What is the difference between norwegian and danish

According to the FSI ranking, most of the Nordic languages are very easy to learn for native English speakers. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are all Category I languages.

This means you can reach complete fluency in them in hours or weeks. Icelandic on the other hand is a little bit more complicated. This raises the difficulty level and the amount of time estimated to learn it. You may need up to 44 weeks or hours of study to master Icelandic. So, we can definitely rule Icelandic out as the easiest Nordic language. When it comes to Norwegian and Danish, they are similar in vocabulary. The difference comes in, in the sound as they differ.

On the other hand, Swedish and Norwegian are similar when it comes to the pronunciation but their words used are different.

To understand the relation these Nordic languages have to each other, we can look at them as Scandinavian siblings. Norwegian is the eldest. Danish is the rebel sibling.

Understanding Danish can require a lot of concentration from Norwegians and Swedes alike. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are all very beautiful, but choosing which Scandinavian language to study can be hard. Danish is difficult to understand for other Scandinavian natives. Thanks to this pronunciation, there are a lot of jokes about Danish in the Scandinavian community. Some say that Danish sounds like a drunk person talking.

Others say that only a drunk Norwegian could understand a Dane. Basically a lot of drunk jokes. Danish word endings are often swallowed. But, the writing is still very similar to Norwegian and Swedish. Having a useful vocabulary list is crucial to achieving fluency. Luckily, the Nordic languages share a lot of vocabulary. Thanks to their proximity and shared history, these three languages have a lot of cognates and loanwords. They use a slightly different set of words in everyday language.

A significant source for what we know about Viking Age Scandinavians originates from the efforts of the archbishopric of Hamburg. He brought back some of the earliest testimony on Viking Age culture, although historians often dispute his claims. Theirs is some of the most compelling testimony of Viking Age Scandinavian culture we have, and archeologists have confirmed much of what they reported. In contrast to their cousins in Norway and Sweden, the Danes consistently appear to have been a regional, cultural, and military power from the mid-8th century onward although this could be a slant from our familiarity with the Danes.

Even the Franks admitted in the Annals of Fulda that the Danes were the most powerful among the Northmen. As a political power, the Danes also had the closest thing to a monarchy of any of the three regions. Although they experienced political turmoil at the beginning of the 9th century, their rulers reigned consistently throughout the Viking Age, giving the Danes a political and societal strength the others did not have.

The Danes were also heavily involved in regional politics. Although there is no mention of what came of that meeting, it demonstrates the Danes were interwoven in the events of the time. They did not, as chroniclers have suggested, appear from nowhere in While the Danes were not alone in developing ambitious plans for territorial conquest, theirs involved enemies who better chronicled their exploits.

Their invasion of Britain, the establishment of the Danelaw, and the settlement of Normandy put them front-and-center in the Christian world and in closer proximity to the most important intellectual centers of the day. The Swedes expanded as well, but their exploits East appear in fewer texts, such as the Russian Primary Chronicle.

The Norwegians were exceptionally active in Ireland and Brittany, but the sources on their activities are scarce in the form of the Annals of Ulster and other disparate documents of the day. Sagas are often evoked to argue that we know as much about the Norwegians as the Danes, but sagas are problematic. Written centuries after-the-fact, they incorporate numerous elements that undermine their credibility as a source.

Even if we could treat the sagas as authoritative, the Danes feature as widely if not more in them than the Norwegians and Swedes. It is against our body of knowledge about the Danes that we tend to compare the other Vikings.

Unfortunately, we do not know all that much about the early political formations of Norway and Sweden. However, it offers very little in the way of substance about the structure of their society, their influence over neighboring peoples, and the cultural backbone that drove their ambitions. We do know that the Norwegians were poised to conduct raids before their Danish cousins — they were the first to attack Ireland and Western France, and are thought to have carried out the raid on Lindisfarne — but ultimately did not exert the same influence as the Danes across Europe.

An example of this is the invasion of Brittany in the late 9th Century, where Norwegian Vikings took control of the regional center of Nantes. They held it for years until the Bretons expelled them, only to find a derelict city and no concerted effort to colonize the land as had been done in Britain and Normandy by the Danes. Similarly, the Swedes, then known as Varangians, or Rus, were poised to discover and pillage new lands in the East along the Volga and Dnieper rivers.

Their expeditions, however, were of a different sort than the Danes and Norwegians in the west. The goal of the Rus was primarily to trade or so we think.

To this day, why this event occurred is unclear, but most historians believe this was a capitulation by the Slavs to years of raids.

The account of Ibn Fadlan during his embassy to the land of the Khazars demonstrates a few stark differences between the Rus and the Danes. For one, the Rus were allegedly covered in blue tattoos, which is not something that Western chroniclers commonly reported. The method of burial for their king, their grooming habits, among other details, stands in contrast to the Danes. Likewise, the Frankish chronicler Rimbert recounts the mission of Anskar to Sweden to convert them to Christianity, where he describes the unusual and shocking religious rituals of the Swedes at Upsala, including human sacrifice.

That the Swedes may have been somewhat different from their Danish and Norwegian cousins from a cultural and spiritual standpoint is still hotly debated. Again, it is hard to say anything for sure as the sources in question have disagreements that undermine their credibility.

Due to our general ignorance of the political and cultural structure of early Swedish and Norwegian society, the real difference between the three groups ultimately boils down to how much we know about them, especially early on. Archeologically speaking, the three groups were very similar if not the same, and there existed a distinct shared culture, as evidenced by ship burials and colonies in all three regions, which stood apart from their neighbors i.

By that account, the Danes, as evidenced by the texts we have about them, are far and above the most familiar to us, and tend to drive our conception of what it was to be a Viking. From there, we can say that the Norwegians participated in Ireland and France, and made the great leap across the pond to Iceland, Greenland, and the Americas.

Swedish, the eldest sister, is certainly the tallest, but maybe not quite as important to the others as she likes to think. Norwegian, the middle child, understands both her siblings and plays the role of mediator. This metaphor is not that far away from reality. Conversations between Swedes and Danes in particular take a lot of concentration and are known to be a bit awkward. Let us clarify. Danish stands out from the other two Scandinavian languages mainly because it has a large discrepancy between written and spoken language.

The words are shortened, the consonants softened and the endings almost swallowed. To people speaking Swedish and Norwegian, a lot of Danish pronunciation patterns seem completely random. A lot of the time, conversations default to English as a common lingua franca. Danish: en farve. Norwegian: en farge. Besides pronunciation, there are also some false friends to watch out for.

If a Swede and a Norwegian agree to do something roligt together, the Swede will be expecting to have a lot of fun, but the Norwegian will be preparing for something more calm and relaxing. If a Dane thinks a Norwegian is nice or cute, they call them rar.

Despite some differences in vocabulary, written Danish and written Norwegian are almost identical. This is because Norway belonged to Denmark between the 14th and 19th centuries.