American was shocked by Nordics' English Differences!! (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian)

Can American identify the difference between Nordic English Accent?

Today we had our American pannel Illa try to guess the Nordic languages just by listening to them

Hope you enjoy

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[ivanka]

Imagine if Finland was also there:

In English we say "sun".
In Norwegian we say "sol".
In Swedish we say "sol".
In Danish we say "sol".

In Finnish we say "aurinko".

[jarboen]

I always find it hilarious how Norwegians and Swedish understand each other so easily while many struggle with understanding Danish. Even tho Norway was under Dane rule for 400-ish years.
On the flipside, write the same sentence in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk and you will see some wild similarities in Norwegian Bokmål and Danish. :)

[tomastorheim]

Just one thing, the Norwegian girl said PC stood for "portable computer" which is not correct, it stands for "personal computer", however, since laptops have become the norm for many of the younger generation, it is a bit understandable that she would make such a mistake.

[kaz]

It wasn’t about English accents, but about vocabulary in each country.

[Bleckman]

Knife, like Sword, Eye, Nose, Ear, Boat, Sail, Sea, Stone, Tree, Wheat, Seed, Bread, Milk, Cow, are all very old words that date back from the time England and the Nordic countries sort of shared a common vocabulary, before being influenced by other languages.

[iphcvui]

finnish 🇫🇮
computer = tietokone
sun = aurinko
water = vesi
reindeer = poro
bag = laukku
knife = veitsi or puukko

[DraslyThe]

As a Norwegian I found this video hilarious! Understanding everything of whats being said hits different

[henri]

The word "Sol" is not only spelled similarly between these three languages, it's the same thing in Spanish and Portuguese, Sol, despite the different pronunciation

[ownstyle]

The Stockholm, Oslo & Copenhagen dialects are quite easy to understand for most scandinavians. However, if you get to more rural parts of these countries it’s a whole different story. I’m Swedish and I’ve hade moments when it’s been hard understanding another swede

[simplyepic]

There are so many interesting similarities between Scandinavian and English. One of my favorite things is how originally English and Old Norse had a bunch of words with the sk/sc sound. The English words eventually became sh words, and sometimes English would borrow back the sk word from Old Norse, but with a slightly different meaning. Some examples: shatter and scatter, dish and disk, shirt and skirt.

[Zzyyxx]

Shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of Scandinavian words in the English language. The Vikings spent quite a bit of time in the UK. We have words but also many place names. For example any place where it’s name ends in “by” Grimsby for example, by is the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish word for “town” so literally Grim’s Town.

[paranoidrodent]

As a bilingual French and English speaker, I was amused at how often the Nordic words sounded closer to French than English (e.g. Norwegian pronunciation of PC was identical to a French person saying PC, Swedish word for reindeer was phonetically identical (reine in French), Sol is obvious to any Romance language speaker since it's the Latin root for our words for sun). I really wasn't expecting that with northern Germanic languages (although once in a while a German word is obvious to me because it's a cognate to something in French).

The confused look on Ella at the K in the Nordic cognates of knife being pronounced was amusing. We English speakers are used to tons of random seeming silent letters but historically those were pronounced (same with all the silent letters in French), so the shared Old Norse root word of knife clearly had a pronounced K.

[iagobrisola]

Norwegian is so so so similar with Brazil pronunciation in some ways.... Wow, it was a surprise..., and why all the Nordic Girls are so gourgeous and charming oh gosh

[ohmp]

I have studied Swedish at school (in Finland) and because of that I usually understand signs, ads etc. texts in Denmark and Norway, but understanding speech is very hard. Simple sentences in Norwegian can sometimes be understandable but Danish is quite impossible for me.

[elitestarquake]

I live in the North West of England where there are loads of place names and words that are Old Norse in origin from the time the Vikings were here. Also Latin-derived names, such as Lancaster, Manchester etc from the Roman period. Old Norse and Old English both developed from Old Germanic hence the large amount of shared etymology.

[RobMorlock]

Please do more videos with these scandinavian ladys. That´s awesome!

[jbwetzstein]

This does not seem to be about how English is spoken differently by Nordic people, as the title implies. This seems to be more a lesson in a handful of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish vocabulary words. Still interesting.

[ЉубомирБошковић]

Sun (English) - Sunce (Serbian)
Stone - Stena
Snow - Sneg
Swine - Svinja
Bush - Busen
Berg - Breg
Water - Voda 🚰
Wave 🌊 - Val
Leaf - List
Day - Dan
Nightmare - Nocna Mora
Beowulf - Beovuk
Gardener - Gradinar

And a lot more... 🇷🇸😎

[anttirytkonen]

As a Finn and linguist, I don’t know why but for me that introduction in Danish sounded Finnish. I heard she said "minä olen", which is "I am" in Finnish. Since Finnish and Danish aren’t related at all even though they are both Nordic, that is very interesting! 🤓

[jiros]

Fun fact. The English word "bag" comes from Old Norse originally. And in Norwegian they say "bag" too but only because it's been reimported from modern English to Norwegian as a loan word.