Comparison of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
The largest differences are found in pronunciation and language-specific vocabulary, which may hinder mutual intelligibility to some extent in some dialects.
[citation needed] However, due to the same reason contemporary Danish speakers generally do not understand spoken Norwegian as well as the extremely similar written norms would lead one to expect.
[citation needed] Because Norway's largest cities have received signals from Sweden's two national TV channels since the 1960s through private antennas[citation needed], Norwegians generally have a better grasp of Swedish than vice versa; Sweden did not receive Norwegian TV until decades later.
[citation needed] Old Norse[4] is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages.
Today Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and other North Germanic varieties of which Norwegian, Danish and Swedish retain considerable mutual intelligibility while Icelandic remains the closest to Old Norse.
After the two countries separated, Danish remained the official language of Norway — although it was referred to as Norwegian in Norway — and remained largely unchanged until language reforms in the early 20th century led to the standardization of forms more similar to the Norwegian urban and rural vernaculars.
Attempts to bring Bokmål closer to and eventually merge it with Nynorsk have failed due to widespread resistance during the Norwegian language conflict.
Danish pronunciation is typically described as 'softer', which in this case refers mostly to the frequent approximants corresponding to Norwegian, Swedish and historical plosives in some positions in the word (especially the pronunciation of the letters b, d, and g), as well as the German-like realisation of r as a uvular or even pharyngeal approximant in Danish as opposed to the Norwegian alveolar trills or uvular trills/fricatives.
In practice, most Norwegians will speak a local dialect in most contexts; furthermore, Bokmål itself is not a spoken standard, and is likely to be pronounced with clearly regional features.
The following is a table that compares the most common Danish, Norwegian and Swedish pronunciations of a letter (without taking into account the grouping of sounds into phonemes, as well as many sub-rules, exceptions and subtleties).
Similarly, [ɑj] and [ʌw] are often spelled as eg and øg in Danish (eg may be pronounced [æɪ̯] in Norwegian, too, e.g. in regne, "to rain").
The most notable differences are, as already mentioned, the pronunciation of approximants in Danish, corresponding to voiced and voiceless stops in Norwegian and Swedish and of r as a uvu-pharyngeal approximant in Danish, corresponding to an alveolar trill in (East) Norwegian and Swedish (except southern dialects) (skrige, "shriek" versus skrike, skrika).
In Norwegian and Swedish, the opposition is still voiced versus voiceless and it is preserved everywhere, with /p, t, k/ being aspirated in the onset of a stressed syllable (as in English and German).
Some letter combinations that are pronounced quite differently are: Some notable sound correspondences are: In Norwegian and Swedish, each stressed syllable must contain, phonetically, either a long vowel or a long (geminate) consonant (e.g. male [mɑːlə], "to paint" versus malle [mɑlːə], "catfish") .
In Norwegian and Swedish, the contrast is between two tonal accents, accent 1 and 2, which characterise a whole word with primary stress; in Danish, it is between the presence and the absence of the stød (a kind of laryngealisation), which characterises a syllable (though usually a syllable that bears at least secondary stress).
There is usually also high pitch in the last syllable, but it is not transcribed here, because it belongs to the prosody of the phrase rather than the word.
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in inflections (declension, conjugation) attach, albeit to a limited extent, endings.
In Norwegian, æ is kept before r: æra, kimære, sfære; Swedish has chimär, sfär but era.
In Norwegian, the system is generally the same, but some common words optionally use special feminine gender declension patterns, which have been preserved from Old Norse in Norwegian dialects and were re-introduced into the written language by the language reforms of the early 20th century.
In Norwegian, the plural suffix -e is used too, but the system is rather regularized, since it is only nouns ending with -er in uninflected form that get -e in indefinite plural form, and this is current for both masculine, feminine and neuter nouns; en skyskraper – skyskrapere "a skyscraper – skyscrapers"; en hamburger – hamburgere "a hamburger – hamburgers"; et monster – monstre "a monster – monsters"; et senter – sentre "a center – centers".
A few masculine words also have an alternative ending -a, derived from -a(ne)/-æne in the spoken language (en feil – feila/feilene, "a mistake/error – the mistakes/errors").
In neuter forms, Swedish consistently appends the suffix -t (-tt) - except for the inflected adjectives of type bra (good).
Swedish numerals are similar to Norwegian ones: sju (7), tjugo (20), trettio (30), fyrtio (40), femtio (50), sextio (60), sjuttio (70), åttio (80), nittio (90), tjugoen (21), andra (the second).
If the participle comes after a verb, grammatical agreement does not apply in both languages: Billeterne blev købt og betalt.
In Nynorsk, as in Swedish, most participles are inflected, but some are indeclined (for example, the forms na -a: elska - see the table below).
In Nynorsk, the ending -st can only be added to the infinitive that follows the modal verb, e.g.: Ingenting kunne gjørast.
In the case of Switzerland, which is known in written Danish and Swedish by its German name Schweiz, this is transliterated in Norwegian as Sveits.
[13] Similarly, the name for Cyprus in Norwegian is the Greek-derived Kypros,[14][15] rather than the Cypern (influenced by the German Zypern) used in Danish and Swedish.
Note that the Danish variant usually exists in Norwegian as an archaic or less frequent form (and/or vice versa).
The vulgar nature of some of these differences forms the basis of a number of television sketches by Norwegian comedians.
