Norway has two official ways to write Norwegian and no official way to speak it. A child in Bergen says eg, a child in Trondheim says æ and a child in Oslo says jeg, all meaning "I", and presenters on national television keep their own dialects.
If you want to learn Norwegian, that sounds like a problem and turns out to be manageable. Start with Bokmål, the written standard the large majority use and almost every course for foreigners teaches. Get the core grammar down in the first weeks, because there isn't much of it. Then spend the following months training your ear on real people, dialects included. On the US Foreign Service Institute's scale, built for English-speaking diplomats, Norwegian sits in the easiest category, at around 24 weeks of full-time study.
Where Norwegian is spoken, and why there are two written forms
About five million people speak Norwegian as their first language, nearly all of them in Norway. For roughly four centuries, until 1814, Norway was ruled from Copenhagen and wrote Danish. When that union ended, Norwegians set about building a written language of their own, and they did it twice. Bokmål, "book language", grew out of the Danish written norm as Norwegians spoke it. Nynorsk, "new Norwegian", was assembled in the nineteenth century from rural dialects. Both are official, both are taught at school, and Nynorsk is strongest in the fjords and valleys of the west, where you'll see it on signs and in local papers.
Norwegian is a North Germanic language, and Norwegians are often said to understand both Danish and Swedish better than Danes and Swedes understand each other. Written Bokmål and Danish are especially close. Our guides to Danish and Swedish cover the neighbours. The alphabet has 29 letters, with æ, ø and å at the end.
What makes Norwegian easier than most
Verbs don't change with the person: jeg er, du er, hun er. The past is var for everyone. The verb comes second in a statement, so "tomorrow I'm going to Bergen" is i morgen reiser jeg til Bergen, tomorrow travel I to Bergen. Plenty of words look familiar: hus, vann (water), bok (book), vinter.
Then come the false friends. Rar doesn't mean rare, it means strange. Fart means speed, and a fartsdump is a speed bump, which English-speaking visitors photograph with suspicious regularity. Full means full, and also drunk.
What takes longer
Tones
Norwegian, like Swedish, has a pitch accent: two melodies a word can carry. Tanken with one melody is "the tank", with the other "the thought". Context almost always rescues you, and you'll be understood with the wrong melody, but tones are what make a foreigner sound foreign long after the grammar is right.
Three genders, more or less
Bokmål has masculine (en bil, a car), feminine (ei jente, a girl) and neuter (et hus, a house), but it lets you treat feminine nouns as masculine, so "the book" is either boka or boken. Both are correct. Pick a style and stay consistent.
The double "the"
With an adjective, Norwegian marks "the" twice: det store huset, the big house, with det in front and -et on the end. Danish uses only the first; Swedish, like Norwegian, uses both.
Dialects
Jeg becomes eg in Bergen and much of the west, æ in Trondheim and the north, and ikke (not) turns into ikkje in many western dialects. Vocabulary and melody change too, sometimes from one valley to the next.
Two ways to count
In 1951 the Norwegian parliament introduced a new way of saying numbers: tjueen (twenty-one) instead of the older enogtjue (one-and-twenty). Both are still heard, so learn to understand the old one even if you say the new one.
One neat accent, and then lunch in Bergen
Beginner material usually gives you one neat accent, often from around Oslo, which is a sensible place to start, and some of it presents that accent as the whole of "Norwegian". Then you move to Bergen or Stavanger and can't follow your colleagues at lunch. Nobody can teach you every dialect, and nobody should try, but you should know from the first week that variety is normal and listen widely. Watch Skam, the series about Oslo teenagers that found fans far beyond Norway, then find something set in the west or the north and notice what changes.
First Norwegian words
- Hei: hi
- Ha det: bye, short for ha det bra, "have it good"
- God morgen: good morning
- Takk, tusen takk: thanks, thanks a lot
- Vær så snill: please, for a real request
- Ja, nei: yes, no
- Unnskyld: sorry, excuse me
- Jeg forstår ikke: I don't understand
- Snakker du engelsk?: do you speak English?
- Hva heter du?: what's your name?
- Skål: cheers
- Takk for sist: thanks for last time, said when you meet someone you last spent an evening with
A month-one plan to learn Norwegian
- Week 1: sounds and greetings. Learn æ, ø and å, the long and short vowels, and the phrases above. Read aloud every day.
- Week 2: nouns and the present tense. Forty nouns with en, ei or et and their definite forms, and the present tense, which ends in -r for everyone: jeg snakker, du snakker, hun snakker.
- Week 3: word order. Practise starting sentences with a time or a place and putting the verb second: i dag, i morgen, på jobben ("at work").
- Week 4: listening widely. Twenty minutes a day of Norwegian television with Norwegian subtitles, from at least two regions, and short messages to a Norwegian speaker or another learner.
By the end you're partway through A1 on the CEFR scale. If you live in Norway, keep the official tests in mind for later: Norskprøven for adult immigrants and Bergenstesten for university study.
How Qlango helps
The Norwegian course in Qlango goes from A1 to B2, which means talking with Norwegians on most everyday and work topics without either side having to simplify. Lessons take a few minutes, and words come back for review right before you'd forget them, which is what spaced repetition is for. Flashcards cover the quick reviews. Word Duel, with a Hard mode for when the easy one stops being a challenge, and MinuteRush make vocabulary practice something you'd do voluntarily, and statistics over weeks, months and years show the long view.
Premium adds offline learning, handy on a ferry or at a hytte with no signal, and an AI teacher you can ask whether it's boka or boken as often as you like. The language you learn through is up to you, and the full list of languages and levels shows the options.
Takk for sist is the phrase to have ready the morning after your first evening out with Norwegian colleagues. Let Qlango's A1 course give you Bokmål and jeg first, then collect eg and æ as the people around you hand them over.
