Faroese Language | Can Danish, Swedish and Norwegian speakers understand it?
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- čas přidán 23. 06. 2022
- The Faroese language - føroyskt mál - is a North Germanic language spoken as a first language by about 72,000 Faroe Islanders, around 53,000 of whom reside on the Faroe Islands and 23,000 in other areas, mainly Denmark. In this video we explore how mutually intelligible Faroese language is with other Germanic languages - Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Can you understand anything?
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📝 The participants:
🇫🇴 Johan - a Faroese speaker living in Faroe Island;
🇩🇰 Michael - an Ecolinguist subscriber from Denmark;
🇸🇪🎥 Gustaf - sound engineer and CZcamsr from Scania, Sweden → @Maaga Duppy
🇳🇴 Åsmund - a teacher from Norway
Big thanks to Åsmund for the help with fixing the audio. 🤗
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🤗 Big hug to everyone reading my video descriptions! You rock! 🤓💪🏻
#FaroeIslands
As an Italian speaker I understood 0% but was fun to watch
Boa noite, amigo italiano!
Thank you so much, Norbert, for having me on and giving me the opportunity to spread the word about my native language a bit. I really enjoyed doing this.
As you may have noticed I was a bit nervous in the beginning so my intro is ultra short. But in the beginning I never really explained which langauges I speak like the other participants did and I've seen some people asking about that. So, in addition to Faroese, I also speak Danish, English, Swedish, German, and Slovak. My Norwegian is pretty good but not as strong as my Swedish and I also speak very basic Spanish. I have also taken courses in a handful other languages but I don't speak these to any extent.
Again, thanks for having me on and I hope your viewers will enjoy this video.
Thank you so much for your contribution to the project, Johan! 🤗
We certainly did. This was very interesting. As a swede I didn't expect to understand anything at all, but got all words. And it was a pleasure to hear skånska representing Sweden.
@@Ecolinguist Nie ma za co. :)
this was great. I loved it.
@Johan Petur Dam Nothing to criticize! You all created a really interesting episode with everyone's little effort into it. Thanks alot. Absolutely exclusive to have faroese standing in the middle of all. Often gets forgotten and left behind sadly.
As an Icelander it was so fun to see the similarities with Faroese. Although it did help that it had the text, I was still able to understand a lot of the Faroese. Icelandic is the most similar language to Faroese of all the Nordic languages, you should include them both in a video if you haven't already!
Definitely should include both in a video
Faroese sounds more like Norwegian than Icelandic, it sounds like a mix between western Norwegian and northern Norwegian.
@@dan74695 yes but written Faroese is like 90% similar to Icelandic!
@@liljakaren97 It's very similar to written Norwegian as well, it's very close to conservative Nynorsk. I understand almost everything lakfpslfødlfpfl
@@liljakaren97 Me kunna samanlikna norsk, færøysk, og islendsk.
It sounds like a Scandinavian language with an Irish accent!
Well it's just slightly north of Scotland, so could be like a highland Scots accent rather than Irish.
Slaviska språk har också palatalisering före främre vokaler.
Well, you know, when my ancestors decided to move to the Faroes, they also decided to do a detour to the Irish sea and take... I mean marry a woman there first. In fact, DNA shows that we Faroese are 80-ish% Nordic in the male line and 80-ish% Gaelic in the female line. So we're an interesting mix in that respect.
@Prof. Spudd According to the Faroese speakers who communicated with some of the last Norn speakers, they were very, very close. In fact, they would have been mutually intelligible. For me when reading the remaining Norn texts, the most difficult part is deciphering the orthography the native English or Scots speakers used when writing down Norn.
@@vlagavulvin3847 Yes, but the Slavs call it hard and soft, while the Gaels call it wide and narrow.
As a Western Norwegian and user of Nynorsk I was able to understand more Faroese than the others. I find it really fascinating to hear!
I'm a Nynorsk user from the north and I understand almost everything. Faroese sounds like a weird mix between western and northern Norwegian to me.
Why do they always use Bokmål speakers, it sounds super cringe to hear and they barely understand Norwegian
@@FluxTrax They speak Danish that's influenced by Norwegian.
Yeah, I think it would've worked with more diverse dialects for the continental Scandinavian speakers
As the Swedish speaker is from Scania, right next to the Danish border
@@FluxTrax cuz almost everyone speaks Bokmål
I've been waiting for faroese
me too
Beautiful ancient language. For me it sounds like Icelandic witn no rolled Rs and a lot of sh and dzh sounds. Also, the manner of speaking recalls me something from Scottish, monotonous and nasal
How long for?
I’m Danish and overall I don’t understand Faroese, but suddenly out of the blue comes a sentence I do understand and obviously single words here and there. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the Faroe islands twice, nice people and beautiful place.
I'm Norwegian and I understand Faroese.
