(Note: Replying from my personal email, so User:Julle speaking rather than User:Johan (WMF). I'm not working on this and not intimately familiar with the plans for the strategy consultation; these are not comments from the WMF, which as far as I know has no position on the subject of Scandinavian languages.)
2017-01-31 15:38 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com:
Swedes have trouble speaking with both Norwegians and Danes, Danes have lesser trouble with Swedish and even less with Norwegian, Norwegians have virtually no problems wiith Swedish and Danish. People from Island and the Faroe icelands usually speaks Danish, they learn it in school, and as Norwegian and Danish is pretty close they usually understands Norwegians without any problem. It is somewhat strange how much trouble Swedes have in understanding the other Scandinavian languages, given that they are so closely related.
As far as I know, there's no major difference between Swedish and Danish understanding of the neighbouring languages. When looking at Denmark, Sweden and Norway and how well adolescents understand their neighbours, Delsing & Lundin (2005) found two things that really stand out: On average Norwegians understand Danish and Swedish significantly better than Danes or Swedes understand the other Scandinavian languages – especially the Danish understanding of their neighbours had dropped since Øivind Maurud looked at the same thing in the 1970s – and both Danes and Swedes found Norwegian the easiest foreign Scandinavian language to understand.
(They mainly performed OKish when it came to understanding written text; understanding of the spoken languages are more difficult – the Norwegians struggled with spoken Danish, too. Here's Norwegian national TV making fun of how difficult the other Scandinavians generally find Danish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk)
(Reference: Delsing, Lars-Olof & Lundin, Katarina. "Håller språket ihop Norden? : en forskningsrapport om ungdomars förståelse av danska, svenska och norska" (2005): https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/files/5905032/625654.pdf)
//Johan Jönsson --