AHC: Scandinavian Language

Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are mutually intelligible languages. Your challenge is to make these languages one. Also, Iceland can't speak a different language. You can use any POD you want.
 
Have the three cultures never diverge from one another, and be ruled by one king. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway wouldn't even exist in this TL, so Iceland would have to be colonized by them.
 
Norweigians/Danish conquer core areas of Scandinavia on end of 10th century/early 11th century.
 

Alkahest

Banned
An authoritarian Swedish Empire of some sort could easily try to create an official "Scandinavian" language, probably mostly influenced by Swedish with some concessions (for example, Swedish Ä and Ö turning into Danish/Norwegian Æ and Ø). I think some west/east split is more or less inevitable, but the languages are so similar that a sufficiently motivated state could fuse them with merely an acceptable amount of fuss.

How about a Rudbeckian Atlantis fantasy-obsessed loony regime trying to establish a "pan-Hyperborean" wonderstate with a common "Gothic" language?
 
It only takes a continuing Kalmar Union to achieve this, and the language would be "Danish", since the other three were designed to be "not-Danish", Swedish in the 1500s, Icelandic in the 1700s, and Norwegian in the 1800s. :)
 

Alkahest

Banned
Even a longer-lasting Kalmar Union wouldn't guarantee a uniform Scandinavian culture. Economics and geography make the interests of Denmark and Sweden so different, that they are bound to split sooner or later. Neither Denmark nor Sweden would benefit from having the same foreign policy, unless one country (most likely Denmark) completely dominated the other - which would of course make a long-lasting union untenable in itself.
 
If you want to create a unified Scandinavian language, I think merging, rather than prevention of divergence, is more likely. Geographical factors led to what I understand to be quite an early divergence of Old Norse, long before any unifying factors could come into play. But political Scandinavianism, particularly in the 19th century, I think, could easily lead to the merging of the three.
 
As you say, the languages already have a quite high degree of mutually intelligibility. There is no real reason we have to consider them separate languages, instead of just dialects of a single Scandinavian language. Basically, your PoD could simply be that a pan-Scandanavian ideal becomes popular. There, job done, it's considered a single language--no political changes or changes to the languages itself required.

Without ethnically cleansing the Icelanders or some other horrendous crime against humanity they're going to continue speaking Icelandic, as they have been for a millenia.
Well... it wouldn't require ethnically cleansing the inhabitants, though it would involve an infringement on their rights. But there are numerous cases throughout history were a language group has been forced to speak another language. It doesn't even need to take more than a handful of generations. You don't have to kill a single Icelander to kill Icelandic, you just have to set up an oppressive situation where they have to speak another language.
 
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