@@dan74695 good for you👍
I've also been there twice.
And i agree, beautifull place. I was so lucky that i had sun and 16 degrees both times.
Og Nu! Grønlandsk 😅
As a Norwegian I didn’t expect to understand ~90% or more of the Faroese examples being used, but between what was spoken and the written text I damn near understood everything and came to the right conclusions every time anyway. Super fun!
Færøysk er eitt norskt målføre malfkwpflsæfppsøfåspd
It's a old Norwegian coloni that Denmark stole 😅
Yeah I was surprised too when I could understand the Faroese guy; I thought he was speaking danish in parts though?
I learned Faroese and Danish over 20 years ago when I lived in Denmark and the Faroes and even though I haven’t really used either of them very much in the past 20 years I understood everything perfectly in all of the languages. It’s amazing how languages just stay dormant somewhere in my brain until I need to access them again.
As a native Dutch speaker, this was enjoyable hard work! I had never heard Faroese before. Dutch is definitively related to all those northern languages but very distant. It feels like many generations came and went since we spoke with each other last. Only a stray word here and there is still the same. All the other words drifted apart from each other. Thank you for making these great language videos! They reunite us! Keep it up.
For sure! There's a lot of cultural influence in The Netherlands/Downlands from Scandinavia but many many hundred years have gone since then.
To a Norwegian, Dutch sounds perfectly normal like Norwegian Østlandsdialect at a distance, but once you get closer it's like "wtf stop using made up words" 😂
As a Swede, I can often understand for instance billboards or ads in the Netherlands. A lot of similarities to the Scandinavian languages + English, so pretty easy to put together educated guesses.
I am German and don't understand a single word, LOL. Kinda surprising considering all of these languages are Germanic.
Dutch would be closer to Michal's Jutlantic dialect. There is like a second Germanic language group between Low Saxon, North Frisian, English and South- and West-Jutlantic.
As a native English speaker, Dutch is somewhat easy compared to the other Germanic languages. Some words are different but if we look at the written sentence we can generally understand
As a Swede, having the subtitles on while listening to Johan speak Faroese made it a lot easier to understand. I think I could almost understand all of it with the subtitles on, and it was a lot harder when I tried to just listen as Mikael mentioned in the end of the video. It was a really interesting video to be able to see how closely related our languages are!
In my western Norwegian dialect we say «Vatn» to Water!
As a native English speaker, this is interesting. I understood almost nothing, even in the written form, but when I watch these videos with Romance languages I understand a lot more despite the languages in this one being fellow Germanic languages. I get a bit more with other West Germanic languages, especially Dutch, but even then often not as much as Romance languages.
as expected, since english vocabulary is 58% romance loans, and only 26% native words and germanic loans. so it would definitely make sense to understand more from the romance videos than the germanic videos
English: a Germanic orphan raised by different foster parents, who were Romance languages the majority of the time!
More common now english is seen a distant Scandinavian or North Germanic language and not a western Germanic language, with a lot of frankish an latin influence. Also some small britonic pieces left.
I really enjoy hearing Faroese. The í/ý diphthong really makes it stick out and sound kind of funny to me (in a good way!). It sounds so much to me like an Irishman learned Icelandic (OWN) but insisted on keeping the accent 😉, with the characteristic r and all the /t͡ʃ// & /d͡ʒ/ sounds. (Also the change from Þ to H and even Ð to glides.) I suppose it's the history. A very interesting language and another fun challenge!
Many dialects in Scandinavia have that diphthong.
Am feroisk
indeed, faroese is the product of gaelic influence on a scandinavian language xD
@@BarbarooTheKangaroo It just sounds like a weird mix between northern and western Norwegian to me.
@@BlueblueblueShark Hei! Eg er norsk.
I know this video is old but as a German-Norwegian, this is fascinating to watch. It's joyful. I understand what's being said (especially in writing) and I feel connected to all these languages around my ancestry. Thanks so much for running this channel, Norbert. It's been so lovely to dive into it.
I'm curious how much can Icelandic and Faroese speakers understand each others cause the two looks more similar to themselves than to any continental Scandinavian speech (though Nynorsk is maybe exeption). Hope to see that comparison! And thx for this one
Personally: Written Icelandic about 75%, spoken Icelandic significantly less. And I even took Old Norse at university. However, I'm sure a few months in Iceland would totally remedy that.
Faroese spoken slowly 90%, spoken fast and slangy 40%. Written faroese 90-100%. That being said I also know danish so other Icelanders might understand less since faroese has a lot of danish loanwords and influence therefrom.
Very interesting video. As a Norwegian from the western parts of East-Norway I actually could understand alot more of the Faroe Island language then expected, especially in writing. It might have do to with my dialect (Valdres) wich have more in commen with Nynorsk then Bokmål, at least in spelling.
