In this video, we take a look at how well nonnative German speakers whose mother tongue is a nonGermanic language understand other Germanic languages. Mark and Anton will present several sentences in Yiddish, Swedish, and Norwegian, while Ons, Mohamad, and Szymon will see how well they can understand them.

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Yiddish (ייִדיש / יידיש /אידיש) is a language that originated in the 9th century in Central Europe, as a HebrewHigh German language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It is an IndoEuropean language with many elements taken from Hebrew and to a lesser extent from Aramaic, with some forms eventually taking part of Slavic languages, and traces of Romance languages. Yiddish writing uses the Hebrew alphabet and is mostly spoken by Hasidic and Haredi Jews. Colloquially, the term מאַמע־לשון‎ (meaning 'mother tongue') is sometimes used in order to distinguish it from "holy tongue", referring to Hebrew and Aramaic. Today, the majority of Yiddish speakers are are Hasidim
and other Haredim (Orthodox Jews), with the majority of them living in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel. In the U.S, there are several major Hasidic communities where Yiddish remains the majority language, most notably in Brooklyn, New York, in the Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg neighborhoods, as well as in Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York.

Swedish (svenska) is a North Germanic language, mainly spoken in Sweden and in parts of Finland. The ancestor of Swedish is Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples that lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. The modern Swedish alphabet is a modified form of the 26letter basic Latin alphabet, consisting of three extra letters, Å, Ä, and Ö, while historically Old Swedish (fornsvenska), spoken in the Middle Ages, was written in the runic alphabet, which was also used to write many different Germanic languages prior to switching to the Latin alphabet during the process of European nations adopting Christianity.

Swedish has a long literary tradition, with the first known literary text dating back to the Viking Age, the Rök runestone. As the Swedish language was standardized in the 16th century, the literature flourished with it. In the ensuring centuries numerous Swedish authors emerged, such as Georg Stiernhielm, Johan Henric Kellgren, Carl Boberg, Viktor Rydberg, Gustaf Fröding, Carl Michael Bellman, and August Strindberg. In the 20th century Sweden continued to produce many more great authors, such as Hjalmar Söderberg, and Nobel laureates such as Selma Lagerlöf, Verner von Heidenstam, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Pär Lagerkvist, Nelly Sachs, Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson, and Tomas Tranströmer.

All Germanic languages share a common ancestor, known as ProtoGermanic, which was a single language spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. As one of the main branches of the IndoEuropean language family, Germanic languages are further split into 3 subdivisions:

West Germanic languages: English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Scots, Luxembourgish, Limburgish varieties, and the Frisian languages.

North Germanic languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

East Germanic languages: Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct.

The German language (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language with official status in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. In Luxembourg, Belgium and parts of Poland, German is a coofficial language, and one of several national languages of Namibia. German has many similarities with West Germanic languages such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and Yiddish. The Germanspeaking countries are ranked among the top in the world in terms of annual publication of new books, and a great amount of German literature, from medieval works to modern times, has been produced. Among many others, there are the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a literary genius who is considered to be like the German Shakespeare. Goethe is best known for his novel, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), which was published when he was only 25. Other classics include Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin, The Devil’s Elixirs by ETA Hoffman, Debt and Credit by Gustav Freytag, Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, and many others.