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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a similar artificial language to unify the Scandinavians?

Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic are similar enough that it should be possible to create a language that could be passably understood by all speakers -- call it "skandiska"...?

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There is Folkspraak. Although it is meant to be for all Germanic languages (including English) not just the North Germanic languages.

http://www.langmaker.com/folkspraak/folkgrammar.htm

http://www.langmaker.com/folksprk.htm#Introduction

A linguist would probably say that Scandinavia already has a common language, and that Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are mere dialects of the same Scandinavian language. They are considered different languages mainly for political and historical reasons, but since they are mutually intelligible (with the possible exception of drunk Danes) "Scandinavian" is really a single language from a linguistic perspective.

Icelandic is a different story, of course. Thankfully, though, the Icelandic speak English rather well...

Danish and Norwegian are dialects, Swedish qualify as a separate language. "Nynorsk" ("New Norwegian") is a new language designed specifically to qualify as a new language, mainly for political reason (Norway was a colony of Denmark).

That all depends on your definition of "language". For most linguists, all that matters is mutual intelligibility. For others, a language is a "dialect with an army and a flag", i.e. a political construct.

A Swedish person like me most of the time have no trouble at all understanding spoken Norwegian, and reading both bokmål and nynorsk is quite easy. Spoken Danish requires some effort and getting used to, but it is still quite possible to have a conversation.

Fascinating, thank you.

As a Norwegian, I have no problems understanding both Swedish and Danish. That's mostly correct the other way around as well.

As a Dane I have not no problems understanding Norwegian and Swedish, but with a bit of getting used to it, and an open mind(1), it's my experience that most Scandinavians will be able to understand each other perfectly well.

1: Especially young people will switch into English immediately, and I find that I have to force myself to not do that when talking to fellow Scandinavians. It's a shame since there's often much meaning lost in the double translation + our languages are quite beautiful, IMHO.

Ah. I didn't realize that Scandinavians already understand each other so well. I'm a Finn who studied mandatory 6 years of Swedish at school, yet I can't understand a word of Danish...

I wish they would teach us something more useful than Finland's regional Swedish dialect and accent -- it only has a few hundred thousand native speakers, of whom 95% speak Finnish anyway :(

Regarding Danish, have you tried reading it? Spoken Danish can be pretty hard for Norwegians and Swedes too at times. There's a common expression in Norway that Danes speak as if they have a potato in their mouth - a lot of sounds in Norwegian (and Swedish) are a lot harder/sharper than in Danish.

Funny that you should mention a potato. I remember my late grandfather saying, that speaking english is like speaking german with hot potato in one's mouth. Btw. I'm neither english nor german, but slovene (living right next to Italian border).

Koper, maybe? :) i come from that city as well but now i live in UK

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