The Scandinavian languages evolved from Old Norse, the ancient language of the Vikings. This is similar to how all the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.) evolved from Latin.
But unlike the Romance languages, which are all relatively easy to learn, the Scandinavian languages differ more in their difficulty levels.
The easiest Scandinavian language is Norwegian; the hardest is Icelandic.
In case you were wondering, Finnish is not a Scandinavian language. That is because Finland is not a Scandinavian country —it is a Nordic country, though.
Finnish belongs to a completely different language family: it is a Uralic language (and so are Estonian and Hungarian).
The term “Scandinavian languages” is a synonym for “North Germanic languages.” It refers to a branch of the Germanic language family (English belongs to that family). Germanic languages are part of the broader Indo-European language family.
Finnish and the other Uralic languages are not Germanic languages; they are not even part of the Indo-European language family.
Scandinavian languages include Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese —as well as a few extinct languages like Greenlandic Norse, which we will not consider in this language comparison.
| Scandinavian Language | Approximate Number of Speakers |
|---|---|
| Swedish | 10 million |
| Danish | 6 million |
| Norwegian | 4 million |
| Icelandic | 300 thousand |
| Faroese | 70 thousand |
When English speakers decide to study a Scandinavian language, they often select one of the more widely spoken languages in that family (Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian).
Some also choose to learn Icelandic, despite the fewer native speakers, because Iceland —with its glaciers, geysers, volcanic eruptions, and unique culture— fascinates many language learners.
Very few English speakers study Faroese because of the very limited number of people who speak this language and also because of the limited amount of learning resources available for Faroese.
Because this comparison of the easiest and hardest Scandinavian languages is geared towards those considering learning a Scandinavian language, we will limit our focus to the most spoken ones (while including Icelandic).
The Vikings sailed great distances. They reached the coast of North America nearly five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Around the year 1000 CE, a Norse explorer named Leif Eriksson sailed to North America.
About a hundred years earlier, in 874, Iceland was settled by Ingólfur Arnarson, a Norseman who came from a city that is today part of Norway.
The first inhabitants of Iceland spoke Old Norse. Surprisingly, the language used in Iceland did not change that much during the millennium that followed.
The geographical isolation of Iceland sheltered the Icelandic language from the influence of other languages.
Icelanders today can still read sagas that were written in the 11th century. Good luck to any English speaker who attempts to read epic Old English poems like Beowulf, which date from around the same period.
While Icelandic has remained close to the Old Norse language of the Vikings, other Scandinavian languages like Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian have changed a lot during the same time period.
Icelandic has kept many of the complicated grammatical features that existed in Old Norse, whereas most other Scandinavian languages have simplified them to a great extent.
You could write an entire article about the difficulty of learning Icelandic. And, in fact, we have — it’s here.
There is a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibility between Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. This means that a speaker from one of these languages can generally, to a large extent, understand speakers from the other two.
The standard forms of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have only two grammatical genders; common and neutral, while Icelandic has three; masculine, feminine, and neutral. Icelandic has four grammatical cases for nouns, while the others have between one and two.
Icelandic also has complicated declensions for nouns (often irregular) based on those cases and genders, and different forms of conjugation for verbs, based on tenses, person, and number. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, meanwhile, have simple declensions for nouns and no conjugations of verbs for person and number.
Although Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are similar languages, they do not present exactly the same level of difficulty to an English speaker learning them.
It is its rather complicated pronunciation that prevents Danish from being the easiest Scandinavian language.
Basically, Norwegian is the easiest Scandinavian language (for English speakers to learn), but Swedish is a close second.
We have two articles discussing the easier and the harder aspects of learning Norwegian and Swedish.
We have created lists of the thousand most common words for each of the four major Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.