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Generally, speakers of the three largest Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) can read each other's languages without great difficulty. The primary obstacles to mutual comprehension are differences in pronunciation. According to a scientific study of the three groups, Norwegians generally understand the other languages the ...
Dutch is the main language spoken by most Dutch people. It is a West Germanic language spoken by around 29 million people. Old Frankish, a precursor of the Dutch standard language, was first attested around 500, [ 65 ] in a Frankish legal text, the Lex salica , and has a written record of more than 1500 years, although the material before ...
Faroese speakers (of the Insular Scandinavian languages group) are even better than the Norwegians at comprehending two or more languages within the Continental Scandinavian languages group, scoring high in both Danish (which they study at school) and Norwegian and having the highest score on a Scandinavian language other than their native ...
North Germanic peoples, Nordic peoples [1] and in a medieval context Norsemen, [2] were a Germanic linguistic group originating from the Scandinavian Peninsula. [3] They are identified by their cultural similarities, common ancestry and common use of the Proto-Norse language from around 200 AD, a language that around 800 AD became the Old Norse language, which in turn later became the North ...
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
The modern descendants of the Old West Norse dialect are the West Scandinavian languages of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, and the extinct Norn language of Orkney and Shetland, although Norwegian was heavily influenced by the East dialect, and is today more similar to East Scandinavian (Danish and Swedish) than to Icelandic and Faroese.
English has a long history of contact with Scandinavian languages, given the immigration of Scandinavians early in the history of Britain, and shares various features with the Scandinavian languages. [17] Even so, especially Dutch and Swedish, but also Danish and Norwegian, have strong vocabulary connections to the German language. [18] [19] [20]
A Dutch speaker. Dutch (endonym: Nederlands [ˈneːdərlɑnts] ⓘ) is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language [4] and 5 million as a second language and is the third most spoken Germanic language.