Linguistically speaking, how close is Norwegian to Swedish?

Question

Linguistically speaking, how close is Norwegian to Swedish?

Answer 1

They are pretty close, I think even to a point of being dialects of eachother though Danish is closer to Norwegian still.  I can speak basic-intermediate Swedish, and with what I know, I can pretty much make out almost the same in Norwegian, I am sorry I am not much help :/.  Scandinavian Languages except for Finnish are all part of the North Germanic Language family....

Answer 2

They are quite close, if you speak Swedish, you understand Norwegian and vice versa. Some words are quite alike, also the grammar is pretty similar. I´ts much harder for a Norwegian or Swede to understand Danish. If you read Danish you might understand some words, but the spoken Danish is very hard to understand, so Danish is not more similar to Norwegian than Swedish, on the contrary!

Answer 3

Close. Pretty close although Danish is more understandable to a Swede than I understand Norwegian.  The previous answerer gave you the opposite answer and I think it depends on where in Sweden you come from. Southern parts of Sweden tend to understand Danish a lot more than the rest of the country.

Answer 4

They are very close.   However, it depends on many factors.

There is no "Norwegian" language, or should I say there are 2 official Norwegian languages.   There is Bokmal, which is the langauge of Oslo and the establishment, and there is Nynorsk, which is the official language of the west coast and used in literature and poetry.   There are also several local dialects that are very different from one another.

If you are talking about Bokmal, then in the written form, it is very similar to Danish, and less so with Swedish.  In spoken form, Bokmal is actually closer to Swedish than Danish.

Nynorsk is much farther away from both Swedish and Danish.  In fact, Bokmal is closer to Swedish and Danish than it is to Nynorsk.  

Nynorsk has much in common with the various dialects found

up and down the west coast of Norway.  There are some aspects of Icelandic and Faroese found in Nynorsk.  

Norway has a very complex language situation compared with Denmark and Sweden where there is relative uniformity in language and dialect.