Talking Language

Just for Fun
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@Mno Though we might need to continue here.

Anyway, I can read Danish and Norwegian pretty good,spoken is also understandable.

Most of the times when meeting someone who speaks Dansih, they turn to English pretty quick because it’s quicker and easier, involving no guessing games.

So we usually say that we understand Danish better than they understand Swedish. Spoken Norwegian is not problem we just keep on, they on Norwegian and us in Swedish :joy:

Counting in Dansih is really different they tend to say numbers in a way that sounds backwards to us.

The language in the Netherlands is readable to a certain point, if, I for example needs to read a food label or a recipe and it’s only available in your language,I’ll be able to understand it, because many words as similar.

Just as in Danish or Norwegian it’s just the spelling that’s different. (Netherlands tends to use a lot of extra letters compared to Swedish :joy:)
But I doubt I’ll be able to fully understand a newspaper or conversate actually trying to speak it.

Can’t speak German at all, but my 13 y/o can. He learns German in school (I choosed French and Spanish, but can barley speak them anyway) Written German I might understand maybe half of it If I’m lucky.

And then I’m lucky enough to speak Romani Chib (Gypsy language) as a native language, which has similarities to all of the languages including my husbands first language which is Serbian. Once again, some words are similar as they are in Swedish and Romani. But if he speaks Serbian and I speak Romani Chib we wouldn’t understand each other.
Writing in Romani chib is another thing though, it’s a pretty recent Idea. And there’s multiple ways to spell everything even if it sounds the same :joy:

I’m sure you already know this but I just have to show and example.
So I’m using the numbers 1-3. In the different languages. In dutch, German,Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Romani chib, and Serbian.

  1. één - ein - ett -en -et -yek -jedan
    2.twee - zwei -två -to -to -duy -dwa
  2. drie- drei -tre -tre -tre -trin -tri

Might have made some spelling errors somewhere, you’re welcome to correct me :smiling_face:

Love discussions like this one, it’s so interesting.

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@MrsOdh I’m going to be lazy and say één twee drie is spelled correctly :upside_down_face:

Dutch and German is very similar, more in spelling than in pronunciation but that also depends on the local dialects spoken. I can read German pretty well. My spoken German is awful but I can make myself understandable OK. I rather speak English with my German friends. Level playing field.

because I spent a lot of time in Friesland as a kid I can understand Frisian ok too.That’s more like Dutch and (Old) English than German. English changed a lot since the French conquered England in 1066 and after that the English conquered France back , it was more like the other Germanic languages before that.

I guess Romani chib is a bit like Yiddish, the language spoken by the European Jews, which is mainly a variant of German but with elements of Hebrew and Roman and Slavic languages. Until WWII Amsterdam had a big Jewish population, and despite most of the Amsterdam Jews were murdered, many Yiddish words still survive in Amsterdam dialect.

I use these Yiddish borrowed words at times. Just a few examples:

Mazzel - good luck, goodbye (from mazzeltov)
Porum - face
Majem - water
Mokum - from makom, place. Now means Amsterdam.
Jatten - hands as noun, to steal as verb, from Jad meaning hand.

There’s hundreds of these words in Amsterdam dialect.

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That’s so cool.
I’ve got some friends in Israel, and my grandparents (On my mother’s side spent a lot of time there) I can understand a few words of Yiddish, know some kids songs,but I had no clue it was used in modern Dutch today.

I think a lot of words is borrowed from Romani chib into Swedish or maybe it’s the other way around. There’s also a language called Swedish Romani or Travellers Romani which is spoken by Swedish Gypsies. It has a few similar words in Romani Chib, but we wouldn’t understand each other either. The Romani I speak is more similar to the languages spoken at Balkan.

I also know that the English and especially Australian Romanos have a language of their own. Just as the Finnish speaking ones. Not that I can understand real Finnsih anyway, it’s a language group of it’s own.