A funny thing i noticed was that the Faroe word for potato "eple", also is the word for potato in my dialect and older people here use it, while younger people tends to use "potet".
That's interesting, the French also use apple to refer to the potato - pomme de terre.
In my dialect of swedish, we often use 'pära' for potato, which is norwegian pære/english pear. But we use 'päron', the standard swedish version of the word, when referring to pear, the fruit.
In French it's the same word too. Pommes and pommes de terre. The root of "eple" is a word for any fruit not just what we call apples today. Maybe they thought of potatoes as a kind of fruit in the old days.
As a native Icelandic speaker I could understand what everyone was saying! Didn't even need to use English captions or subtitles!
Even the Danish?
@@deaganachomarunacathasaigh4344 yes because we learn danish in school, So I can speak the language ok
@@MarinoMoons Ohhhh ok
It’s great to have Faroese at last. It is the Nordic language that is the closest to Icelandic though it is probably only as close as most think. Based on how well they managed to understand him I suspect that Faroese sits right in the middle between mainland Scandinavian and Icelandic. But to correct one of the participants, Icelandic has the same double L sound as Faroese (the tɬ) and also the K pronunciation of Hv in all modern “dialects” of Icelandic though the southern dialect (when there really was one) used to pronounce it as spelled.
Færøysk ljodar sum ei blanding millom vestnorsk og nordnorsk.
R-ljudet i Färöiskan får en verkligen att tänka på någon nordnorsk dialekt :)
@@dan74695 høgnorsk brukar?
@@heinemann0074 Eg skriv landsmål sum heve litet hågnorsk i seg.
@@oskich Ja.
Loved the video! I’m Norwegian and I feel like I could understand a lot with the written text. Without it I’d say I would be able to understand a few words here and there, at best.
Btw I would love to see this kind of video with speakers of the finno-ugric family! I.e Finnish, sami, estonian and hungarian. Would be very interesting. :)
I was an exchange student (from the US) to Denmark for six months in 1993. I am all sorts of proud of myself for how much of these languages I still understood!!! 😁
Well they're all relatively grammatically tame and easy yo remember, faroese and Icelandic are the only ones who still have grammatical genders and cases
I was an exchange student in Sweden two years before and yeah, still understand a lot, even some of Faroese. Though because I lived further north in Sweden, I actually found the Swedish guy a bit difficult to understand as the Skånska accent is quite different to a more northern Swedish accent.
Would love to see more of Faroese and these lesser-known languanges.
yes me too.
hopefully he will do one gutnish and elfdalian
Faroe Islands has a population of 50000
As an Englishman who speaks Danish and Swedish, I found them all relatively easy (with the advantage of being able to read), but like Gustaf, I was initially somewhat torn between 'veska' being a Danish 'væske 'or a Swedish 'väska', but the next sentence cleared that up.
In Norway "Veske" is purse, while "Væske" is liquid. They are pronounced the same; one of the few instances the æ isn't really pronounced like æ. Just to make it more difficult LOL
@@SebHaarfagre In swedish it is "vätska" for liquid. 😛
Fascinating video! I'm a Norwegian speaking Englishman, can understand Swedish pretty well, can read Danish pretty easily (understand spoken Danish only if it's slow like Mikael said!), and have studied a little Icelandic. Faroese is a fascinating hybrid - looks like Icelandic to a degree, but sounds very different. Very obvious Celtic influences, which isn't a surprise considering the relative proximity to Scotland and Ireland.
What obvious Celtic influences did you notice?
@@explodingmonad4535 One example. English DUCK / Faroese DUNNA - Scottish Gaelic TUNNAG / Icelandic ÖND - Danish, Norwegian, Swedish AND
@@explodingmonad4535 I was thinking specifically of the phonology which sounds more like Gaelic than a Scandinavian language. Faroese looks Scandinavian but sounds Celtic.
@@Farerets That’s actually the worst example as it is disputed. Better examples are: drunnur, grúkur, tarvur, blak, and ærgi.
@@Farerets tarvur in old celtic tarb
I was waiting for this video thank you
Really really interesting. Thanks for that
As a German Native Faroese is very difficult to understand just by listening but I have to say that reading doesn't help so much then.
The other scandinavian languages are good to understand especially reading them. I can understand Norsk also by hearing because I have learned it for a time. But I think I forgot the most
It's fascinating, how Danish and Norwegian suddenly become perfectly understandable for a learner of Swedish, compared to Faroese.😄
Great video and great project :)
That was very interesting! I am an ex-librarian (found it funny it was one of the chosen word) with a B1 level in Icelandic, B2 for reading. At the beginning, I could understand maybe one word out of 10, then I started to pick up on a few phonetic differences and in the end could understand maybe one word out of 7. When I read it, I could understand a good 70%. I could also pick up on a few bits here and there in the other 3 languages, Danish being the one I understand the least.
