Johanna wrote:SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:What is the degree of mutual intelligibility of Swedish and Dutch?
This question is about both written and spoken language.
For monolingual speakers? Pretty much zero on both accounts but especially when it comes to the spoken language. It is possible to get a few words in the written one, but full sentences? Nah.
That "monolingual speakers" part contains an important hint, especially in combination with what has been written below, quoting it now
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Johanna wrote:Swedes who know English and German can make out quite a lot of written Dutch however, even if their German is pretty darn rusty. When it comes to the spoken language, however, we're back to zero once more.
Now when someone is a trilingual speakers, like a native of Swedish who even would know both of English and German, things really can be different, yes.
As for my background, I am a semi-native of Dutch
. Why? Because I am a native of German. And whenever I was pondering about the connection between those two these days, they feel more of one single bigger language to me, and less of two different ones.
As someone who knows both English and Dutch, Swedish, after spending some additional time (not too much even) on learning it, became surprisingly familiar to me. Although I cannot really use it actively yet, it is mainly about passive understanding, and it is especially about written Swedish. Now I don't fully consider it another variant of a bigger language as it is the case with Dutch, but also I don't consider it a fully different language. Not talking about the sole fact that all of those belong to the Germanic family, instead, there is more to it even.