Swedish belongs to the Nordgermanic Indoeuropeian language group. Which is the Scandinavian languages including Icelandic and Faeroise.

The Germanic languages and the English language is also related.

Finnish, Estonian, and the Slavic language belongs to a group of their own. Hungarian,Estonian and Finnsih makes their own group.

While the Slavic languages are closer related to each other. My husband who speaks Serbian is able to understand many of the other Slavic languages to a certain point, including Ukrainian. Not Albanian even if it’s located close to those countries, their language isn’t really related to any of the languages spoken today.

It’s a whole science but I think it’s so cool that we’re all mostly able to understand each other to a certain point even if we do speak different languages.

Another really cool thing is that Esperanto which I’ve tried to learn for years is a whole made up language mainly built on languages from the indo European and the Germanic language group.

Fun fact: in Charlie Chaplins movie The Great Dictator all the signs are written in Esperanto. As it’s supposed to be a neutral language with no Political meaning.

Fun Fact two: The languages the minions in Despicable me is speaking known as Banana language or Minionese is a mash up between English,French,Korean,Hindi,Danish/Swedish, Italian.

And yet almost everyone who watches them understands completely what they are saying. (For what I know the minions doesn’t get dubbed into any language even if the rest of the movie does, maybe because of that)

Gru is supposed to have a Russian/German dialect. In the Swedish dub they’ve made him more Russian/Slavic speaking with a heavy accent.

We tend to semi dub/voice over our kids movies here. For example the newer Disney movies Coco or Encanto is semi dubbed, they speak something that mostly can be described Swedish/Spansih.

In Luca it’s Swedish/Italian.

Not sure why they do that. But I think it’s a good idea.

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This app is always having people from Europe on it speaking and writing cleaner English than most Americans! People from The Netherlands and Finland especially!

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Can’t speak for other countries here,but in Sweden we’re starting to learn English (British English)in kindergarten. Spending the entire elementary school practicing spelling and pronunciation.

A lot of our tv-shows are from either UK or US. Semi dubbed for the youngest crowd. Subtitled from like
8-10 year olds.
Also it’s not uncommon that families are like mine with parents from different European countries with only English in common. Travelling between the European countries are also easy. Not like travelling from US to Europe.

Today’s kids are probably more influenced by the American pronunciation and American culture than the UK one I guess.
Internet also makes it possible to conversate and like my kids does gaming (Minecraft and Call of Duty, the later is only played together with one of the adults. I don’t like it but it’s was almost impossible to avoid when their father playes) where instructions and conversation is done in English.

Which is pretty funny consider the fact that Minecraft is created by a Swede (Notch) :smiling_face:

So that might be the reason for that :smiling_face:

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Yeah. We need more french like me to ruin this :metal:t2:

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At least France isn’t like Canada sending all its smoke here. Oh and the Statue of Liberty was a nice gift…

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I don’t think this is funny. Canada is being devastated by these fires and affected more than we and it’s still early in the season.

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All the French speaking people I’ve ever met has spoken great English. They might prefer French but it isn’t like it’s really noticable. The only I can think of that might be different is the speed of talking. The French speaking people speaks what sounds to me in high speed, no matter if it’s French or English. Love it though,wish I could speak more French than I actually do. :smiling_face:

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Oh yes, of course some of us speak good english… but overall it’s not so good. Most of us are still watching movies or series dubbed in french for exemple, in school the way they’re teaching us english is fucked up. Oops. Excuse my french. They’re teaching us mostly how to write it, rather than how to speak it.

Yeah, we do talk fast I guess ?

