Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 November 9

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November 9

Swedish lingua franca Scandinavian

Is Swedish a kind of lingua franca for Scandinavia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.4.158.151 (talk) 03:23, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

My cousin, who's half Danish, Swedish, and Finnish (his grandmother read part of the Kalevala in Finnish for me before her death at 103) spent a year in Sweden where he was kidded for having a Danish name. He and his Danish great-aunt conversed, each in their own tongues. His PhD thesis in linguistics was on Sinhala, though. In any case, my experience with Scandinavians speaking Nordic languages other than Finnish (which is not Indo-European) is that they are all educated enough to understand each other, with Danish being the most conservative dialect. That's OR, not RS. But I am not sure you're going to get a better answer than one from an actually Scandinavian editor, of which we have several. [Alansplodge's comment below comports with what I have heard second-hand] μηδείς (talk) 06:22, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Supplementing the anecdotal evidence by Medeis with some actual referenced data: North Germanic languages#Mutual intelligibility. Tl;dr: no, most Scandinavians outside of Sweden cannot speak or understand Swedish. --194.213.3.4 (talk) 06:34, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Maybe they won't understand it without learning it. But I have the impression that many do learn it. In the case of Iceland it's maybe because they are much smaller. Finland had a historical connection to it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.4.137.75 (talk) 13:44, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

See also On Danish's odd relationship to Swedish and Norwegian which says: " I happen to speak some Danish (my wife is from Copenhagen) and so have a small-n experience with this: I've had exactly one conversation with a Swede, me speaking Danish and her speaking Swedish, and we understood each other quite well. I've seen my wife speak Danish with a Swede and another time with a Norwegian, once again, with little apparent trouble". Confirming the story I heard from some Norwegian friends; "All the other Nordic countries joke that Danish sounds like Swedes talking with a potato or porridge in their mouths, while Danes joke that Swedes sound like drunk Danes, and Norwegians sound like drunk Danes singing" [1]. Finnish is from a totally different language group; Swedish is the second official language but only "44% of Finnish citizens with another registered primary language than Swedish could hold a conversation in this language" (see Languages of Finland). Alansplodge (talk) 20:16, 9 November 2017 (UTC)