Danish–Norwegian mutual intelligibility

[pne]

I just skimmed over an email exchange between someone writing in Danish and someone writing in Norwegian, and it made me wonder how mutually intelligible those languages are in their written form (using specifically Bokmål for Norwegian).

I mean, I know they're fairly close, but I wonder *how* close, in terms I can "bellyfeel".

I imagine, further apart than UK English and US English, but closer than German and Dutch... perhaps like Standard German and written Züritüütsch or something? Or closer than that?

Comments

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that it's like, or maybe closer than, Portuguese and Spanish. I suppose if that's a useful comparison depends on what languages you've studied!

[edricson.livejournal.com]

Danish and Norwegian are pretty unintelligible when spoken, though. This is not true for Swedish and Norwegian, as has been discovered both by myself (after five years of Swedish at university I stopped speaking English after just a week of living in Norway) and by the many Swedes who move to work in Norway: everyone I know or have heard in the street speaks Swedish, and no-one seems to have a problem with it.

On the other hand, those five years of Swedish never helped me with spoken Danish, which remained gibberish. After three months in Norway I was sitting with the TV turned on, and I heard what I classified as a horribly difficult southern dialect, but could understand a fair bit of; it turned out to be Danish on closer inspection, so maybe Norwegian did move my Danish forward a bit.

[edricson.livejournal.com]

BTW I think standard German and Yiddish may make a good analogy.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting. Hadn't thought of that pair.

[bjorng.livejournal.com]

Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are about as similar as Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese (though not necessarily in that order). In written form, you can usually extract the meaning from your non-native language without too much work if you speak one of those.

As a (northerly) Swede, I find Norwegian much easier to understand in spoken form than Danish. (Someone from Skåne would probably say the reverse.) In written form I think Danish and Norwegian are closer to each other than they are to Swedish.

As an interesting contrast, I knew an American who lived in southern Norway who thought northern Norwegian was harder to understand than Swedish.