Intelligibility of Swedish for Danes: loan words compared with inherited words

Abstract

The Mainland Scandinavian languages, i.e. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are so closely related that the speakers often use their own language when communicating with each other (so-called semi-communication, Haugen 1966). However, communication is not perfect and sometimes fails. Previous investigations (Maurud 1976, Bø 1978, Börestam 1987, Delsing & Åkesson 2005) aimed at getting a general impression of how well Scandinavians understand each other. It appeared that mutual intelligibility is highest between Norwegians and Swedes, whereas Danish is relatively hard to understand, especially for Swedish-speaking subjects (Perridon 2000). The investigations just mentioned measured the overall intelligibility of complete texts by means of open questions. Little attention was paid to the linguistic phenomena that can explain the differences in the level of understanding between the three languages. In complete texts, all linguistic levels (segmental, supra-segmental, lexical, morphological, syntactic) are combined and mixed, so that it is hard to assess the effect of separate linguistic phenomena. In the present article, we restrict the investigation of intelligibility to the understanding of isolated words, trying to determine the role of a limited set of phonetic/phonological factors that may affect intelligibility in inter-Scandinavian communication. We focus on the intelligibility of Swedish words for Danes, and in particular on the intelligibility of inherited words compared to loan words. As in most western countries, puristic movements in Scandinavia have taken action against the large number of loan words that have become part of the Scandinavian languages (cf. Section 1). However, from the point of view of semi-communication in Scandinavia, it could be argued that a large number of such words is an advantage for mutual intelligibility, at least if the languages have borrowed the same words. We can think of three reasons why this might be the case.