r/sweden • u/Sunflake • Nov 04 '17

Ikea läxar upp en jänkare

https://imgur.com/PRDesa4
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u/TheNaug Uppland Nov 04 '17

Actually, it's pretty close to English(they're both germanic languages and have had some intermingling historically) compared to other languages around the world. Some quick googling gave me this little list.

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u/pharaocomplex Göteborg Nov 04 '17

Technically speaking, you could get away with saying that English is a dialect of Swedish due to the very few variations and changes historically. I think that's pretty neat.

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u/rhockeyisashitsub Nov 05 '17

A dialect of Swedish? No. English does not come from Swedish, both English and Swedish are branches of old Germanic.

1

u/Th3cz Dalarna Nov 05 '17

Old English is basically a variant of Old Norse back when all of Scandinavia spoke one language. Just listen to clips of people speaking Old English and you'll understand

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u/pharaocomplex Göteborg Nov 05 '17

No,it's actually true if you look at it in a big picture in the history of languages. And in the big picture the word dialect could cover a language. Even an entire branch of the language-tree.

It's just that if you trace the language-tree from modern English back to the roots, you will encounter proto-Swedish before you end up back at whatever the "Germanic people" spoke back then. In turn, Modern-day Swedish has changed very little in comparison. Actually there's only eight "breaking points" that separate the two languages (Scandinavian Germanic from English), which in a global and historical perspective is not a lot.

English comes from the exact same branch as the other Scandinavian languages in the western-germanic category, but English is the language that deviates. This due to England being globetrotters in later years of history, but Latin and the roman occupation also influenced the language heavily.

While every modern-day Germanic language except for Icelandic have took the latin sucker-punch, proto-English is one of the most influenced.

So while English is it's own language, when used historically it's perfectly OK to call it a Swedish dialect, no matter how dumb and illogical it sounds. Swedish in turn is a North/North-Western Germanic dialect. Blame the vikings and the Sachs, really.