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Icelandic and Some Facts About It:
It is the official language of Icelandic and is spoken by 314,000 people. It is closely related to Faroese but the two are not mutually intelligible. Icelandic developed to be very different from other North Germanic tongues. It also does not share similarities with English and German, unlike the other members of the group.
Majority of the speakers of Icelandic live in Iceland. A small portion lives in Denmark. You can also find 5,000 Icelandic speakers in the United States, and a small number of them in Canada. Iceland takes many measures to ensure that the national language survives the hand of time and does not become endangered. Since it is a complicated tongue, not many outsiders learn it.
- Facts About Faroese:
The language of the Faroese Islanders is spoken by about 72,000 people. It is closely related to Icelandic and as a result, not that similar to other North Germanic tongues. It descended from Old West Norse like the other members of the group. In its written form, it resembles Icelandic a lot, but the speakers of the two cannot understand each other. A significant amount of its speakers live in Denmark.
- Facts About Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish:
Due to the similarities between the three, it is better to study them together. Between them, they have 20 million native speakers. They are mutually intelligible even after developing many new features. In their written form, the similarities are more prominent and can be noticed easily even by the non-native speakers. But when it comes to the spoken form, only the native speakers of the three can understand other tongues. The three languages also share some similarities with their distant cousins English and German. The three are written in Latin script. The alphabet used in Denmark is closely related to the one in use in Norway. Swedish share more features with English but it is Norwegian which is closest to the language. The pronunciation of the two are quite similar.
Out of the three, Danish has the most distinct pronunciation. Norwegian and Swedish have phonetic similarities for the most part, but they Swedes have problem understanding the Danes. However, the vocabulary of the three vernaculars is pretty much the same which makes things a lot easier. The Danes use a distinct system of pronunciation which is why their spoken words sound completely different from the written ones. This is why sometimes they get told to write whatever they are trying to say when they are talking to a Swede to make things easier for the both of them.