The languages spoken in the Scandinavian countries have developed from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. The common background and evolution of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian account for their almost identical grammar and similar vocabulary. Due to their isolation, Icelandic and Faroese (the other two languages belonging to the Scandinavian group), are no longer mutually intelligible with Norwegian.

Norwegian language spoken nowadays is very similar to its ancestor, West Norse, a language that flourished on Norway’s territory between the ninth and the fourteenth century.

At the beginning of the 1000s, Christianity started to spread in Norway, bringing along the Latin alphabet which substituted the old runes. The Norwegian alphabet has twenty-nine letters and it contains certain characters that are to be found only in the other Scandinavian languages (å, ø, æ).

The death of King Håkon the 5th in 1319 and the imminent demise of the Norwegian royal family facilitated Norway’s administrative take over by Sweden and eventually led to the Kalmar Union, that brought together Norway, Sweden and Denmark to form a single, more powerful kingdom. Sweden soon opted out of the Union and Norway remained under Danish rule. Subsequently, Danish language was declared the official language of the kingdom. Norway separated from Denmark in 1814 and in the next twenty years Norwegian substituted Danish in schools.

The 1850’s saw Norway striving for cultural and administrative independence. In this period several Norwegian linguists led by Ivar Aasen started to promote the idea of a unique, autonomous language that should be built on the grounds of all the Norwegian dialects spoken within the country at that time. This initiative led to the creation of Landsmål, an artificial language which was not spoken by the great mass of the population. Landsmål was later renamed Nynorsk and it still coexists with Bokmål, the written and most widespread language in Norway.

All the attempts to unify Nynorsk and Bokmål into one comprehensive language have failed. In 2002 the project of creating Samnorsk was abandoned for good. Nowadays almost 85% of the Norwegian population uses Bokmål, 8% use just Nynorsk and the remaining 7% use both. Bokmål is used in most media and in the official and intellectual circles while Nynorsk is spoken mostly in the rural areas of Western Norway.

Norwegian, in both its forms, is spoken by almost five million people who inhabit mainly Norway, but also Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the US.
Ioana Mihailas works for Lingo24 Translating Services, a company with an established track record in providing high quality English to Norwegian translations