“Excuse me, what language are you speaking?”

I went out to eat dinner with a Norwegian friend of mine the other night, and we were chatting in Norwegian while we were waiting for our food. The waitress comes up and asks what language we were speaking. And that is not the first time I’ve been asked that question when I talk to my Norwegian friends in public here in the US. Some people are afraid to ask, so they just stare. As in many metropolitan areas there are a lot of languages spoken, but Norwegian is probably not the language that you hear the most or would recognize. I would say that it’s the same thing for Swedish and Danish.

I ask my husband all the time if he can tell the difference between Norwegian and Swedish, because I have some Swedish friends back in Norway. He says he can’t. And I guess it would be hard when he doesn’t really know the Norwegian language that well.

The Scandinavian languages are very similar, and I explain to that to people all the time. I guess it’s different for everyone, but I understand Swedish better than Danish. Danish and Norwegian is a lot more similar to each other when you read. But I do have a hard time understanding Danish when it is spoken. I think that’s mostly because I have not been around it a lot. Swedish I understand very well, because I grew up with Swedish TV channels. So I grew up watching “Björnes magasin”, “Rädda Joppe!” and all the Astrid Lindgren movies in Swedish.

I was surprised when I realized that Swedes did not understand Norwegian as well as I understood Swedish, especially if they were from the east side of Sweden. There have been a lot of younger Swedes that have moved to Norway to work, and some of them have become my friends. They told me that they had a hard time understanding Norwegian when they first came to Norway. And it was because they did not grow up with Norwegian TV channels.

When I visited Denmark for the first time, I was a little girl. And I had a very hard time understanding Danish. Unfortunately I still do, and the last few times I have been there I have been speaking English instead. I am sure if I just tried a little harder I would be able to understand. I have friends that have lived in Denmark, and they don’t have a problem understanding at all.

Thankfully our languages are so similar, so if you just spend some time with someone from one of the other countries you will get used to it and understand it pretty quick. It is fun to be able to say that you know more languages than just your own and English J