ONCE AGAIN a mini-thread developed in my comments on dialect, this time on the Scandinavian family. I said that Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can chat "comfortably"; several people replied no, they can't, and specifically, that the others can't understand Danish very well. I happen to speak some Danish (my wife is from Copenhagen) and so have a small-n experience with this: I've had exactly one conversation with a Swede, me speaking Danish and her speaking Swedish, and we understood each other quite well. I've seen my wife speak Danish with a Swede and another time with a Norwegian, once again, with little apparent trouble. Perhaps we understood them better than they understood us, and they were just being nice, but it didn't seem that way. Against the mutual-comprehension argument, I've also seen my wife and a friend struggle a bit to communicate in southern Sweden, and consequently switch to English.

Or, here's a take from Norway, suggesting that Danish is incomprehensible even between Danes:

John Cowan has done the service of collecting folk explanations of how languages are "essentially" other languages under this or that condition—"English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls," and the like. The Danish explanations that ring familiar to me are "Danish is essentially Norwegian (or Swedish) spoken while eating a hot potato," and "Danish is essentially Swedish after running over all consonants that didn't get out of the way fast enough." If you have medium-thick skin, click through to see how your favourite language is described "essentially" in terms of another under less-than-optimal conditions.

(Incidentally, the complicated Danish number system mentioned in the video, which really is complicated, is described here.)