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As a Dane, I have a difficulty distinguishing between Swedish, Nynorsk and Bokmål when given a text. To me they appear as non-Danish Nordic languages.

I am wondering whether there are good quick heuristics to distinguish between the 3 non-Danish languages given a short text? The Swedish "och" (meaning "and" in English) is to me clearly an indication of Swedish. Would there be other such rules?

Consider the text "Samfunnsoppdrag under press: Erfaringer og vurderinger i norske bibliotek under Covid-19". To me the "og" word clearly indicates that this is not Swedish. Many of the words are similar to the Danish words, so I presume that this is Bokmål!? The word "Samfunnsoppdrag" is surely not Danish. But could the text be Nynorsk?

BTW: I have a webapp that - based on Wikidata lexemes - attempts to dectect the language for a given text. The data entered in Wikidata is unfortunately limited, so in the case with the above text it erroneously guesses on Danish, Swedish and Bokmål in the given order: https://ordia.toolforge.org/text-to-languages?text=Samfunnsoppdrag%20under%20press:%20Erfaringer%20og%20vurderinger%20i%20norske%20bibliotek%20under%20Covid-19

Finn Årup Nielsen
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    Swedish has ö – för (English ‘for’), Norwegian has ø – før (English ‘before’). Also æ in Norwegian and ä in Swedish. Also, Swedish has icke and Norwegian ikke. As for kinds of Norwegian, here I cannot help. – Yellow Sky Jun 16 '21 at 12:01
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    @YellowSky Swedish does have icke, but as a verbal negation, it’s very old-fashioned, bordering on archaic (though it’s still found as a negating prefix). The standard verbal negation is inte. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 16 '21 at 13:28
  • @Finn As a general rule of thumb: as mentioned in Yellow Sky’s comment, if it has ä and ö (as well as och and inte), it’s Swedish. Otherwise, it’s Norwegian. If it’s Norwegian, the more it looks like slightly misspelt Danish, the more likely it is to be Bokmål; the more it looks un-Danish, the more likely it is to be Nynorsk. And don’t forget that a lot of the informal Norwegian you’ll read online is neither: when writing informally, most Norwegians write in their own dialect, generally adapting it to a greater or lesser degree to resemble Nynorsk or Bokmål. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 16 '21 at 13:34
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    @jk-ReinstateMonica I’ve added my dupe vote, but there is the fundamental difference between the two questions that the asker of the old question didn’t understand the Scandinavian languages and had to go by purely orthographic, non-semantic cues alone. The asker here is a native speaker of one of them and will thus understand the vast majority of the text in all three languages and can employ more sophisticated measures to tell them apart. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 16 '21 at 15:22

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