ABSTRACT
Non-Scandinavians are occasionally astonished to hear Danes, Norwegians and Swedes conversing, each in their own language, without interpreters. The fact that some degree of mutual intelligibility exists between these languages, which we shall refer to as the mainland Scandinavian languages, has led some to suggest that together they should really be regarded as only one language. While for some purposes it is convenient to bracket them together, it is hardly correct to speak of only one Scandinavian or Nordic tongue. Such a practice would require a rather restricted definition of the term ‘language’. It would neglect those aspects that are not purely linguistic, but are also social and political. To call them ‘dialects’ is only historically true, i.e. in that they have branched off from a once common Nordic. In speaking of them as ‘languages’, we take into account the facts as Scandinavians
themselves also see them: that they constitute separately developed norms of writing and speaking. Each language has an officially accepted form, taught in schools, used by journalists and authors, required for government officials, enshrined in grammars and dictionaries and spoken at least by educated members of the nation. They are, in short, what linguists refer to as ‘standardised’, making them standard languages. This is indisputably true of Danish and Swedish. The fact that Norwegian is spoken and written in two somewhat deviating forms only means that we must distinguish two standard Norwegian languages. These will here be referred to as B-Norwegian (BN), for Norwegian bokmål ‘book language’, formerly riksmål ‘national language’, and as N-Norwegian (NN), for Norwegian nynorsk ‘New Norwegian’, formerly landsmål ‘country language’. The names used in Norway are misnomers resulting from political conflict and compromise. In reckoning here with only four mainland languages, we are setting aside what we may
call the insular Scandinavian languages Faroese (in the Faroe Islands) and Icelandic (in Iceland). Danish is still one of the two official languages in the Faroes and in Greenland. Swedish is official not only in Sweden, but also alongside Finnish in Finland, although today only 5 or 6 per cent of the population speak it natively. We exclude Finnish from this account, since it is wholly unrelated to the Indo-European languages that surround
called lectally divided speech of the Sami (Lapps), who inhabit the far north of Scandinavia and nearby Russia. Greenlandic, a variety of Eskimo (Inuit), is also spoken within Scandinavia, as are Romany (Gypsy) and along the south Danish border some German. The following account is thus limited to the central, mainland Scandinavian of Indo-European descent, the standard languages of the Scandinavian heartland.
