The mutual intelligibility of Swedish and Danish in tourist interactions outside of Scandinavia

The continental Scandinavian languages are very closely related and this fact often leads to the presumption that their speakers are able to communicate with each other without using another language (e.g. English); this type of communication is called semicommunication (this term firstly used Haugen in his paper from 1966). Although there are many historical, social and linguistic preconditions which favour semicommunication, interactions between Scandinavians can be characterized by frequent misunderstandings. This thesis focuses on semicommunication between Danish and Swedish and it consists of the author's research on Danish-Swedish conversations outside of Scandinavia with both native and non-native speakers of the languages. The research took place in Prague, in a tourist office with Danish owners and Scandinavian clients. It is based on audio recordings of conversations between non-native Swedish speaking employees of the office and Danish tourists. The aim of the research is to find out in which situations and why semicommunication fails, how the possible misunderstandings are solved and whether they create problems for subsequent communication. The conclusion of the analysis is that the extent of misunderstandings was about the same with Danish tourists and Swedish speaking employees of..