Norwegian is a North Germanic language and is mainly spoken in Norway where it is the official language.

There are around 5 million native speakers of Norwegian.

Norway flag

Five interesting facts about the Norwegian language:

  1. Norwegian shares similarities with Danish and Swedish, making them mutually intelligible due to their common history.
  2. Norwegian is a tonal language, which is rare in Indo-European languages and is more commonly a feature of Asian languages.
  3. There are two official written standards for Norwegian, ‘bokmål’ (book language) and ‘nynorsk’ (new Norwegian).
  4. English contains some loan words from Norwegian, such as ‘berserk’, ‘slalom’ and ‘lemming’.
  5. Between the 16th and 19th centuries in Norway, Danish was the standard written language used in Norway.

 

 

 

Experts in Norwegian translation services

If you would like to work with a professional translation agency for the translation of your documents from Norwegian to English or English to Norwegian, please get in touch with the award-winning team at Surrey Translation Bureau.

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