00:00Denmark and Norway have different official languages. Kind of. Because both languages
00:05are part of the North Germanic language family, they're closely related enough to be mutually intelligible.
00:10To some extent, especially in writing, and especially for Buk Mol, one of Norwegian's
00:15two main written varieties. For centuries, Norway was ruled by a Danish-speaking elite, while
00:20part of the Union of Denmark-Norway, which was not an equal partnership, but dominated by
00:25Denmark. After the end of the Union, Buk Mol was to a large extent adapted from Danish.
00:30But despite Buk Mol and Danish being very similar in writing, the pronunciation of Norwe-
00:35and Danish is quite different, making them much less mutually intelligible in speech.
00:40In each country, the dominant ethnicity, Danish and Norwegian respectively, make up the vast
00:45majority of the population, but there are different minority groups in either country,
00:49which reflects their geography.
00:50For Denmark, which borders Germany to the south, the most historically important is the German
00:55minority of the Northern Schleswig area. Schleswig, or Schleswig, was his
01:00historically a duchy controlled by Denmark, and it had inhabitants who spoke Danish,
01:04Frisian, and Lo-
01:05German. After a war in 1864, Denmark lost all of the territory to Austria.
01:10Austria and Prussia, but after the First World War, it became divided between Denmark and Germany.
01:15Today, the German-speaking population of Northern Schleswig is small, about 15,000 people.
01:20But German is recognized as a minority language in Denmark.
01:23In Norway, almost half a-
01:25of which lies above the Arctic Circle, an important historic minority is the Sami people, a group
01:30of
01:30semi-nomadic peoples who traditionally engaged in reindeer herding. The Sami people live across
01:35the high Arctic nations of Northern Europe, including Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The Sami people-
01:40speak Sami languages, a group of related languages in the Uralic language family, meaning the-
01:45related to Finnish.
01:46Nation, Conversďż˝
02:00West
02:05East
02:08East
02:12East
02:15East
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