Is Danish similar to Polish or Czech?

Question

or another language or both

Answer 1

Danish is very similar, especially in written form, to the other Scandinavian languages Norwegian and Swedish and to a far lesser degree Icelandic. Danish is a Germanic language, like English, German, Dutch, and the four languages already mentioned. It has very few features in common with Polish or Czech.



Although Polish orthography is quite different from Czech or Slovak, there are many similarities to those languages. Polish is a Slavic language, like Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian and the ones already mentioned.

Answer 2

Danish, together with the other Scandinavian languages, is Germanic, whereas the other two are Slav languages. They are therefore members of quite different language groups. A native speaker of Danish would be able to understand quite a lot of Norwegian, but very little Czech. A Polish speaker would get the drift of Russian, but not Danish. BUT...



Nonetheless, they are both members of the same language family, the Indo-European languages, which, as well as the Germanic and Slav languages would also include, for example, the Romance (Latin-based) languages, Persian and Hindi. So at the most basic level, there are certainly some similarities among all three of the languages you mention. They are more like each other than any of them is like (say) Hebrew, Basque or Japanese.

Answer 3

Danish is an entirely different language from Polish and Czech.



Danish, Norwegian and Swedish is mutually intelligible.



German is spoken widely in Denmark.

Answer 4

Slavic languages are closest to the Baltic ones (Latvian, Lithuanian and extinct Old Prussian). Neither are undoubtedly almost Germanic ones. There's a tentative Germano-Balto-Slavic grouping that's going plenty further once more in time (predating satemization, for instance, considering that the Baltic and Slavic branches are each and every satem whilst Germanic is centum) nonetheless it's only a hypothesis. Generally, vocabulary's an unreliable marker of inter-language-family closeness. You can undoubtedly no longer tell if it wasn't shared by way of contact, and that includes now not exceptional mutual borrowings however in addition a predilection to utilize cognates. Slavs and Teutons certainly have a (pre-)old beyond of living detail by way of detail. P.S. @Mark, it's historical-original to take into account of centum and satem as two "proto-companies" that went on to split further. Satemization was a cross-group process that spread by way of contact one day after Proto-IE had already ceased to be a single language. Nothing have got to theoretically bar a satem group an identical to Balto-Slavic from being a bigger relative of a centum group an identical to Germanic, than of one other satem group an identical to Indo-Iranian.