Being someone speaking 7 germanic and latin languages, I really appreciate your channel and would love to see one with Icelandic as the main language.
Being a Dane when listening to Icelandic and Faroese if find it useful that i also speak English. Seems to really help with the pronunciation, words and the grammar. I would love to see how people from the English isles perceive Icelandic and Faroese.
As a west-coast Norwegian, I understood:
* 70 % of the Faroese,
* 100 % of the Norwegian,
* 100 % of the Danish, and
* 100 % of the Swedish
in this video. Admittedly, I played it at 50 % speed.
Faroese can sometimes be a bit similar to the dialects of Western Norway, such as pronouncing "hv-" word as "kv-" and pronouncing "ikki" (or "ikke" as I would spell it) as with a voiceless palatal fricative (or something like that) with some plosive in front of it, something like /'itçə/ (I'm not an IPA expert).
Phonetically, the thing that seems most different with any dialect in my region is that Faroese uses a kind of American-sounding R. This also seems to get retroflex in some situations, which in Norwegian is associated with East-Norwegian dialects. I'm going to guess that this aspect developed separately.
Ma nigga from the West Coast yo
As a west coast Swede, (only listening, not reading the subtitles):
40 % of Faroese
100 % Norwegian
70 % Danish
Faroese sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
@@dan74695 It's a lot like Icelandic. If I hear and I'm not listening it sounds familiar - like I should be able to understand it. Once I start listening I find that I can't really understand all that much.
Faroese has a North Norwegian r sound. Faroese just sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
I've never heard Skånska before. That was an experience.
Thank you for this interesting video . Languages and their interactions are so fascinating.
Man, I love your vids Norbert. They’re like asmr
This setup is incomplete without an Icelandic speaker. Being a B2 Icelandic speaker, I was able to vaguely grasp the general meaning of the sentences without subtitles (but then again, I know Faroese phonetics thanks to Eivør!)
Eivør and I do speak very similar dialects. In fact, we are from the same island but about 30 km away. However, our dialects are pretty different from the capital's. If you listen to the songs that Týr sing in Faroese, you will hear Heri Joensen's voice and he has more of a Tórshavn dialect (but not quite either as I believe he grew up in several places).
Faroese is closer to Norwegian. It sounds like a mix between northern and western Norwegian.
@@dan74695 I'm not personally a fan of saying that a language is closer to this one or that one or that a language is older than this one or that one but it is however true that Faroese takes a sort of middle ground with Icelandic being on one side and (West) Norwegian being on the other side.
I kind off agree that an Icelander was missing… I would have thought that was an unfair game before seeing this episode, as I considered Faroese closer to Icelandic than the Scandinavian languages… but, based on how much they understood it is probably more half way between West-Norwegian and Icelandic like Johann Peter said. I’m not sure that an average Icelandic speaker would have done any better than the rest of the crew.
@@sgjoni Færøysk er nærare norsk en folk tru. Når folk skulla samanlikna færøysk med norsk samanlika dei det næsta alltid med bokmål, sum er dansk, ikkje norsk.
The calmest conversation ever :)
Having studied a bit of Danish, I caught a bit more than I thought I would have.
Thank you very much!
I have to say I had a hard time understanding spoken Faeroese, but the text helped a lot.
As a C1 Swedish speaker (native French speaker), I guessed 4/5 right, the bull was really hard to understand. I sort of cheated and was reading the Faroese transcription throughout, though. Otherwise I think I would have understood much much less 😂
Well faroese has some words that derive from Irish and Scots (Gaelic) and Tarvur (bull) is one of those originally Tarbh in Irish.
Amazing content. Jeg elsker den skånske fyrs accent! And I was surprised how much of Faroese vocabulary was intelligible to me as a dane as well
As a Slavic language speaker, I always find Germanic languages brutal in terms of pronunciation. I like the fact that both Icelandic and Faroese remain untouched for 1000 years, there are some changes in pronunciation, but I like the fact you guys can read the old sagas, at least you can understand what is written there.
You guys have a wonderful culture and history. Iceland and the Faroese islands saved the spirit of the Vikings who lived centuries ago. I hope your culture will remain the same for the next centuries or even thousands of years as well.
I am German and don't speak any of those languages. But as I have been to all of the 4 countries and know some basic scandinavian words and expressions, I could understand quite a lot. Most of my guesses were pretty close :D Highly interesting video!
you should make a video with Faroese, Icelandic, Orkney, English, Shetlandish and North Scottish.
As a Swede I hade no trouble of understanding Faroese. The Faroese I have met before I thought they were Swedish for a short moment. As they remove their diphthongs when they speak "Danish" and the vowel sounds are very close to Swedish. Which would place them in a triangle of dialects in east Uppland, Gotland and Åland area.
hade... inte? ;)
Du hade inga problem? Det är slående måste jag säga. Jag är dansk och förstod inte ens en fjärdedel av det.
