Re:Sweden will vote against the copyright deal/article 13
by anon4242 on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @05:28PM
(#19619119)
> linguistically homogeneous group
I beg to differ. Finnish is as far removed from Swedish and Danish as Hungarian. Italian is probably closer to either than each other. Swedish and Danish are (at least on reading level) mutually intelligible.
Re:Sweden will vote against the copyright deal/article 13
by ahje on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @06:03PM
(#19619423)
There are about 20 million speakers of Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Swedish (including native Swedish-speakers in Finland). If we added the Finnish-speaking population to the mix we'd end up with a population of over 25 million -- not 20.
That being said, I'd say Finns are quite close to the other Nordic countries culturally, even though there is a clear language barrier.
For those who don't know what this is about, Finnish and Sami aren't Indo-European languages like the other Nordic languages are, while Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are closely related and somewhat mutually intelligible.
Of course, an expert conspiracy theorist will note that the more or less culturally and linguistically homogeneous group of about twenty million people living in the north of Europe are already split into a vote-buffing four countries ...