Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence

[Steve Gustafson]

David L. White wrote:

>         It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw
> areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my
> opinion) to reconverge, was unique.

I suspect that the current situation in Scandinavia is similar.  All three
(or four) of the continental Scandinavian languages are to some degree
mutually comprehensible.  At the close of the Viking era, the dialects of
Norway (and Iceland) [West Scandinavian] were distinct from those of Sweden
and Denmark [East Scandinavian]; these latter two shared a number of common
features.

A number of important social and political developments followed.  All three
languages were strongly influenced by Low German, the mercantile language of
the Hanse.  There were a number of political unions among the several
nations; the longest lasting of these was the union of Denmark and Norway,
which lasted until the early 1900's.

During the early modern period, Danish evolved away from the northern
standard with some fairly comprehensive vowel and consonant shifts.  These
changes were not shared by Norwegian or (most) Swedish.   Danish continued
to be the government and prestige language of Norway, but the Danish
imported there was spoken in accordance with the more conservative Norwegian
phonology.

The net result was that Norwegian and Swedish generally share a common
phonology, while Danish and Norwegian share a common vocabulary that Swedish
occasionally dissents from.  The most common form of Norwegian has lost its
West Scandinavian distinctiveness and has been assimilated to Swedish in its
pronunciation, and Danish in its vocabulary.

The complicating factor in all of this is a nineteenth century attempt to
revive the surviving features that once made Norwegian different, by
proposing a new standard language based on rural and western dialects that
had preserved some of the West Scandinavian distinctiveness.  While the
numbers of schools teaching the new standard suggest that it has not been
particularly successful, both seem to be relatively stable, and both
Norwegian dialects freely borrow from one another.

--
  Quae vestimenta
       induet misella
            in conviviis crastinis?