Category Archives: Norwegian

The Northern Germanic Languages

A friend of mine has a post up at his site referring to an earlier post of mine, Scientific Studies of Intelligibility in Scandinavian Languages. North Germanic has been traditionally divided by East Norse (Swedish, Scanian, Danish, etc.) and West … Continue reading

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Filed under Danish, Dialectology, Dutch, English language, German, Germanic, Icelandic, Indo-European, Language Families, Linguistics, Norwegian, Swedish

My Language Has More Words Than Yours!

In the comments section, James Schipper comments on the notion that English has more words than, say, Swedish: Measuring the number of words in a language isn’t very scientific. What is a word? Is it anything that is separated by … Continue reading

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Filed under Altaic, Applied, English language, French, Germanic, Hmong, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Italic, Italo-Celtic, Italo-Celtic-Tocharian, Korean language, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics, Norwegian, Romance, Sociolinguistics, Swedish

Yet Another Scandinavian Intelligibility Study

We’ve reviewed several of these studies before, and this subject seems to send a lot of Scandinavians up the wall for some reason. Especially Swedes are quite insistent that Swedish and Norwegian are a single language. They get pretty furious … Continue reading

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Filed under Afrikaans, Danish, Dialectology, Dutch, Frisian, Germanic, Language Families, Linguistics, Norwegian, Sociolinguistics, Swedish, West Frisian

Scientific Studies of Intelligibility in Scandinavian Languages

I’ve been asked to provide this information from some folks who, incredibly, are insisting that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are all one language. What makes it even more painful is that at least one of them is a Swedish-language speaker. … Continue reading

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Filed under Danish, Dialectology, Germanic, Icelandic, Linguistics, Norwegian, Sociolinguistics, Swedish

More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Indo-European Languages

Note: Bizarrely enough, the PC headcases have accused this post, a Linguistics post of all things, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Caution: This post is very long! It runs to 88 pages on the Web. … Continue reading

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Filed under Albanian, Applied, Armenian, Baltic, Bulgarian language, Celtic, Czech, Danish, Descriptive, Dutch, English language, French, Gaelic, German, Germanic, Greek, Hellenic, Hindi, Icelandic, Indic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Italic, Kashmiri, Language Families, Language Learning, Language Samples, Latvian, Linguistics, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romance, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Slavic, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish

North Sea Fisherman Patois

Interesting quote from the Free Republic: I used to work with a Dutch guy who said that he was at some sort of North Sea confab, and when people spoke in their national languages they couldn’t understand one another but … Continue reading

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Filed under Britain, Danish, Dialectology, Dutch, English language, Europe, German, Germanic, Germany, Icelandic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Classification, Language Families, Netherlands, Norwegian, Regional, Swedish