Lätt är nog lite överdrivet, men i sammanhanget var det inte svårt att lista ut vilka ord det var. Vissa meningar var helt omöjliga att förstå vid första försöket, men det blev lättare när man kunde läsa Färöiskan ovanför. Är rätt stolt över att jag lyckades förstå att tjuren blev ilsken av färgen röd på första försöket.
Färöiska är lite enklare att förstå än Isländskan i den tidigare videon. Intressant att det finns många likheter (t ex Mjölk, vatten) med uttal och ord i svenskan :-)
@@oskich
Det är vettigt.
@@oskich Precis, både ljud och text hjälper stort i detta fall. De färingar jag träffat tidigare talade "danska" (berättarröst: det var inte alls danska). Som du säger är ljudbilden väldigt lik svenskan, det som försvårar är diftongerna. Det var inte svårt för mig att lista ut vad orden var.
Arbetar mycket med folk från hela norden som talar vitt skilda dialekter. Så vissa drag finns i olika dialekter av olika språk. Vilket bara visar att det är ett spektrum av olika dialekter. Skånska har fler likheter med danska och sydliga norska dialekter än andra dialekter av svenska. Svenskan i Österbotten har fler likheter med norrländska mål som bondska än andra finlandssvenska dialekter i Nyland. osv osv. Färöiska har likheter med svenskan som saknas i danskan och norskan. Som kanske och mjölk, istället för måske och melk. För att ta två exempel.
Great stuff!
Awesome job, Johan. This was a great video. :)
Thank you, @Mina McVinnie. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
This is interesting; I come from Ostrobothnia in Finland and I can hear some resemblance to the dialects of Swedish that are spoken natively in that area.
Och nu först ser jag att min namne Johan också kan svenska XD
Finally Faroese is getting attention. That makes me so happy
Interesting about the word "vøllur" because in Swedish we have the word "vall" as a synonym to "fotbollsplan". We have, for example Vångavallen in Trelleborg and Ryavallen in Borås and both of them are football fields.
We have "voll" in Norwegian. Same meaning and usage. It's from Old Norse "vǫllr".
Vold exists in Danish, too. It usually means violence but can also mean a slope or a bank.
Yes, even in German we have this word: Feld (pronounced "felt") and you can also say "Fußballfeld" (football field).
I never thought I would live to see a danish speaker ”help” a swedish speaker understand a different language (by speaking danish)… Quite ironic! Cool video. 👍
but to be fair that danish guy doesn't speak so badly as many danish people. he doesn't pronounce only half words. :P
This was really interesting Norbert!
As a swede, some words and sentences were oddly familiar but some f it was harder to figure out than Icelandic. Really cool nonetheless
Færøysk er myket lettare fyre meg å fata en islendsk.
it sounds like he is speaking icelandic in a stockholm accent
Been waiting for this one to come out! I always love lesser-known/lesser-spoken languages being featured on this channel.
Of all the interesting features of Faroese phonology & orthography, the most intriguing to me is the shift of the sound represented by the letter eth (Ð ð), which is overwhelmingly pronounced as some sort of dental fricative in most of the languages that have it (including neighboring Icelandic), but in Faroese it usually represents /j/, /w~v/, or isn't pronounced at all. Does anyone have more info on how this sound shift took place?
Faroese definitely has its own unique "lilt" to it…it's a treat listening to it spoken casually. I echo the sentiments of those in this comment section who hear its similarity to the phonology of Irish and Irish English-the approximant /ɹ/ sound really contributes to that!
Well, the fricative ð and fricative g were both completely lost in Faroese so to avoid a hiatus we compensate by adding a glide. But the glide depends on the preceding vowel so if the vowel is a i/y or í/ý it will be a /j/ and if it's a u or ú it will be a /v~w/.
@@johanpeturdam Fascinating! Definitely results in a more etymological orthography…I've heard Faroese and Icelandic have a fair amount of mutually intelligibility in written form due to this. Takk!
Most Norwegian dialects, but not all, have had a similar shift of the medial dental fricative, and more varyingly of the the voiced velar fricative. There are glides in most places were they were for us as well, though like I mentioned, there are exceptions.
A good and cozy video, getting to practice listening to other nordic languages, it was great and many thanks you all of you good folk, may you bet sheltered from cold on many a winter and bask in the sun of summer on as many!
As a native Dutch and Frisian speaker who learned Swedish at university, I was surprised how much Faroese I could understand. It definitely helped that everything said here was spelled out, but even without the subtitles I was able to understand quite a bit more than I thought. The first word was the only one I guessed wrong :) This was also pretty much the first time I could understand Danish without any problems at all, but as Michael said, understanding Danish is much harder when it's spoken at a faster, more regular pace. Great video!