Why do you want to speak french? It’s useless!
Ha, I’m joking. As long as you know baguette croissant bonjour au-revoir merci…and fromage you’re supposed to be ok :v:t2:

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I think What it is is a lot of Netherlands, and European countries were English Is not the native language it’s taught proper form

So when we come along with our slang we sound like fools yano it’s lit fam

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Here English is mandatory to learn,and then in fift Sixth grade (it depends a little bit on Which school you’re going to) you need to choose between either French,German and sometimes Spanish. I crossed French,studied French four years. After that I was able to choose Spanish as a third third extra language for three years. So I did that. But sadly I haven’t used it for years so I don’t remember too much. Thing is that if you can speak English,French,German and Spanish you can conversate with a huge part of the world much easier. :smiling_face:
Knowing how to say fromage or baguette won’t help me much to know, Je suis allergicque au lait et gluten.
:joy: Not sure If that’s how to say it. I never really got to use my French much.

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Yo yo make it rain fatty bo batty fat stacks on the West side gangsta style 4EVA EVA! $$$$

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We have to chose one second language at 11years old, generally it’s English. Then a second language, it’s Spanish or German, or anything you want as long as it is available in your school)

And we do have free gluten bread :smiling_face: and soy/almond whatever milk :v:t2:
Come on it’s 2023 ! :yum:
(And yes you said it correctly! Bravo!)

french slang is a huge part of our language too ahah
Exemple :
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/warner-bros-raunchy-french-barbie-poster-meaning-1235519470/

Here we got Ken. Backward it’s Nek, as for Nique, and nique, a slang word too, means “to F#€&”
Yeah i know it’s complicated
We got very popular words such as
Meuf->Femme (woman)
Cheulou → Louche (strange)
Or Relou ->Lourd (heavy in a way like…man ok you’re…sluggish (i think it’s the correct word)

Sometimes I have to read lyrics in order to understand some of our rappers

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Dutch street and rap language these days is a mix of the languages spoken by the parents of the kids in the streets: moroccan, turkish, surinam (which in itself is a mix of english, dutch, portugese, west-african and probably more that I don’t know about) , antillian (mainly a mix of spanish, portugese and dutch, and the base for esperanto) and more. TBH I don’t understand that much of it. Gramps Menno.

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I’m sure you do, most places does nowdays. Allergies is pretty common all over the world. I’m one of those annoying people who have a list of allergies so no soy for me either. :joy:

Haven’t been to France since I was like 14 years old or something like that. We where in Paris and somewhere by the sea (I don’t remember where, all I remember was a huge apartment complex very close to the beach in the town we where in) my parents didn’t speak a word French and just wanted to go home. I loved it the entire time, and swore that I’ll come back someday.

I haven’t yet though, my husband refuse to go somewhere he doesn’t understand the language (And yet he wants to take us all to Serbia where I won’t understand the language, double standards for real here :joy:)

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I think all countries have something like this. Here we have many Arabic speaking immigration, and a lot of times you can hear the kids speaks something that’s a mix of Arabic, English, Swedish and still a few Balkan words even if the main Balkan immigrants are in my age and older, and many of those kids (Like my husband) is more or less raised in Sweden. And their kids are born and raised here too.

I’m always amazed that they actually understand each other,and can switch between the languages in the middle of a sentence, or just make up their own words. Until I realize that we probably do the same thing without thinking about it, and they probably don’t think about it either. It just happens.

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Yep :blush:

Numbers in Finnish. Any similarities? :point_up:t2: None :joy:

  1. yksi
  2. kaksi
  3. kolme
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And despite that a lot of you actually speaks Swedish, while we didn’t even get to learn a word in your language except for the curses we heard from our parents friends once in a while. That’s sad.

How similar is it compared to languages in the same group?

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At least Finnish has some relatives. The Basque language is totally unique. And totally unintelligible, just like Finnish and Hungarian are by the way.

PS Moved these posts here (after being hinted by another mod) to make this into a proper thread, as it seems interesting enough to merit its own thread.

Some basque numbers

  • one: bat
  • two: bi
  • three: hiru
  • four: lau
  • five: bost
  • six: ja
  • seven: zazpi
  • eight: zortzi
  • nine: bederatzi
  • ten: hamar
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