Gus, while you're here I may as well turn the table on you. I've heard the argument that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish should be classified as one Scandinavian language. Fair or no? And I don't buy the requisite literary precedent argument for the defintion of a language. Most languages in the world have little to no extant literature.
Well...it's more or less fair. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can pretty much understand each other if they try.
I think the intrinsic differences are certainly a lot smaller than within German or Chinese, to give examples that have been discussed here.
Of course, since they have different countries they do have different written languages and so on.
Norwegian and Swedish have different spellings, but they're pretty close to one another. I'm sure verbally they sound basically the same. Danish is definitely different though. Would you speak Swedish if you visited another Nordic country or just English?
Poll