I'm a native English speaker and I've always felt a bit guilty that my first language is the one other people have to learn to talk to people across the world, particularly given that's largely the case because of my own country's historical colonial past. So I always try to learn as much as possible of the main or one of the main languages of any country I go to on holiday so I'm not just expecting the locals to speak English to me. I usually spend a few months on it beforehand. Sometimes, it works well. For example, on holiday in Prague with my 6yo son, I took him to the Lego place and had an exchange with a cashier there who was not very confident in English and she looked so relieved that I could manage enough Czech to complete our transaction and general chat. So I really do try. However, this all broke down last year when I went to Iceland for the first time. I tried. But an Icelander friend of mine told me in advance: "we really prefer you speak in English rather than halting Icelandic". It's true that Icelandic is bloody difficult for foreigners to learn to speak fluently, and I couldn't. So I swallowed my pride and spoke in English, just keeping a couple of tiny phrases like "I don't speak Icelandic" and "I'm Scottish" in my back pocket to impress the locals with. Then, one evening, I met a few lovely Icelanders in a bar. One of them had lived and worked in the Netherlands and I explained my take on not wanting to assume people would just speak English to me wherever I went and he actually looked quite stern and declared "EVERYONE should speak English." As if he were quite annoyed that not everyone had made the effort. I laughed. Anyway, why am I saying this? Because Faroese sounds like a cute version of Icelandic to my foreign ears, that's all.
Guilty??? Come on
Guilt complexes are never good
I'm a native English speaker, but I know bits of Swedish, German and Norwegian. It's interesting being able to pick out some random common words between all the languages here, usually with different spelling or slightly different pronunciation.
Also awesome Týr poster Johan, that's where I initially learned about Faroese and some of the stories and mythological stuff they sing about.
Intressant! Fist time hearing Faroese. Can't make very much sense out of it, but with subtitles on I feel a bit ashamed not nailing most. Also the mic he's using ist really helping.
I love the Faroe islands and their people, I will go visit
i adore it when the nordic circlejerk appears. i think that dansk is the most beautiful language in the whole world, and my sentiments towards that statement will never change, but on the other hand it is the fist time a lad from the Faroese islands speaks at really slow speed so me, for instance, has a chnace to enjoy it, feel it, actuallt try to bear it, understand it, thus grand great big and vast thank you Johan, you're amazing!
Norbert, we love you! Hilsen fra Sibirien.
Thank you. And I'm glad you liked it.
And your circlejerk comment made me rofl so hard. :D
I totally agree with you about the beauty of the Danish language. Especially when it's pronounced the way Michael or Jacob Matthiesen (from the Norwegian video) do it.
@Mikael Brink Frederiksen oh yeah, 've been there, heard it all :D They just dont get the melody as I umm.. call it.
@@johanpeturdam It was quite a lovely and nice experience and I'm really happy now :D
It is very interesting to hear, how Faroese has many of the same palatizations as English with its "ch" and "j" sounds.
Watching this was (again) a delight.
A big thank you to all of you lovely guys. Especially to Norbert who made this possible - wielkie dzięki! I'm still very happy I discovered your channel a couple of years ago.
Some requests:
1. Is there a possibility that we're going to see Hólmfríður Gestsdóttir in future videos? I'd love to hear her talking Icelandic again plus she's such a sweet person.
2. Could you do a video about the Jutlandic accent Michael talked about?
This would be extra interesting if a speaker of Low German were present, too. Both languages/accents exist directly next to each other geographically. Both are languages of the "common people" of that region. And the Danish / German border has shifted a couple of times during the past - so they should be kind of similar. Still, Sønder(jysk) and Low German seem to be quite different.
I'd like to find out whether I'm wrong about that.
yes I would love a show with the Jutlandish dialects
@Mikael Brink Frederiksen
Kære Mikael,
tak for dit direkte svar på min henvendelse.
Jeg føler mig beæret.
I wasn't aware that South Jutlandic is so different from West Jutlandic. Very interesting! So there must have been other/different influences on South Jutlandic. A late friend of mine once told me that it could have come from Dutch farmers who were recruited(?) by the Danish government some hundred years ago in order to settle in the area and to cultivate it.
Anyway: Now I came up with another idea for a video dear Norbert could do: West Jutlandic or South Jutlandic vs Standard Danish / Scania Swedish / Norwegian Bokmål. The latter three being relatively close to each other vs one language/dialect that is (at least kind of) new to the speakers of the other three languages.
It made me smile when you wrote that you grew up with West Jutlandic but that you don't really speak it in daily life, because that's exactly the same with Low German for me. Though I wish I could talk Low German fluently.
Varme hilsner og alt det bedste!
This conversation is fascinating. I know English and Spanish. I came here to hear Faroese and to get a glimpse of what it sounds like. Not sure exactly which language each person is speaking all the time.
