The Bridge

[woofas]

What language was this program originally made in? Swedish or Danish or did use the language to fit with each scene and then dub or sub-title to suit the other country?
Just wondering.

[Ken4155]

Apparently, all the Danes speak Danish while all the Swedes speak Swedish. The two countries do understand each others language but not as easily as is portrayed in The Bridge.

[emmie]

they mixed between the two. i thought it one of the best dramas i had ever seen,

[Peter Pedant]

yeah I wondered this
at one point our heroes - one is Danish and one Swedish asks
how is your Danish? and he give the universal danish for nicht sehr gut ( that is German by the way)

relevant question - just done The Pianist - there are pirated versions around the internet - and the German was unsubtitled as German and the Poles speak - - English!

odd in the final scene when he runs out in front of the polish liberation lorry and civilians because he has a German great coat on, start screaming "He's German!". And as a pole he should be shouting i am a pole ( polski!) in russian because it is the red army shooting at him - it all ends well for him

[zebo]

//they mixed between the two. i thought it one of the best dramas i had ever seen,//

Oh yes it was totally brilliant and it also had one of my all time favourite theme tunes, Hollow Talk.

[ParsleyDumpling]

As has been said they spoke both languages, as the whole program was subtitled in English, it really made no difference to the viewer. I agree with Zebo about the theme music, I downloaded to my phone very soon after watching the first episode. Totally brilliant series.

[woofas]

Two points:
a) So did they shoot danish scenes in danish & swedish for the others?
b) I understand from other articles that whereas Swedes can easily understand norwegian neither of them can easily cope with danish due to the influence of german changing the pronunciation making it more gutterall. Although written text in danish can be easily read by the Swedes and vice versa.

[The Builder]

As some of the others have said, Woof, there weren't two versions of every scene. Each actor spoke in their own language, even if they didn't fully understand what each other was saying.

Sergio Leone did something similar in the "Spaghetti Westerns". It was an international cast. When filming, they took no sound crew along.
Instead, each actor spoke in his native language. Then, versions were over-dubbed later in the studio. Each version was in the language of whichever country the films were due to be released in.

In Scandinavia, mutual understandability depends on region. In Northern Sweden, towards the Norwegian border, their dialect is much nearer to that of the neighbouring Norwegians. Stockholmers, and those in the south in Skåne, can struggle to understand their northern countrymen.
Danish should be easily understood by Norwegians, (they were the same country once) but it isn't now. Germanic languages all of them, but Denmark historically had a great deal of cultural and trading dealings with The Dutch. That changed things around a bit.

If you'd like a good giggle, there are several youtubes where various Scandinavians try to understand what each other is saying in their own tongue.
The joke in Scandinavia is that Danish is simply Norwegian being spoken by a Swede.................... while drunk ;o)))

[brainiac]

Written Danish and Norwegian look very similar, but sound very different as Danish has a rather harsh gutteral sound with glottal stops.

Written Norwegian and Swedish look quite different but sound quite similar - that 'sing-song' sound that people associate with Scandinavia.