Learn about the Norwegian language, but wait - how many languages do they really have??
Norway has three, official, written languages.
To further complicate things, two of the languages are known by two different names, bokmål/riksmål and nynorsk/landsmål.
Click on the link below to hear the Norwegian artist, Odd Nordstoga, sing a funny song in nynorsk/landsmål.
The third language is Sami and is spoken mostly in the utmost northern part of Norway.
The three extra vowels in the Norwegian language....
WHAT? - You must be kidding!
Oh yes, Norway has three extra letters in their alphabet... Click on the letters to see how they are pronounced.
æ Æ, ø Ø and å Å. Doesn't that look like fun? You can't speak or write much Norwegian without these three little vowels.
To find out how these wovels are used in words, click
Learn more about the Norwegian language and the dialects of Norway...
To make the Norwegian language even more exciting, each village and town have their own dialect. Even a few kilometers away from our village, some pronunciations and expressions are different than ours - no surprise, Norway has hundreds of dialects.
The further away from your village or town you are, the bigger the difference in dialects. It is so pronounced, you can hear immediately what area people are from by the way they speak.
Norwegian Village. (left)
Which Norwegian language is spoken in most rural areas?
Nynorsk/Landsmål is usually spoken in rural areas, BUT, in the dialect of that area - you understand, of course. HE-HE
Sometimes Norwegians have a hard time understanding each other. That sounds like a joke, but listen to this... My mother speaks riksmål in Helgeland's dialect, totally different than the way I speak, in my landsmål Isfjord's dialect, but we two understand each other very well.
Norwegian School Children (left) begin learning English in first grade.
My children and I spent one year in Norway when they were 9 and 10 years old. They attended the same school I went to as a child.
When the Norwegian pupils had English classes I taught my children Norwegian in a separate class room. Now as adults, they both speak Norwegian.
Students from all over the world come to Norway to study.
If you want to learn something – you can!
Foreign Students Skiing in Norway
The same Students after Skiing... don't give up!!!
I began learning English on my own when I was nine years old. English was not part of the curriculum the first six years of education in the public schools then.
One day when I was outside playing with my friends, English tourists, a couple from Cape Town, South Africa, spoke to me and pointed to our tall, beautiful blue mountain peaks.
Isfjorden Blue Mountains
I was pretty sure they were speaking English and I tried to communicate with them, but all I did was struggle, waving my arms and trying to make my Norwegian words sound English. Must have been very funny.
I made new friends, but communicating was difficult. I gave them my address and they began sending letters to me when they returned to Cape Town. Dad helped me reply to them in the beginning, but after a while I could write English myself.
I quickly realized that in order to correspond with my new
friends I had to learn English. Dad gave me a book on learning
English and I was hooked.
As a Norwegian, I had to work extra hard differentiating between v and w and making the th sound as in the word the correctly. It took awhile, but I mastered it eventually. Well, that is almost true, sometimes I have problems with v's and w's - I think it is a Norwegian thing.
Because I had studied English on my own, English was a breeze when it became part of my curriculum in school.
I discovered early, if you want to learn something, you will.
So, if learning a language is on your list of things to do - hit the books now!