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The guide will be ready this month, Miha, I promise 
| quote: | Originally posted by _Ocean_Drive_
The Scandanavian lanugages sound incredibly difficult to me, let alone to read and make a fairly educated guess at pronouncing it. But I find it interesting how Scandanavians all seem to understand one another's language. |
That's because the definition of "language" is incredibly loose. If Americans suddenly decided to call their language "American", someone like Lews who speaks North American English and South African English would then be able to say he doesn't just speak two variants of the same language, but two distinct languages ("English" and "American" in this case).
Danish/Swedish/Norwegian share a lot more in common than some of the Chinese "dialects", which are actually completely different languages (such as Mandarin and Cantonese). Mind you, there's no clear-cut division between what's a dialect and what's a language, although mutual intelligibility is expected from two speakers of the same language - mind you, this is not always possible and/or easy to define: Germans living near the Dutch border can speak Dutch just fine, although they can't understand "Swiss German" just as clearly; on the other hand, someone from Munich can't understand Dutch (reason why they're considered distinct languages)... see how complicated it gets after a while?
Long story short, they're closer to being dialects of the same language, but we call them distinct languages because they're spoken in countries that would rather see their languages that way.
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). I'm not sure if, to the average European, Portuguese is easier than French - whether or not a language is difficult depends on your mother language, after all. We use more verb tenses in the everyday language, our pronominal system changed quite substantially here in Brazil, and fewer words that made their way to the English language. But, I could be wrong... it's not like there's a good way to independently measure these things anyway.
