What Language Are These People Speaking?

Forget the topic of the interview for now. What language are these people speaking? I had two guesses at first, but I got both of them wrong, although one was close.

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0 thoughts on “What Language Are These People Speaking?”

  1. Dear Robert
    It is either Danish or Norwegian. Since it is very hard to understand, I bet that it is Danish.
    Regards. James

  2. This is obviously a Germanic language and it kinda sounds like English at times, so I thought maybe Scotts or Frisian. That’s when I noticed words ending in “-sk”. My guess is Danish.

    1. Dutch cannot understand anything of the other two and vice versa, but Norwegian and Swedish are highly mutually intelligible. 87%. They are almost dialects of a single language.

  3. swedes and norwegians can work out each other, dutch is closer to german – was considered a german dialect until c. 1500s

      1. A lot of the vocabulary is similar, but the word order and syntax is completely different. The similarities are more confusing to monolingual native speakers than anything else. Fortunately, there are few Dutch people who can’t speak English, German, or both. I visited the Netherlands some years ago, and found the Dutch language fascinating. Most of my exposure was through print, because every single Dutch person I met spoke English better than most native speakers and never used Dutch except with other Dutch people. I expressed my interest in learning the language to a Dutch colleague, and her response was, “But why would you do this?”

  4. It seemed obviously Scandinavian, so I assumed it couldn’t be one of the obvious Scandinavian languages like Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish. So I guessed Icelandic. But it turns out to be Danish.

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