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The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages (including English, German, and Dutch) and the East Germanic languages (now extinct). They are spoken in the three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), Finland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and to some extent Greenland as well as by immigrant groups mainly in North America and Australia. The language group is often also called either the Scandinavian or Nordic languages. The latter term is the most commonly used by both scholars and laymen in the Nordic countries and is often favored by these when writing in English.
Classification
There are two main branches, West Scandinavian and East Scandinavian. The eastern branch is heavily influenced by especially Low German and consists of Danish and Swedish along with their various dialects and varieties. The western branch includes Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic. There is another way of classifying the languages that focuses more on mutual intelligibility than historical development that classifies Norwegian with Danish and Swedish as Continental Scandinavian and Faroese and Icelandic as Insular Scandinavian.
As a result, Danish and Norwegian may in reality be somewhat more similar to each other than either is to Swedish. Due to the long political union between Norway and Denmark, the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål shares much of the Danish vocabulary. In addition, due to Danish pronunciation, Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. One witticism about Norwegian that expresses the basic similarities and differences between the languages is that "Norwegian is Danish spoken in Swedish." The relationships between the three languages might be summarized by the following diagram:
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Norwegian ----------------- Swedish
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- phonology
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Danish
The North Germanic languages are often cited as proof of Hubert Lyautey's aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." The differences in dialects within the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark can often be greater than the differences across the borders, but the political independence of these countries leads continental Scandinavian to be classified into Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish in the popular mind as well as among most linguists. This is also due to the strong influence of the standard languages, particularly in Denmark and Sweden. Even if the language policy of Norway has been more tolerant of rural dialectal variation in formal language, the prestige dialect often refered to as "Eastern Urban Norwegian", spoken mainly in and around the Oslo-region, can be considered to be quite normative. The creation of Nynorsk out of dialects after Norway became independent of Denmark in 1814 was an attempt to make the linguistic divisions match the political ones.
Family tree
All North Germanic languages are descended from Old Norse. Note that divisions between subfamilies of North Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and the most separated ones not.
Beside the two official written norms of Norwegian, there exists two established unofficial norms: Riksmål, similar to, but more conservative than Bokmål, which is used in different extent by a large number of people, especially in the cities; High-Norwegian (Høgnorsk), rather similar to Nynorsk, used by a very small minority.
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