Danish, Norwegian, Swedish - all the same?

As you would expect from countries who share so much history and are in such close proximity with eachother, the languages of the Scandinavian countries are all very similair and of course stem off the same Northern Germanic section of the language tree.

While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all mutually intelligible (relatively), Icelandic and Faroese are much less so, despite also being North Germanic languages, they maintain much closer relations to Old Norse (the 'original' Nord language). Finnish, of course, is completely different to all of these, as a Finno-ugric language it is much more similair to Estonian or Hungarian.

Norwegian today has been heavily influenced by both Danish and German, from the Denmark-Norway times of the 1500s (all the way up until the early 1800s) when Danish was the written language used and taught in Norway, and from the presence of the Hanseatic league in Bergen.

Written Norwegian today still very closely resembles Danish, although spoken is completely different, the accent with which Danish is spoken is often the point of many jokes.

As touched on previously, Norwegian has two written forms and many spoken dialects which differ enormously to written Norwegian. Bokmål is the more common form of written Norwegian and is the version which developed during their times under Denmarks rule, and therefore written Norwegian is extremely similair to written Danish, while Nynorsk (spoken by about 10-15% of the population, at a probable over-estimation) was the newly independent Norwegian governments attempt at revitalizing the language and separating itself a little from Denmark. Interestingly, most spoken dialects are probably closer to Nynorsk than Bokmål.

Anyway, have a look at a basic phrase from the three languages:

Swedish - två svarta katter

Norwegian - to svarte katter

Danish - to sorte katte

The word for 'cats' is almost the same across the board, while the word for 'two' also shows similarities, although Swedish shows a larger difference here to Danish and Norwegian. You can see that the word for 'black' is a little different for each one but still very similair. This is only one example to show how it would be relatively easy to understand eachother despite being three separate languages. I suppose the main difference is in inflections and sentence structure - for example in Norwegian you would be more likely to say (correctly) "the car mine" while in Swedish you would say simply "mine car":

- Bilen Min (Norwegian)
- Min Bil (Swedish)

Anyway, this entry is somewhat boring and a little all over the place, I just felt like mentioning that there are similarities and differences between the languages.

It was proposed once that there should just be one language for all the countries, and in Iceland when they teach Danish as a language they just call it 'Scandinavian' - do you think there should be a merger language for simplicity sake?

Months, Days, Weeks

Since it's a new year now I guess a good way to start off is with the Norwegian words for the months and days of the week. 

Both of these are pretty simple, since the words are fairly similar to English, and if you remember a little about Norse mythology there is also a connection between the naming of the days and the Norse Gods.

Weekdays - Ukedager (Ookeh-dagger, Singular Ukedag/weekday en ukedag/a weekday)

Monday - Mandag - Derived from the Old Norse Máni

Tuesday - Tirsdag - Derived from Tyr

Wednesday - Onsdag - Derived from Odin

Thursday - Torsdag - From Thor

Friday - Fredag - From the Goddess Frigg

Saturday - Lørdag - Not derived from a God, this one comes from the Old Norse word for 'day of washing'

Sunday - Søndag - Like Mandag, Søndag is derived from the word for Sun, thus, "day of the sun" 

Hopefully everyone at least has an idea of who Thor and Odin where, the others are probably a bit less well known, but the links are there if you want to read up a little more on your Norse Paganism. Next is the months of the year:

Months - Måneder (Moh-neh-der)

January - januar (Jan-you-are)

February - februar (Feb-roo-are)

March - mars (Marsh)

April - april (Aypril)

May - mai (Mai)

June - juni (Youni)

July - juli (Yuli)

August - august (August)

September - september (September)

October - oktober (Oktober)

November - november (November)

December - desember (December)

As you might have noticed, none of the Norwegian month names have capital letters. Unlike in English, these are not capitalized unless it's at the start of a sentence. But as you will have also noticed, the English words for most of the days of the week, and months, are practically the same as English, so it's very easy to learn. 

So, good luck.

No pictures of women today, instead, Jormungand.
In Norse Myth, the child of Loki and a giant.
He was so large he could wrap around the world and bite his own tail
this is where the Ouroboros concept likely arises.

Norwegian Christmas

Christmas is coming closer, and in Norway, most celebrations traditionally ‘begin’ on the 13^th of December. 

