Svorsk (Norwegian: [ˈsʋɔʂk]) or Svorska (Swedish: [²svɔʂka]) is a portmanteau of svensk(a) "Swedish" and norsk(a) "Norwegian" to describe a mixture of the Swedish and Norwegian languages. The term "svorsk" is used to describe the language of someone (almost exclusively a Swedish or Norwegian person) who mixes words from his or her native tongue with the other language. The phenomenon is not uncommon, especially in light of the close business and trade ties between the two countries and the mutual intelligibility between the two languages, the latter in its turn being due to the common ancestry and parallel development of both Norwegian and Swedish from Old Norse (see North Germanic languages). The term originates from the 1970s.