[…] For all the jokes and misunderstandings, Swedes, Danes and Norwegians have made a good go of the “neighbour languages” business. Most don’t find the time to study each other’s languages in much detail but they do their best anyway, out of a sense of regional solidarity. (Politiken’s phrasebook also includes the Swedish phrase for: “Why are you answering in English? We are Scandinavians, after all.”) It helps that the three countries in question are of roughly equal size and weight: Sweden the biggest and most populous, Norway the richest, Denmark the former colonial heavyweight and current cultural darling. No one lords it over anyone else.

Many other groups could be considered “neighbour languages” on pure linguistic terms, a category that avoids the choice between “foreign languages” and “dialects” while recognising the closeness at hand. But politics often gets in the way. When one language is bigger or more prestigious than the other, the temptation of the bigger one’s speakers to put the smaller language on a distinctly lower pedestal is hard to resist. Johnson’s most recent column, on Catalan and Spanish, triggered hundreds of anguished comments, in a political situation that is currently frustrating just about everybody. Similar frustrations can be found on the South Slavic continuum running across most of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Bulgaria, where nationalist tensions make the similarity (and often near-identity) of the languages a source of friction rather than friendship. More.

See: Johnson | The Economist

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