Soon after I began my PhD program at the University of Minnesota, while I was a TA in the 4-skills course in Norwegian, I began an informal discussion with a native Norwegian political science professor, who was interested in funding course development for the Scandinavian Studies Department. He liked the idea of this kind of reading course, and wrote my fellow graduate student, Ian Ritchie and me into a grant to develop and teach a course. Ian (who had lived in both Sweden and Denmark) and I spent two summers outlining and writing essentially a comparative grammar (in the old sense of descriptions of parts of speech, and syntax) of the three languages. We wrote and then typed (using a good old IBM Selectric typewriter) our book, then called "The Scandinavian Languages: A Grammar and Reader," the first summer, taught the course during two quarters in 1980-81.

The following summer, we found 10 printed articles in each language, trying to cover a wide variety of fields within the social science and humanities. We glossed each word in the 30 articles (and unfortunately opened the window as we had our lexical slips laid out on a desk), and typed up a glossary (or three glossaries). We taught the same course the next year. Our book still serves as an inspiration to me, and much of the summaries of the grammar is modified from that book, for which we unfortunately could never find a publisher. Several of our colleagues asked for copies of the book and taught similar courses at their institutions. Our early students were in fields like library science, film, history, and German. My general impression is that during one quarter students learned to read in all 3 languages at least as well as they would have learned to read in a single language in a whole year. In other words, I thought the students gained useful access to primary material in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

The course was taught several times at Minnesota, but essentially lay dormant for 15 or 20 years. I most recently taught the course in a tradition face-to-face setting in 1999, where half of the students were advanced undergraduates in one of the three languages, and the other half were a mixture of graduate and undergrads in German who were looking to expand their understanding of Germanic languages.

I owe much of my thinking about more global (and less grammatical) approaches to reading to that class, and appreciated their feedback on what they were doing and how well they were progressing. At that point, the accessibility of the world wide web and electronic versions of many texts eased the burden of finding and reproducing authentic uses of the languages. During the early parts of 2001, I offered a free, pilot (no-credit) course on reading Norwegian online. Of the hundreds of inquires, only a handful of students enrolled and actively participated. This course is an outgrowth of all my previous courses and attempts to teach such a curriculum, and of course I thank my colleagues and former students who have made valuable suggestions.

While these next few paragraphs are not meant to be at all comprehensive -- one would need a special course on the topic to do it justice --- I hope to sketch the broad outline so the current relationship among the languages can be placed in its historical perspective.
The Scandinavian Languages (here I am using the term to include modern Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, as well as Icelandic and Faroese, and all their dialects --- and I am excluding Finnish because it is not genetically related to the others) belong to the vast Indo-European (IE) family of languages, which included languages as diverse as Sanskrit and Welsh. A large branch of the family is the Germanic Group, which split off from the parent IE family about 4,000 years ago (of course this is a rough estimate). The Germanic Group itself began splitting up into smaller language groups about 2,000 years ago. The current theory (and there is always dispute) suggests at first a tripartite split into East Germanic, West Germanic and North Germanic. Of the first (East), only Gothic is known, and that language is recorded primarily in a fourth century BCE translation of the New Testament. West Germanic is represented by the present-day languages of German, Yiddish, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian and English. The third subgroup of Germanic, North Germanic, developed into the Scandinavian languages. Traditionally this group is again subdivided into East Scandinavian and West Scandinavian. Old Swedish (including Old Gutnish) and Old Danish comprised the East Scandinavian group; Icelandic and Norwegian the major West Scandinavian languages. Explorers from Iceland and Norway carried their language to new settlements, and languages such as Norn (spoken in Northern Scotland, the Orkneys, and Shetland Islands) and Faroese represent this early Norse expansion. While Norn has become extinct, the inhabitants of the Faroe Islands in the North Sea continue to speak Faroese.
Swedish and Danish essentially developed along separate lines, and even though they are part of the East Scandinavian group, both their orthographies and grammar are substantially different. The southernmost province of Sweden, Skĺne, was part of the Danish kingdom, and thus the pronunciation of Swedish in Southern Sweden has many Danish traits, but the orthography and standard grammar conform to the standards of Swedish.
While Norwegian started out as a West Scandinavian language, several historic (and contemporary social factors) give it many East Scandinavian traits, so the classification is at best problematic. After the Black Death decimated Norway in 1350, the administrative and cultural centers were shifted to Denmark, which had been an equal partner in a joint kingdom (Sweden left the union in 1525). The peasantsŐ spoken language was relatively unaffected by this shift southward, but Norwegian as a written language died out for all practical purposes in the 15th century. Danish was the written language of the church, state, and the arts in Norway for the next 400 years. After gaining its independence from Denmark in 1814, leaders in Norway sought to establish a written "Norwegian language" separate from the Danish which poorly matched their spoken language.
The complicated situation in Norway today stems from two basic philosophies concerning the best way to establish a "Norwegian" language. A moderate plan, urging the evolution of the spelling system towards Norwegian pronunciation led to one standard language. A more revolutionary approach was suggested by the linguist Ivar Aasen, who maintained that a thoroughgoing linguistic revolution was required. He constructed a language, based on his knowledge of the contemporary Norwegian dialects (mostly from Western Norway, where he lived and traveled extensively gathering evidence) and also on Old Norwegian / Old Icelandic, which he had studied. The new language, spoken by nobody, was supposed to be a written standard relatively close to the speech of Norwegians throughout the country. Both languages have, in fact, survived, and are by law on an equal footing in all official state documents, including postal, (e.g., stamps have either the name "Norge" or "Noreg" on them), legislative, broadcast. Schools books (at least up through secondary school are mandated to be published in both languages.
The more concervative language, maintaining more Danish elements, was originally called Rigsmaal (Language of the realm) while the newly created language was known as Landsmaal (ambiguously language of the nation or the rural areas). Both languages now are known by other names. Rigsmaal (later riksmål), is now officially called bokmål (literally 'Book Language') while Landsmaal is now called nynorsk (New Norwegian).
Bokmål is chosen my more than 80% of the parents of school children to be the first language of instruction, but all students eventually learn to read (and write essays) in both standard languages. Forms allowed in one language are frequently allowed as optional forms in the other, and there is occasionally talk of merging the two (the usual term is samnorsk 'Joint Norwegian.'
Nynorsk can be said to enjoying a period of renewed interest, mostly among university students and teachers, and radical politicians. The language has always fared well as a poetic medium, with its roots more intimately tied to the Norwegian rural soul.
This course and the grammar summaries will concentrate for the most part on bokmĺl, since most scholarly writing is done in that form, and the forms are more closely related to Danish. An advanced reader, however, will have little difficulty reading nynorsk, once a firm ground has been established in bokmĺl. I will be happy to share a list of the major differences between bokmål and nynorsk later in the course.
Norwegians speak their local or regional dialects, but must select either bokmål or nynorsk to write in. The degree of similarity between their speech and the standard written form they chose varies considerably.
Inter-Nordic communication has been called Ňsemi-communication." At least among speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish people can talk to each other and be understood in addition to use of commonly borrowed loan words from other languages, mean that the absolute basic structures are similar. This is a broadly stated summary:
Icelanders and Faroese generally are not understood by 'mainland' Scandinavians without resorting to another language. (Since Danish was the language of the dominant culture for so many years, Danish is taught in schools, but as is often the case with colonizers' languages, there is some resentment. English comes in handy for these communications.

