Tell Apart Nordic Languages

As a language lover I tend to take for granted that certain languages are clearly different from others or recognizable from certain features. Some time ago my sister asked what was the language I was reading in, and I was expecting her to know that with ð’s it has to be Icelandic. But if language learning is not your hobby, Dutch and Swedish might as well be the same thing, purely because you never get to see them. I still remember reading about differences between Danish and Norwegian and finding it really useful, so I decided to make a summary of features and differences that can come in handy as a guide for those who would enjoy being able to distinguish all Nordic languages without actually studying or knowing much.

Please note that I’m mostly writing about the written form, as nuances of the spoken language can be much harder to describe. For what concerns the oral form, you just have to listen to them a lot, and as a Swedish friend once told me:

Swedish is up ‘n downs, Norwegians is all ups, Danish is all downs.

And well, it makes sense.

How similar are Nordic languages to each other?

Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese belong to the North Germanic language family. Their cousins are German, Dutch and English. If you speak two of these three a big amount of vocabulary and grammar will be familiar to you.

Swedish, Svenska; Norwegian, Norsk; and Danish, Dansk, are the languages of Scandinavia, (yes, the Scandinavian paeninsula is made up of only these three countries) could be considered siblings (or twins?) because they are mutually intelligible, a Swede and a Norwegian will likely converse in their own language without recurring to English, the same goes with a Dane although Danish can be more problematic…But you can read about that later. Their unique letter is Å, which is roughly pronounced as O. So yeah, remember that when you talk about songs by Måneskin…

Icelandic, Íslenska, is essentially old Norse – the ancestor of all North Germanic languagages – that got crystallized in the middle of the North Atlantic. Because of this Icelanders find it pretty easy to read old viking sagas than the Scandinavians, who don’t really understand Icelandic. Faroese, Føroyskt, spoken in the Faroe islands – between Iceland, Norway and Scotland – is similar to Icelandic in the written form, but the spoken language is quite different. They are classified as Insular languages of the North Germanic family, its distinguishing letter is ð (called eð in Icelandic and edd in Faroese, capital Ð), pronounced as th in this. Both have æ, á í ó ú in their alphabets.

Swedish and Danish would be classified as East-North Germanic, while Norwegian and Icelandic West-North Germanic, the bound between Icelandic and Norwegian is is noticeable in some Norwegian dialects, but the geographical distance made Norwegian become more intelligible with the eastern branch instead.

However, there’s an odd one out of the Nordic languages. Not only Finnish, Suomi, does not belong to the North Germanic family, but it is not even indo-european. That means Hindi is potentially closer than its neighbour Swedish. Finnish belongs to the Finno-ugric family and is completely different grammar-wise, but has quite a lot of loanwords and cultural influence from Swedish. You can recognize it by very frequent double letters with combinations as yy and ää, double consonants after another consonant: tsemppiä, pankki. Finnish does not have B, G, D in its alphabet.

The Sámi, indigenous people of north Scandinavia, have their own languages, which are related to Finnish as they belong to the Uralic language family, this article i wrote focuses on them.

And now let’s go into detail!

Swedish vs Danish & Norwegian

Norwegian and Danish look very much alike in the written form, but if you hear them you will be more likely to think Swedish and Norwegian sound similar while Danish stands out for its “weirdness”, It is said that Danes speak as if they had potatoes in their mouths, if you want to know more look up the stød linguisti phenomenon.

Swedish: Ö, Ä / Norwegian & Danish: Ø, Æ: The first and easiest difference
CK/KK: ck is found in Swedish, usually K or KK in the other two: lycka/lykke (luck); tack/takk, tak (thanks).
-A/-E: Swedish tends to have a lot of -a endings, while you have E’s in Norwegian and Danish. See the example above of lycka/lykke, also in plural adjectives: mina/mine (my) goda/gode (good).
HV/V is not found in Swedish, which got rid of the H: vad, vem/hvad, hvem; (what, who)
X an Q sometimes occur in Swedish, only in foreign names in the other two: exempel/eksempel (example).

To sum up:

Swedish ä ö ck: jag, och, vem, -a, lycka, exempel
Danish & Norwegian: æ ø, hv: jeg, og, hvem, -e, lykke, eksempel

Danish vs Norwegian

Modern written Norwegian was based off Danish so it can be extremely similar and if you have a very short text it might even be all spelt the same way, but a few features will signal which of the two you are reading:

ØJ/ØY: øj in Danish while øy in Norwegian: tøj/tøy (clothes)
MIG/MEG: Norwegian Bokmål uses E in deg/meg/seg, while Danish has mig as in Swedish
K/KJ: kj an b found frequently in Norwegian while Danish has directly a vowel after K: kære/kjære (dear); at kende/ å kjenne (to know)
TION/SJON: Norwegian’s spelling in words of foreign origin is more “tamed” to the language, for instance words ending in-tion, where Danish keeps the -tion ending and Norwegian has -sjon: international/internasjonal; chokolade/sjokolade (chocolate).