Hello Norbert! I really wish that you'd consider making a video about comparing Maghrebi Arabic dialects/Languages with the Maltese language
Im from Møre og Romsdal(Norway). i didn't expect faroese to have so many similar words, grammar and even pronunciation in common with some of the dialects here.
I know right, I noticed many things in common with Faroese as well.
Being from Hardanger in western Norway I could actually understand faroese nearly 100% when spoken slowly like this. I remember going to the islands on holiday as a kid and my dad could converse pretty seamlessly with the locals by speaking the way he remembered his grandfather did. Da va trivle pao Færøyane og eg kjeme jedna att
I think it would be a good idea to discuss why for the first word nobody understood the klue with color reed.
being a Dane, the most difficult thing was understanding what the colour red did to the bull.
I think they moved too much their attention to the milk, hence they started thinking about the cows or the cattle.
Norbert! It would be super interesting if you could get a Finnish speaker, an Estonian speaker and maybe a Karelian speaker together to see if they understand each other! Thanks for the content!
It would be great to make video with someone who speaks Saami language.
Then you’d have to combine it w languages from the uralic family
I know that.
Yeah this would be interesting to see with Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian!!
@@mohamadmosa8116 Remember also that Saami is not a single language. Ecolinguist could try to pit North Saami against South Saami, against Pite Saami, against Lule Saami, etc.
Bad idea. Estonian and Finnish make a common group. Sami and Hungarian are different beasts. Call some Mansi for Hungarian, at least. And call another Sami for the first one )))
This was pretty ebin :D
I'd like to see a Uralic comparison video some time if possible
I taught myself old Norse and I read quite often. I also speak Norwegian (not natively) and I'm amazed of how much of this that I understood. It's amazing how similar all these languages are. I was able to guess all of these.
Hello! Do you think you could get an elfdalian speaker on the show? Really nice video btw, greetings from Sweden
Now that would be a lot of fun!
@@MarkRose1337 Yes holy shit. Get a Swede, Icelandic and Dutch or Afrikaans person on it.
Maybe someone speaking Närpes dialect as well.
I’m from Finland and I have visited Faroe Islands in June 2016.
Great to see Johan after all these years.
18:31 - I know he's Swedish and all, but Gustaf just _nailed_ it with that pronunciation of Danish *hvid* , even Michael smiled. 😁
He's from Skåne, so it's cheating ;-)
@@oskich Oh well, no wonder he nailed it, then! 😁
Nice greetings from 🏴
Do you speak Gaelic?
@@rafaeldebrasilia unfortunately no
This is fascinating. Im a faroese person whos spoken danish and norwegian since the age of 4 due to family. (Godan dagin, eg havi tiverri eingilskt knappabord) I find it amusing called out our apple logic to be similar to french, haha. I adore the scandinavian languages for having a lot of similarities and the same roots dating back to the viking age.
Geat to see Faroese - really interesting. Surprised to see 'tarvur' which souds similar to Wesh 'tarw' (bull). As a Welsh speaker who speaks no Scandinavian language, Norwegian seems to be the easiest one to 'hear' and pick up words which I may be familiar with from my limited German.
The Faroese word tarvur (as well as Icelandic tarfur) is actually a borrowing from Middle Irish. I know that the Scottish Gaelic modern form is tarbh and it's probably a cognate to Welsh tarw.
@@johanpeturdam Also cognate with Latin taurus, Greek ταυρος, and possibly Hebrew שור (shor, ox), where the /ʃ/ was originally /θ/. It's suspected that PIE borrowed the word from Proto-Semitic or they both borrowed it from the same other language.
But honestly you can see the similarity between tarvur and tjur or words like that. It's the same root.
@@ShishiSonson Yes, it is. Faroese has retained the Germanic root too in the form of tjórur and tjórneyt both of which are archaic ways of saying oksi.
@@johanpeturdam I was reading that in old Faroese they said tjórur more than tarvur, but I wonder where the pronunciation would be similar.
Norbert, make one on Portuguese dialects and Portuguese-based creoles ! Your job is getting wider and wider
“Dance, monkey, dance!” :)
13:00
In Russian language we have a word “Букварь” (Bukvar) which means «Alphabet book”.
Im swedish an I could mostly understand everything. Faroese was harder than norwegian and danish but still understandable.
As a native English speaker who has studied Swedish a bit, there were sentences in every language that I understood and many words in each I did not. For my first time hearing Faroese, I was surprised at how familiar it was.
I think the words chosen were a bit too easy.
Much respect to Johan for having Nightwish, Tyr and X files posters on the background 😁 Tyr came to my city Almaty, Kazakhstan for a tour back in 2018. A little bit of nostalgia :) Faroese sounds very unusual, even in comparison to Icelandic
As a (Swiss) German speaker with some knowledge of Norwegian and Swedish I understood the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish in this video almost perfectly.