Spoken Swedish and Spoken Norwegian (especially East Norwegian, the city-language around Oslo) are mutually intelligible to a very high degree (if I had to guess unscientifically, I'd say that 90% of what is said is understood without a huge production). The mutual comprehensibility is screwed, so that Norwegians seem to understand Swedish better than vice versa. (I could but won't speculate as to the reasons here.) There are some well-known lexical differences that usually end up in jokes -- a Swede seeking fun in Oslo jumps into a cab and asks the driver to take him a to 'rolig' place. The cab driver drives him to the cemetery, much to the Swedes amusement. 'Rolig' or 'roligt' in Swedish mean fun, lively, entertaining. In Norwegian it means simply 'quiet' or 'peaceful.'

If one starts walking from Bergen on Norway's west coast towards the east, there would be no clear time when the dialects would clearly proclaim "this is Swedish, but 2 miles to the west, it was Norwegian." (The political border would separate the particular standard languages taught in school, but the people living on either side of the border would have almost identical speech patterns. (G.B. Shaw is often quoted -- but might not have said it that --- the definition of a language is a dialect with an army. One can argue about whether Swedish and Norwegian are dialects of some language, or languages themselves. And how Danish fits in would merely complcate the argument. But we can take advantage of the similarities by learning to read all three with reduced effort.) Some very common words have different forms in the two languages. But one probably would get used to the difference and hardly pay attention to it. For example, Danish and Norwegian spell the preposition 'for' while Swedish spells it 'för'. Danish and Norwegian use 'og' for "and" while Swedish spells it 'och.'

The sound system of Danish is quite different form Swedish or Norwegian. For example (and we don't really have to worry about how words are pronounced in this course) the Norwegian and Swedish vowels /u/ and /o/ are considerably higher and farther forward in the mouth than the equivalent Danish vowels. (The Norwegian and Swedish vowels are considered the forms that innovated, while the Danish remains closer to the standard European pronunciation.) Foreigners have considerable difficulty with /o/ and /u/ in the Norwegian and Swedish. Another salient difference is that the northern two languages have a tonal system for each word. There are two distinct tones (called tonemes) in Norwegian and Swedish, and for some pairs of words, the tone is the only distinguishing feature. (The actual contour of the sounds differs by region, but the existence of them is regular in those two languages.) Danish, on the other hand does not use tones to differentiate words, but has developed a glottal stop or catch (called střd in Danish). Words with střd generally correspond to words with tone 1 in Swedish and Norwegian. Neither the tone nor the stød is represented in the spelling, so it is being mentioned here as evidence that Swedes and Norwegians communicate orally with less trouble than Danes and either of the Northern Scandinavian language speakers.
For a very readable introduction to the current status and a bit of the history of the languages (also including the non-Scandinavian languages spoken in the Nordic region -- Finnish, Sami, Greenlandic Eskimoic, and the language(s) of the Gypsies-- see 'The Nordic Languages: Their status and interrelations' by Lars S. Vikør, published by Novus Press for the Nordic Language Secretariat, in 1993.