Which languages do you speak?

So what's Norweigen and Danish?


What's English?

 

Danish is Swedish spoken with a mouthful of hot potatoes and Norwegian is Swedish spoken when high on happy pills.

"Scandinavia" is just a geographical term and not a linguistic one. Sure, in everyday-speech you can say "Scandinavian language", but if I am not mistaking, linguists do not use that term. They talk about Germanic languages and classify the different languages of that group in smaller sub-groups like West-, North- and East Germanic.

I think it is sometimes called Nordic languages. But in the field of linguistics, "Scandinavian language" is an invalid term. Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Faroe Islandic are all North Germanic/Nordic languages. English is Germanic too, but belong to the sub-group of West Germanic languages.
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American.

 

Classic by now:


Lolzzzz. Her "Portuguese" is absolutely horrendous though, but she completely nailed the other ones. Although I recall this video to be a bit more funny.

 

English, Deutsch, Русский, in that order.

 

Do other countries have different accents within their own languages, like how southerners and northerners talk in the States? I know the English people have different accents depending on where they are from. What about Germany or other countries?

 

European national accents are easy for me to spot and identify.
American regional ones I struggle with. Deep south, New York and Chicago I can recognise so far.


@ Rhetoric, try this one next time you are on Instagram. Ketsu furi furi.

There aren't many languages I can't start a fight in, get laid in, or buy a beer. But I only speak English fluently.

Mobile phones make life easier these days.


The first word I like to learn in any new language is "monkey" the second is "tickle".

Your mum and... is always a good one to pick up.
Votre maman et Rhetoric of Life. For example.

Votre maman et une sange.

 

Of course we do. Sweden consists of 25 regions ("landskap") and almost all of them have their own, distinct accents. We have to remember that the concept of a "nation state" with a shared language is rather new in human history - most regions were like their own countries with their very own languages. Then through "language reforms" accents started to fade out and mix with what was declared "official language". In the case of Sweden it was obviously "Stockholmian" (Stockholm is in the region of Uppland btw, so you could say "Upplandian" is the official language) that became "Real Swedish".

As mentioned though, accents still exists and are very easy to spot. This comedian does a great job imitating how the language sounds, travelling from north to south. Bare in mind that he is a comedian and therefore exaggerrates, but whatever:

I know you do not speak Swedish, but just listen to the phonetics.

 

If you look at Italy, that is a very young country (unified in late 1800's), the regional dialects (19 regions as a whole) are even greater. Spain is even more messed up as some of the regions have their very own languages; Catalan in Catalonia, Basque in Basque Country, Asturian in Asturia, Galician in Galicia etc etc. Castillian is the official language only because the king said so.

 

Mandarin Chinese and English. The former is my native tongue. I started learning English when I was 13-ish but wasn't like, fully immersed in it till I was 16. Even though I have been in an English-speaking country for well over 20 years, I have to admit that my spoken English is quite poor. I mean, I can hold a conversation with people however I have a horrid accent and I always struggle to find the right words to convey what I think. My written English is slightly better though, probably because I spend so much time on online forums talking to people.

I am also losing my written Chinese quite badly.

 

Not a lot of people know that!

 

Yeah, I find this forum posting good English practise too.
My second language/school lnguage was French.


Je suis une vache.
Moo.

 

Hope I do not sound to up myself when I say I consider my English to be very good, so I do not really see participating on English speaking boards as too much of an "English practice" (although language is something you can always train and become better at and one way of doing so is to read and write. This applies for native speakers too). However, I know that my English is not perfect and sometimes (I think) I mess up the prepositions and might use incorrect words every now and again.

Some of my posts are written in such bad English that looking back at them makes me embarrassed and I really cannot see how you guys managed to understand them and provide replies as even I struggle to understand my own posts.

 

I have always been very fond of these types of videos becauses it pleases my fascination with language and Disney, both at the same time. All languages sound really beautiful when they are sung. Even Flem and Dutch, which I generally hate, sound really sweet.


It is obviously much more fun to listen to the full song in each language as that gives you a much better idea of how it sounds, but these are nice too. A bit easier to share too (lol).

 

Well, that is difficult because I can't understand them. I can hear a difference between the way the two men speak though.

 

The host, the man with the strong, rolling R's is from the south and the one doing the impressions is from mid-Sweden somwhere.

 

Well, I didn't even know he was doing impressions! I understood exactly 0% of that.

 

I atually mentioned it in my post:

 

If you hadn't said, I wouldn't have known is what I should have said. I had no idea what was going on there.

 

Anyways, I understand there are lots of advantages having a "nationalised" language, mostly because it facillitates trade. But, at the same time, I find it sad that local and regional variations are dying out to be replaced with the more conventional way of speaking.

Obviously, public schooling has a lot to do with this reform, at least in Sweden, as it was decided that every school ought to teach the very same things and follow the same plans etc. Furthermore, pop culture did a lot to kill dialects/accents to - Radio-reporters and tv-stars all started to hide their accents to sound more posh and appealing (in American context this would be "mid-Atlantic accent", yes?) and like the sheep most of us are, we started to imitate our idols. This even further killed regional and local variations.

Finally, it was not very popular having heavy accents when people started moving into the cities because it was seen as "trashy" or whatever. Luckily, there are still diffetences in pronounciation, but still a bit sad that the regional variation of the language are pretty much dead.