How to Identify a Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Book (When You Don't Know the Language)

If you find a book at a book store, garage sale or library and you need to know what language it's written in because you are studying one of the Scandinavian languages (or if you are a bookseller and you need to identify the book in order to resell it), here is a quick way to identify whether you are looking at Norwegian, Swedish or Danish.

Look through the book (or sometimes the title) and try to find the small words for "of" and "and". These words are easily identifiable because they are small and they are also very frequently used.

The Danish word for "of" is "af", while Norwegian and Swedish use "av". The Swedish word for "and" is "och", while Norwegian and Danish use "og".

Confused? Don't be.

In other words, if you find the word "af", you have a Danish book. If you find the word "och", you have a Swedish book.

Things are a little trickier for Norwegian, but not much. You have to find both "og" and "av" before you can identify the book as Norwegian.

Hope this helps. 

See also: Danish, Swedish and Norwegian - What's the Difference?
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Danish Comprehensive Grammar