Language for Its Own Sake

he Mainland Scandinavian languages, i.e. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are so closely related that the speakers often use their own language when communicating with each other (so-called semi-communication, Haugen 1966). However, communication is not perfect and sometimes fails. Previous investigations (Maurud 1976, Bø 1978, Börestam 1987, Delsing & Åkesson 2005) aimed at getting a general impression of how well Scandinavians understand each other. It appeared that mutual intelligibility is highest between Norwegians and Swedes, whereas Danish is relatively hard to understand, especially for Swedish-speaking subjects (Perridon 2000).1 The investigations just mentioned measured the overall intelligibility2 of complete texts by means of open questions. Little attention was paid to the linguistic phenomena that can explain the differences in the level of understanding between the three languages. In complete texts, all linguistic levels (segmental, supra-segmental, lexical, morphological, syntactic) are combined and mixed, so that it is hard to assess the effect of separate linguistic phenomena. In the present article, we restrict the investigation of