If a person speaks Norwegian, can s/he understand Swedish?

[raccoon]

And vice versa.

[ZombieNixon]

1. To some extent.

Norwegians have it one-up on both the Danes and the Swedes since Norwegians can understand about 80% of spoken Danish and 60% of spoken Swedish, but Swedes can only understand about 25% of spoken Norwegian (40% for the Danes). In terms of vocabulary, Norwegian is closer to Danish but in pronunciation is closer to Swedish.

Eg. Norwegian alle mennesker "all people" (ALL-uh MEN-es-kur), cf. Danish alle mennesker (AHL-eh MEN-e-shur), cf. Swedish alla människor (ALL-uh MAN-is-kor).

Danish pronunciation is more slurred and Norwegian and Swedish is sharper so Danes have an easier time understanding drunk Norwegians than sober ones. :D

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. When I was in college, I knew someone who had grown up in a

Norwegian immigrant family and whose family still spoke Norwegian at home.

She said that she could watch Ingmar Bergman films without subtitles, and she claimed that even in his grimmest films there was humor that didn't translate or that the subtitler completely missed.

[Recursion]

3. There's a joke about that...

...that Danish is Norwegian, spoken in Swedish. Danish and Norwegian's vocabularies are very similar, and different from Swedish, but Danish pronunciation is much closer to Swedish. So, Norwegian and Swedish are the fartherst apart of the troika.