Lussekatter

The reason celebrations ‘start’ on the 13^th of December is because of St. Lucias day, typically a Swedish tradition, it is still celebrated in Norway (and indeed, even in Denmark, Finland and Iceland to a point). There is a lot of ceremony involved in this, and it involves the serving of “lussekatter” (lucia buns) by children to their parents. Each town or even family can vary in the different ways they celebrate this, if they do at all, but the core ideas remain mostly the same, and this generally marks the beginning of the ‘Christmas Season’ in Norway. 

The Norwegian word for Christmas is ‘Jul’ (Yoohl). Like most countries, they have a Christmas tree (Juletre) which can be decorated with tinsel, lights, beads and glass balls, pepperkaker (ginger bread) and most importantly, Norwegian flags! 

Plain Norwegian Pepperkakker

The real celebrations begin on the 24^th, Christmas eve, which most view as the most important part of the season. Most families get together for a traditional meal to celebrate, with some of the more common foods including lutefisk, pinnekjøtt, julepølser and medisterkaker. These Christmas family dinners can continue from December all the way through to new years (Romjulen). 

Julebrus has many variations

Julebrus is also something which is associated with Norwegian Christmas, it is a ‘festive’ soft drink likely made so that minors could have something to drink while the older members of the family would drink alcoholic beverages. Now, however, Julebrus is popular among Norwegians of all ages and huge quantities of it are sold throughout Norway during  the Christmas season. 

I don’t know if you did this wherever you’re reading this from, but when I was a kid we left out cookies and milk for Santa (later to discover it was my father eating them, not Santa) and in Norway, it is not unusual to leave out a traditional porridge dish (lillejulaften) for Julenissen (the equivalent of Santa Claus), though I strongly suspect that the father will be eating that when the children are asleep.

One interesting thing is that Norwegians are taxed half as much during Christmas time as an incentive from the Norwegian government, perhaps to encourage spending and also give their part to the Christmas spirit.

  

Norwegian kids celebrating. The girl with the candles is dressed
in the traditional outfit for St. Lucias day.

In Norway, the way of saying 'Merry Christmas' is God jul (Gooh yoohl) and when the new year comes around, godt nyttår (gooht nytohr) 

So, god jul og godt nyttår! Hopefully you get lots of expensive presents! 

The Norwegian Alphabet

I guess the most important thing for learning a new language is the differences in alphabet. For some languages this is harder (for example, Slavic languages, which have a completely different alphabet).

For Norwegian, it's simple, because the alphabet is exactly the same as english except for three letters -
ø, æ and å.

Pronunciation of these letters is a little more difficult than just seeing them, though, and when I first started I just assumed 'å' was pronounced like a regular 'a', and 'æ' like 'ae' and 'ø' just like a regular 'o'. Other letters in the Norwegian alphabet are also pronounced differently to in English.

Norsk Alfabetet (The Norwegian Alphabet):

Aa - (ah)
Bb - (beh)
Cc - (seh)
Dd - (deh)
Ee - (eh)
Ff - (eff)
Gg - (geh)
Hh - (haw, sometimes 'hoo')
Ii - (ee - how you would pronounce the letter E in English)
Jj - (yeh, J is like the English letter Y)
Kk - (kaw, I have also heard kuh)
Ll - (ell)
Mm - (ehmm)
Nn - (ehnn)
Oo - (oh, short)
Pp - (peh)
Qq - (koo)
Rr - (arr, somewhat rolled, especially in the middle of words)
Ss - (ess)
Tt - (teh)
Uu - (ooh, longer than 'O')
Vv - (veh)
Ww - (double veh)
Xx - (ex)
Yy - (ew)
Zz - (zett)
Åå - (aw, sort of like in cot)
Øø - (err/ur almost like a saucy sounding grunt, or the word churn, with less focus on the 'R' sound)
Ææ - (the easiest, pronounced like the 'a' from apple)

"Å" is also the name of a town in Norway

It should be noted that some letters are not used frequently, except for foreign words, for instance I don't know of any Norwegian words that have C, Q, X or Z in them. It might also help that Å, Ø and Æ are all vowels of the scandinavian languages (except Swedish, who use Ä, Ö and Ë I think...)

Interestingly, the letter å is also a word (to) and the name of a small town.
After some practice of pronouncing words with the letters, you do eventually get used to the pronunciation (it's a good idea to listen to some audio of them if you have it)


I guess that's all for now, just a short one... not sure what it will be yet, but something new will hopefully be up by next Tuesday (in Norwegian, Tirsdag!)