"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

+ a million if I could. One of my favorite quotes. It's from Max Weinreich, right? "A sprakh iz a dialekt mit an Armee un Flot"

Except that for Arabic "dialects", the presence of Armies and Navies hasn't turned any of these dialects to a language.

On the other hands, Kurds have their language(s?) despite not having an army or a navy.

Treating it as the same language would be a stretch.

As a Swede, especially spoken Danish is completely unitelligible.

Having worked with Norwegians the last few years, I have learned to understand spoken Norwegian most of the time. There is however a lot of variation i dialects, making some of them easy to umderstand, while others are almost as bad as Danes.

In adition to dialects, there are enough unique words and idioms in each language to make especially written norwegian cryptic.

There are also a lot of gotchas where the same words have different meaning. A fun example is the expression "rar tös" meaning "sweet little girl" in Swedish, but "weird slut" in Norwegian.

Having lived abroad for a large portion of my life: I've seen lots of Scandinavians be able to communicate in some combination of their languages, be it Danes/Norwegians and Norwegians/Swedes. Fins got by by all knowing Swedish, so they all got by mostly in the middle... Interesting to always see them find a middle ground, where us Dutch people always switch to English, the minute someone doesn't know Dutch.

Sounds like a great idea for a band name.