Quote Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla View Post
Mutual intelligability exists on multiple levels, the level at various periods between Scandanavia and England is instructive, as is the level within England. In both cases, I believe it depended on how far and often you traveled, but unity only comes with a written standard. When that was achieved in Norway I'm not sure, but it can't be before Cnut started using English missionaries to convert the populace.

Yep, but otherwise Hungarian is mutually intellibigle with Slovakian, dragging Scandinavian into this does not become quite as apt. As HT said, lingual unity has not yet been achieved in Norway (even if you exclude the Sami), neither spoken nor written. As I said though, I'm pretty certain that the unity was much greater in the Viking age, both written and spoken. After the Black Death, Norwegian as a written standard gradually went pretty much extinct. As the language got resurrected in its written form in the 1800ds; two competing variants arose, and both still exist today (one is closest to mentioned western Norwegian, other to eastern Norwegian).

Point is: not all countries of today came to an apparent lingual unity via discriminating minorities.