Languages

[smc]

Originally Posted by Tread

Did you compared it to Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish (also Germanic based), but the grammar could be more similar to English.
Or only compared with World languages, witch wouldn’t exclude Dutch.

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.