The easiest and the hardest Scandinavian languages

Vocabulary comparison

The vocabulary cards below let you compare some basic vocabulary across Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.

You can navigate between cards using the left and right arrows buttons, and a card counter indicates the index of the current card.

friend
Swedish:
vän
Danish:
ven
Norwegian:
venn
Icelandic:
vinur
love
Swedish:
kärlek
Danish:
kærlighed
Norwegian:
kjærlighet
Icelandic:
ást
city
Swedish:
stad
Danish:
by
Norwegian:
by
Icelandic:
borg
woman
Swedish:
kvinna
Danish:
kvinde
Norwegian:
kvinne
Icelandic:
kona
family
Swedish:
familj
Danish:
familie
Norwegian:
familie
Icelandic:
fjölskylda
child
Swedish:
barn
Danish:
barn
Norwegian:
barn
Icelandic:
barn
ocean
Swedish:
hav
Danish:
hav
Norwegian:
hav
Icelandic:
haf
boat
Swedish:
båt
Danish:
båd
Norwegian:
båt
Icelandic:
bátur
street
Swedish:
gata
Danish:
gade
Norwegian:
gate
Icelandic:
gata
river
Swedish:
flod
Danish:
flod
Norwegian:
elv
Icelandic:
á
sun
Swedish:
sol
Danish:
sol
Norwegian:
sol
Icelandic:
sól
moon
Swedish:
måne
Danish:
måne
Norwegian:
måne
Icelandic:
tungl
snow
Swedish:
snö
Danish:
sne
Norwegian:
snø
Icelandic:
snjór
language
Swedish:
språk
Danish:
sprog
Norwegian:
språk
Icelandic:
tungumál
email
Swedish:
e-post
Danish:
e-mail
Norwegian:
e-post
Icelandic:
tölvupóstur
computer
Swedish:
dator
Danish:
computer
Norwegian:
datamaskin
Icelandic:
tölva
television
Swedish:
tv
Danish:
fjernsyn
Norwegian:
fjernsyn
Icelandic:
sjónvarp
teacher
Swedish:
lärare
Danish:
lærer
Norwegian:
lærer
Icelandic:
kennari
mobile phone
Swedish:
mobiltelefon
Danish:
mobiltelefon
Norwegian:
mobiltelefon
Icelandic:
farsími
software
Swedish:
mjukvara
Danish:
software
Norwegian:
programvare
Icelandic:
hugbúnaður
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The easiest and the hardest Scandinavian languages

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 reasons why Icelandic is the hardest Scandinavian language

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.

The reasons Norwegian is the easiest Scandinavian language

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.

Additional ressources

We have created lists of the thousand most common words for each of the four major Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.