Norwegian Phrasebook Attractions & Activities - The Best Holiday Destinations for 2020
Norwegian is the language spoken in Norway. It's closely related to Danish and Swedish, and most speakers of the three languages can understand each other without much difficulty. Norwegian is also historically closely related to Icelandic, but the two are no longer mutually understandable. Written Norwegian is virtually identical to Danish and phrasebooks for the two languages can for most purposes be used interchangeably. Most of Norway's 4.5 million citizens speak Norwegian. Norwegian is written with the Latin alphabet and three additional vowels (ø, æ, å).
Because Norwegian is a Germanic language, learning a decent form of Norwegian shouldn't be too hard if you already speak English, German and/or Dutch. Norwegian grammar is similar to English and relatively easy compared to German. For example, the role of a word is determined by its place in the syntax, rather than by morphology. Norwegian basically only has two grammatical cases: Nominative and genitive - genitive differs from nominative by an "s" at the end of the noun (like English but without the apostrophe). Verbs are not conjugated according to person. Adjectives are (like in English) placed before the noun. Norwegian has three grammatical genders, and nouns are inflected according to their grammatical gender. Plural form of noun is often expressed with the suffix "-r" or "-er", for example "en katt, katter" = "a cat, cats".
Although modern Norwegian is relatively easy to understand and practice at a superficial level, learning Norwegian a hundred per-cent fluently is exceptionally difficult. There are several reasons to this: The first thing worth mentioning is that there is a wide range of dialects in Norwegian, that could differ significantly to the standard written form. Due to the country's geography, being extremely long and narrow, these dialects have had the opportunity to develop over time. There is no standard spoken Norwegian, and it is fully socially accepted (even highly regarded) to use your local dialect whatever the context or situation. Politicians and news reporters all do this. Norwegian has a number of idioms, many of which are used regularly but hardly make any sense to an outsider (they just have to be learned). Many idioms originates from playwright Henrik Ibsen, from the ancient sagas (compiled by Icelander Snorre Sturlason), or from the Bible, as well as from popular culture. The weak Norwegian verbs could also have one of five different endings.
There are two official variations of written Norwegian: Bokmål and Nynorsk. The differences are small, but important to a lot of Norwegians. Bokmål is by far the most common, and evolved from Danish. Nynorsk is a reconstructed standard written form, devleoped by Ivar Aasen, a teacher and linguist. Aasen traveled through most of the country, except for the eastern parts, because he felt those parts had been too heavily influenced by Danish language. Between 1848 and 1855, Aasen published a grammar, lexicon, dialect samples, and a set of readings as he developed Nynorsk (called then landsmål) A summary of the language situation can be found at:
In 2003, approximately 15% of primary school pupils were in school districts that taught Nynorsk as the primary written standard.
Numbers, time and dates
Note that Norwegians use comma as the decimal sign, for instance 12,000 means 12 (specified with three decimal places) not 12 thousand, whereas 12.000 means 12 thousand. Norwegians use both 24 and 12 hour system, spoken often 12 hour system and 24 hour system in writing. Norwegians don't use PM/AM to indicate morning or afternoon. Dates can be abbreviated in a number of ways, but the order is always DATE-MONTH-YEAR, for instance 12.07.08 is July 12, 2008.
Other notable features:
- Unlike some Germanic neighbors, in Norwegian the definite article is postfixed (a suffix) while the indefinite article is a separate word like in English (a house = et hus; the house = huset).
- Verbs are not conjugated according to the person.
- Capital letters reserved for names of persons or places as well as beginning of sentences.
- Norwegian has three unique vowels: æ, ø, å (more below)
- Norwegian has fewer French/Latin words than English, but still enough "international" words (adopted from English, French or Latin) that are understandable for most visitors. For instance: information = informasjon, telephone = telefon, post = post, tourist = turist, police = politi.
- Unlike English, Norwegian words are compounded to form new nouns. There is in principle no limit to the number of new nouns that can be created, unless these are "decomposed" some of these may not be found in dictionaries or phrasebooks.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Norwegian Phrasebook
