How long percent Danish people can understand these languages?

🇬🇧＆🇺🇸English
🇩🇪German
🇳🇱Dutch
🇸🇪Swedish

See a translation

close to 90% of Danes speak/understand English. With the exceptions being mostly the older generation.

Statistics say that only around 0.04% of Danes speak German. But 47% of us pick it as a third language in school. So most of us are probably at my level of understanding, which is that we can recognize and understand a lot of words and such, so understanding German is much easier than speaking it. Not fluent, but understanding it is manageable.

I can’t find any numbers on Dutch. But to an ordinary dane, Dutch isn’t intelligible. Written, we might recognize a few words. But most Danes won’t understand Dutch.

Swedish and Norwegian are very similar to Danish. Most Danes, if spoken to slowly, can understand Swedish. It is a lot easier reading Swedish though.
Also the level of intelligibility will decrease the further west in the country you go. But if spoken in a slow way, almost all Danes will be able to mostly understand Swedish.


I couldn’t find numbers on most of these things as it varies strongly from area to area in the country. But I hope this helps a little at least :)