Comment: Three countries, one language?

18 April 2025

When travelling abroad, we Scandinavians often get mistaken for each other. I've lost count of the number of times I've said "I'm Norwegian", only to be met with stories about someone's trip to Sweden. This is followed by my mandatory answer: "no, that's actually a different country".

But how different are we, really? I thought of this while listening to "Norsken, Svensken og Dansken", a podcast marketing itself as "pan-Scandinavian family therapy". Here, the hosts – a Norwegian, a Swede, and a Dane – speak their own languages and understand each other just fine. It's a bit like Irish, Scottish, and English accents, different, but mutually intelligible with slight differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

Despite our similar languages, we are getting less and less exposed to each other, making it harder to understand each other. Much of our communication has been replaced with English, especially amongst young people where almost everyone speaks it as a second language. Nevertheless, I – coming from Oslo – often understand Swedes and some Danes, better than some Norwegian accents.

Throughout our shared history, we've been at war with each other many times. As for Norway, we were under Danish rule from 1381 to 1814, and then Swedish rule until 1905. To this day, Norwegians celebrate the day when they escaped Danish rule and wrote their constitution (briefly before Denmark had to surrender us to the Swedes after losing a Napoleonic war): 17 May.

We also established a second official written form for Norwegian – Nynorsk (New Norwegian) – based on rural dialects, as a way to break away from Danish influence and reflect how people actually spoke.

Independence has been really important for Norwegian cultural identity, making us focus on what is special or different about Norway. Still, given our shared history and many years of practically being one, it's no surprise that our languages and cultures are so similar.