Tendencies:

D, G, B/ T, K, P: Danish tends to have much more D, G, and B’s (it could be compared to Spanish vs Italian I think?). bog/bok (book); nouns in -hed/het; at vide/å vite (to know); peberkager/pepperkaker (gingerbread). Swedish and Norwegian are usually more similar for what concerns this.
Norwegian got rid of many “unnecessary” letters (often D’s, G’s) to its pronounciation: at sige/å si (to say); vidste/visste (knew), sagde/sa, -ld, -nd endings trold/troll (troll); end/enn (than)
Æ frequence: Danish tends to have a lot more Æ, where Norwegian has a ‘simple’ E: næsten/nesten (almost); at tænke/å tenke (think). at hjælpe/ å hjelpe (help). Swedish usually has an Ä here: att hjälpa, nästan, att tänka.

To sum up:

Danish: øj, ld, nd, mig/dig; bog, kærlighed, mænd, legetøj, ud, chokolade, revolution
Norwegian: øy, kj, sj, meg/deg; bok, kjærlighet, menn, leketøy, ut, sjokolade, revolusjon

Norwegian could be further divided into Bokmål and Nynorsk, which are just two different ways to spell it. Bokmål “book language”, is fundamentally Danish with adjustments to the Norwegian language and the most widespread one, while Nynorsk “New Norwegian” was an attempt to create a more Norwegian-Norwegian, and it is more frequent in the west part of the country, used by about 12% of Norwegians. I won’t go into detail with Nynorsk, but ein, eit indicates Nynorsk, while en, et are Bokmål.

Icelandic vs Faroese

Faroese and Icelandic pronounciations contrast with their similar spelling, that is because Faroese was given an ethymological ortography to resemble its ancestor Old Norse. On top of that, Faroese adopted some words of Danish origin because of its history.

Þ/T: Only Icelandic has Þþ (þorn in Icelandic) which corresponds to English th in mouth, Icelandic words with Þ have T in Faroese: þú/tú (you); það/tað (it).
Ö/Ø: Icelandic uses ö while Faroese adopted ø.
Icelandic has accented E’s, É, not present in the Faroese alphabet: ég/eg (I).

Finnish: the outsider

As previously mentioned, Finnish is completely unrelated to the North Germanic family, it belongs to the Ugro-Finnic family and its closest language is Estonian.

some loanwords from Swedish:

katu – gata (street)
koulu – skola (school)
sokeri – soker (sugar)
tuoli – stol (chair)
suklaa – choklad (chocolate)
pankki – bank

Language comparison

SWEDISH-DANISH-NORWEGIAN ; ICELANDIC-FAROESE; FINNISH

THANKS: tack-tak-takk ; takk ; kiitos
TO HELP: att hjälpa-at hjælpe-å hjelpe ; að hjálpa ; autaa
SOMEONE: någon-nogen-noen ; einhver-onkur ; joku
TO SAY: att säga-at sige-å si ; að segja-at siga ; sanoa
APPLE: äpple-æble-eple ; epli; omena
WHAT: vad-hvad-hva ; hvað-hvat; mikä

Article 1 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights :

Swedish: Alla människor är födda fria och lika i värde och rättigheter.
Danish: Alle mennesker er født frie og lige i værdighed og rettigheder.
Norwegian bokmål: Alle mennesker er født frie og med samme menneskeverd og menneskerettigheter; Nynorsk: Alle menneske er fødde til fridom og med same menneskeverd og menneskerettar.
Faroese: Øll menniskju eru fødd fræls og jøvn til virðingar og mannarættindi.
Icelandic: Hver maður er borinn frjáls og jafn öðrum að virðingu og réttindum.
Finnish: Kaikki ihmiset syntyvät vapaina ja tasavertaisina arvoltaan ja oikeuksiltaan.

If you want to go even more in detail, you can check out this on mylanguagebreak.com, but my advice is to just expose yourself to the languages, and experience all the differences yourself. 🙂 Here you can briefly read about even more languages used in the Nordic countries.

if you want to see an even more succint summary of all this, you can check out my post on instagram.

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