Languages

[ila]

Originally Posted by smc

I read Dutch, which is in the West Germanic sub-group of Germanic languages, and thus most closely related to German and English. I find Dutch difficult to speak because of the odd, rounded vowel sounds; whenever I try, I sound really off. I also read Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish with varying degrees of proficiency, and can speak Swedish after I'm in Sweden for a few days (or my Stockholm friends visit). These are Germanic languages in the sub-group of North Germanic languages, also known as Nordic languages.

I would say from my own experience that Danish is the easiest of the North Germanic languages, because Danish strikes me as the closest to German of these particular languages, both grammatically and syntactically. Of the North Germanic languages, Danish and Swedish share a similar sub-sub-group generally called East Scandinavian. Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are in the West Scandinavian branch, further removed from the original German.

Icelandic is an interesting case, because while it is Germanic in vocabulary, it has an inflectional grammar that's like Latin and even more like Old English.

You can probably tell that languages are of great interest to me.

I read once that up to the widespread use of printing presses, when spelling was becoming standardized, that Dutch used to be considered a dialect of German.

I don't want to start an argument here about which is considered a language in its own right as the Dutch will claim, and rightly so, that Dutch is a language and not a dialect. There is also Frisian which I have heard some Dutch say is a dialect, but the Frisians will say that it is a language. I once saw a program on German television in which everyone was speaking Frisian. At first I thought that I was listening to English.