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Travel and lifestyle in Europe with a focus on Norway & Scandinavia. Swedes have the best non-native English skills in the world, according to the eighth edition of the EF English Proficiency Index. Sweden’s Scandinavian siblings Norway and Denmark also place in the top five. Virtually all are fluent in English too.
New researchers now consider they can confirm that English is, in reality, a Scandinavian language, which indicates that it belongs to the Northern Germanic language family, just like Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese.
Do Scandinavians speak English to each other?
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish all have their roots in Old Norse and a speaker of one has a default capability to at least understand the other two languages. But the Scandinavians’ language ability doesn’t stop there. Virtually all are fluent in English too.
Why is Norwegian similar to English?
A: Yes, in linguistic terms, Norwegian is very similar to English. They are both Germanic languages and there are even extant shared isoglosses, i.e. in some dialects of Norwegian, linguistic phenomena in English are present, too. The two languages are not very mutually intelligible, though.
The need Scandinavians have to learn English is also something we can learn from. A strong motivation or desire to learn a language is crucial for success. A big motivator for me to constantly improve my languages is the friends I’ve made all over the world.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish all have their roots in Old Norse and a speaker of one has a default capability to at least understand the other two languages. But the Scandinavians’ language ability doesn’t stop there. Virtually all are fluent in English too.
Why are Scandinavians so successful?
Another factor for the success of Scandinavians is the the quality of education, which is extremely high. One difference I can point out between Scandinavia and Italy based on conversations with friends is that the Scandinavian education system gives higher importance to the integration of theory and practice.
What are the differences between Italian and Scandinavian languages?
A speaker of one of these languages can understand a lot of the other languages without having to study. On the subject of English: anything between 80 – 90\% of Scandinavians speak English, compared to Italy’s 10-20 \% (I tried to find data on this, but and I kept seeing 30\%.