from the dialects, which were rooted in Old Norwegian (Note: due to the geography of Norway the migration and change of dialects would be rather slow). Norwegian (Bokmål) is closer to Danish, as they made it closer to Norwegian again. Instead of deciding on having one written language Norway now has two, and both are still in use.

As I have no citations for this I will not put it in the article. It is just stuff I vaguely remember from school. - Broken angel (talk) 16:40, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

North Germanic or Nordic Languages versus Scandinavian Languages

This Article should speak only of Scandinavian Languages in the context of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian as spoken in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the Scandinavian Countries. Iceland, Faeroe, Finland and Aland are not part of Scandinavia.Jochum (talk) 01:21, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Mutual intelligibility

Icelanders learn Danish (or Norwegian or Swedish) as the second foreign language in school. Faeroes learn Danish as their first foreign language at school. Their is Mutual intelligibility between Icelandic and Faroese. Their is no Mutual intelligibility between Faroese or Icelandic and the three Scandinavian languages.Jochum (talk) 01:50, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Norwegians may have a better grasp of Swedish as throughout Norway we get at least three Swedish TV channels. However as there was only one Norwegian television channel (NRK) until 1992, and TV3 had a Norwegian branch (it was considered Norwegian, but it was transmitted from Sweden, thus not a Norwegian TV Channel). TV3 had, unlike NRK, more programs directed towards children. The cartoons showed on TV3 were only dubbed in Swedish, therefore it would not be a big surprise that children who grew up watching TV3 have a better understanding of Swedish. As the influence of Danish is less now than it was before, it is more likely that the understanding of Danish will be more of a regional thing, due to certain Norwegian dialects in the South are considered to be more Danish sounding. - Broken angel (talk) 16:15, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Family tree

When we talk about the modern languages we should scrap the distinction between the east and west North Germanic languages (using Scandinavian languages is still worse) and keep to insular and continental.Jochum (talk) 01:56, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Grammar Phonology

Am I really alone in that I am more interested in the languages themselves, that is their phonology, their grammar, what sets North Germanic apart from other Germanic languages, than in the question to what extent they are mutually intelligible? I think that an article this big about a language group should at least have some information about the languages themselves.--Merijn2 (talk) 14:43, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Bokmål and nynorsk

Bokmål and nynorsk are two different writing/spelling norms in Norway, they are not spoken languages. How many people prefer to spell their words in a certain way is completely irrelevant information when listing how many speakers the different languages have. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jrgen (talk • contribs) 08:01, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Nordic council: "One language"

The claim that the Nordic Council has been referring to the three as one language seems dubious. The only example given is "subscribe to thenewsletter (Scandinavian language)", but that could be interpreted as short for "in a Scandinavian language" or "in any of the Scandinavian languages" . I have searched through the site of the Nordic Council for the string "Scandinavian language" and the context invariably implies that there are several different ones.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 12:21, 15 October 2011 (UTC)