Mutually intelligible in the context of "Norwegian language"

This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.

All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian, and English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu, and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.

Mandarin (/ˈmændərɪn/ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas.

Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin varieties are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; lit. 'northern speech').

Serbo-Croatian, also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.

South Slavic languages historically formed a dialect continuum. The region's turbulent history, particularly due to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, led to a complex dialectal and religious mosaic. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread supradialect in the western Balkans, encroaching westward into the area previously dominated by Chakavian and Kajkavian. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural spheres, although large portions of these populations lived side by side under foreign rule. During that period, the language was referred to by various names, such as "Slavic" in general, or "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" in particular. In a classicizing manner, it was also referred to as "Illyrian".

Norman or Norman French (Normaund, French: Normand [nɔʁmɑ̃] , Guernésiais: Normand, Jèrriais: Nouormand) is a langue d'oïl spoken in the historical and cultural region of Normandy.

The name "Norman French" is sometimes also used to describe the administrative languages of Anglo-Norman and Law French used in England. For the most part, the written forms of Norman and modern French are mutually intelligible. The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon was the first to distinguish it along with other dialects such as Picard and Bourguignon.

Swedish (endonym: svenska [ˈsvɛ̂nːska] ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the fourth most spoken Germanic language, and the first among its type in the Nordic countries overall.

Swedish, like the other Nordic languages, is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker.

There are many widely varying names of Germany in different languages, more so than for any other European nation. For example:

• the German language endonym is Deutschland, from the Old High German diutisc, meaning "of the people";
• the French exonym is Allemagne, from the name of the Alamanni tribe;
• in Italian it is Germania, from the Latin Germania, although the German people are called tedeschi, which is cognate with German Deutsch;
• in Polish it is Niemcy, from the Proto-Slavic *němьcь, meaning speechless, since German is not mutually intelligible with Slavic languages;
• in Finnish it is Saksa, from the name of the Saxon tribe;
• in Lithuanian it is Vokietija, of unclear origin, but possibly from Proto-Balto-Slavic *vākyā-, meaning “those who speak loud, shout (unintelligibly)”.

Often language lags behind the changing society and names tend to retain references to first encounters: the Finnish first and foremost met the Saxons while the French faced the Alamanni. Comparable tendencies appear elsewhere, e.g. in names for Russia.

Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by ethnic Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political aspects to it.

By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari Persian, is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official administrative, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC).

Tsakonian or Tsaconian (also Tzakonian or Tsakonic, Greek: τσακωνικά, η τσακωνική διάλεκτος and Tsakonian: τσακώνικα, α τσακώνικα γρούσσα) is a highly divergent modern variety of Greek, spoken in the Tsakonian region of the Peloponnese, Greece. Unlike all other extant varieties of Greek, Tsakonian derives from Doric Greek rather than from the Attic–Ionic branch. Although it is conventionally treated as a dialect of Greek, some compendia treat it as a separate language.Tsakonian is critically endangered, with only a few hundred or a few thousand, mostly elderly, fluent speakers left. Although Tsakonian and standard Modern Greek are related, they are not mutually intelligible.