For Faroese I needed the written version added on the top. With that I could understand it pretty well, but without that, I wouldn’t have understood much.
Thanks Norman and all participants! I guessed "cow, grapes, author, n/a, n/a" using my intermediate German and A1 Swedish (native English speaker)
As an English speaker not knowing any of these languages I was surprised to be able to follow the conversation at times by listening and reading. I recognized "cow, bull, ox, stud, gelding" and the words related to Latin "taurus." I also guessed "apple" before they showed it because I picked up "fruit" and "green." It was a lucky guess because I didn't think the Faroe islands would have a word for lime.
It was apple
@@TheRedleg69 Yes, I guessed it correctly because I thought of a fruit that was green.
Latin taurus? Why not Lithuanian turas? It's a common IE-feature, not separate Italic or Baltic or Slavic (and so forth).
@@vlagavulvin3847 because the commenter is an English speaker and Latin influenced the English language more than Lithuanian did (sorry)
Obviously ;)
As a native Swedish speaker I did try and just listen to the last two words and I managed to pick up enough words to piece together what word it was, but it was right on the edge. Reading is easier than listening. I enjoyed this a lot, thank you. Also thanks to the Danish gentleman for making it easier for us mere mortals. :P
So exciting! Dziękuję bardzo!
lol, faroese is actually easier for me to understand to me as a Dutchman than swedish or danish
danish seems a tad bit frisian-ish, i can regocnize some markers on paper, but the danes speak it so fast natively it is incomprehensible to outsiders mostly, they have a bit of an accent ofcourse too, but the quick tongue is the part that makes it impossible to me
norwegian seems like barely intelligable voodoo for me on paper (not as bad as icelandic though lol), but when backed with spoken word, it makes a LOT of sense, i found that especially in song, where words are way more stretched out, it can grasp way more of it than i expected.
and ofcourse, since old english has a lot of danish and norse in it, and middle english is filled to the brim with dutch and frisian and more middle/low germanic stuff, it has the overlap there that helps a tad bit
Incredible: I am Dutch too. It is beyond me how the written languages can be so difficult for you. They are so easy for me and it is for sure not jut me. All Dutch I tested for fun with, say a Norwegian newspaper, got really 80% at least and knew what it was all about. Now it will vary, but recognising some markers on paper is all??
I love these challenges:
the ones with Nordic languages - I'm danish
the ones where German is involved - I've German as a second language
the one with English in different versions
So keep them coming please, it's such fun.
Yes. I agree. It is really entertaining. DR, SVT and NRK should make some shows like this together.
@@Pracedru Ja, det ville være så oplagt - især hvor danskere og svenskere kan finde på at snakke engelsk med hinanden GRRRRRRH
Men dansk TV har jo efterhånden det princip at kun keendisser må medvirke i udsendelser, hvor man udfordrer hinandens viden - eller mangel på samme :-((( .
You should do the same video with people from different places along the coast of Norway (not east) where the dialects are more similar to old norse. That would be so interesting, because you would recognize the same words i.e «Hvussu hevur tú tað» Would be very simililar to «Koss he du det?» I think there is a lot of links there 😊
Interesting, Icelandic is probably the language most related to Faroese, but still different enough, that as an Icelander, I had to listen really closely to understand what Johan was saying. Faroese also seems to mix in some Danish, Swedish, or simply Scandinavian words.
That was fun to hear. As a Swedish person I found it to be much easier to understand than Icelandic(at least when he spoke slowly I guess)
8:22 come on, ‘okse’ are probably the most use work for that in Danish. In works like ‘oksekød’ especially, ‘okse’ were mainly used when they back in the days were used to pull a plow or something like that.
Something about this conversation between the other Scandinavian languages, it feels similar, like elements of it I understand, even if the pronunciation isn’t what I’m used to.
TARAVUR, first word. In English, Bull, but in Scottish Gaelic spellt TARBH, but pronounced TARAVF !
(BH is our way of making the V sound)
I watch all these videos with the video scrolled up a bit, so that the text isn't visible. Reading is often far too easy. Listening is the real challenge! This was extremely easy in some parts, and unintelligible in others! I used to work with a Faeroese woman in the early 00s. This brought back memories.
That was really fun- it was my first time hearing and encountering Faroese! Without reading the text, it was a bit hard to understand but with reading and my little knowledge of Scandinavian languages, I understood a lot and could guess the most of the words. Had a bit of difficulties with the football field at first. (I speak a decent Danish, understand a lot and speak a little Norwegian, understand some Swedish (based on DK and NO) and learn+ understand a bit Icelandic. That helped! 😅)
I'm Swedish but also fluent in Danish and understood basically every word. Super interesting video!
4 scandinavians being stone cold and way too serious is always a pleasure to watch 😁
Smiling is a waste of energy.
Reminded a little of Gotlandish dialect, with the diphthongs. Nice video.