Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a region in Europe consisting of three countries:

The culture of these countries are very close and the languages mutually intelligible. The difference between (particularly written) Danish and Norwegian language are not much bigger than the difference between English and American English, even though Swedish is slightly different. The Scandinavian languages are North Germanic, strongly influenced by Low Saxon (Ancient German).

The name Scandinavia come from the Skandage body of water sandwiched between Norway, Sweden, and Jutland. ---- Note: The term the Nordic countries has a different meaning, and includes the Scandinavian countries plus Finland and Iceland. The Finno-Ugric language of Finland is entirely unrelated with Scandinavian language, although most people in Finland also speak Swedish, as Finland formerly was part of the Swedish kingdom (until 1809). The language of Iceland is actually Old Norse (spoken in Scandinavia 1000 years ago and also related to Old English). Iceland was a Norwegian and then Danish colony until 1944.

This text of this article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0. It has been slightly modified to fit the general design of this website. The authors of this document are Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel, Evan Prodromou and the following WikiTravel users: Dhum_Dhum, Huttite, Nickpest, Timo_Laine, Jonboy. The original version of this article can be seen at http://wikitravel.org/en/Scandinavia.