So Danish and Swedish are an example of languages that are mutually intelligible, apparently, yet if thats the case, how are they not considered the same language? If a Danish speaker can understand a Swedish speaker, then what makes the two separate languages and not just like… really distant dialects (like a Scottish accent + slang vs an English accent + slang)?
I’m very confused!
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But mutual intelligibility is not the only requirement in distinguishing languages and isn’t a simple binary. Rather it is a spectrum that relates to the level of effort a person that knows one language has to expend in order to understand someone of the second language.
Also there are different kinds of intelligibility, notably “lexical” (being able to understand the language in writing) and “phonetic” (being able to understand the language verbally).
With respect to Danish and Swedish specifically, while there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility, there are enough lexical and phonetic differences for them to be considered different languages.
There’s an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army. There isn’t a hard boundary where we say this is a dialect vs this is a language as you’ve shown above. So a large part of it comes down to politics too.
as a swede myself i can say that i understand some simple danish. but danish and swedish are not the same. its just that the most simple words are very similar. for example and(och and og). what is harder is the name of things and less common words wich are not simmilar at all.
The division is often dictated by politics rather than science. China has a dozen languages which are only partially intelligible with eachother but they’re all categorized as dialects due to the CCP’s stance on a unified China. Denmark and Sweden have had numerous wars with eachother even if they’re more or less friends now.
It’s an interesting question. Language classification is really more like taxonomical classification, in the sense that although it seems like there are discrete groups, there really are related categories.
Let’s take an example language group A speakers. They can talk with the people the next town over just fine, even though the next town speaks language group B. The next town after them speaks language group C and can communicate well with B. And C can also communicate well with language group D. However, speakers of language group D can’t understand speakers of language group A at all.
So where do we separate these groups into separate languages? It’s clear that D and A belong to separate languages, because they can’t communicate, right? But they can communicate with speakers of B and C to different degrees. So where is the line drawn?
In the end, what distinguishes a language from a dialect is not often a scientific question. Often culture and politics play a big role in defining what is and isn’t a language.
Languages aren’t discreet cut and dried separate entities. They exist on a continuum and where you decide to draw the line between one language and another is arbitrary.
Danish and Swedish are very different. They sound very different as well, due to different uses in tone. As a Norwegian, I can understand both Danish and Swedish, but can’t imitate them very well. They’re not like different types of English. Within Norway, we have a great amount of dialects, which would be comparable to different dialects of English. But Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are different languages with different grammar and spelling. If you, as a non-Scandinavian, were to listen to the three languages, they would probably sound so different in your ears you wouldn’t believe we could actually understand each other (I’ve even had this happen when me and another Norwegian, with a different dialect, spoke in front of non-Scandinavians). So in short, they are similar languages stemming from the same Germanic language, but they are also very different.
As someone born in yugoslavia, i went from speaking two yugoslav languages to 5 without learning a new one… If I ever need to write a CV for some far away foreigner, my language section will be quite full
Let’s take your question and run in back in reverse, so to speak: “If two people who speak the same language can have difficulty communicating due to the dialects of one or both speakers, is it still the same language?”
That question, no matter how you answer it, points at the fact that language isn’t exactly decided by who can understand you but by the nature of the language itself. What is or isn’t a separate and discint language is more a matter of anthropology, history, other academic considerations, and politics. Also, people who have these academic backgrounds often disagree on where the exact line between certain dialects and languages actually is.
Personally, I’d leave it up to the native speakers of those languages to decide; if Swedes and Danes consider their languages separate, then I’d tend to consider them separate.
(Edited for clarity)
im swedish and let me tell you we do NOT understand the danish.
i was in a class once with one norwegian girl and two danish guys and the girl i spoke swedish to, she spoke norwegian to me and we understood each other no problem but the guys? i had no idea what they were saying beacuse to me danish sounds like a drunk norwegian dpeaki g a bit too fast with their mouth full of food so i had to speak english to them lol.
apparently thwy understood me just fine though so that might be a e-thing
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