Norwegian phrasebook

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. Most of Norway's 4.5 million citizens speak Norwegian. sS

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 the western regions of Norway, an area in which the Danish influence on spoken Norwagian was minimal during the time Norway was ruled from Denmark. Between 1848 and 1855, Aasen published a grammar, lexicon, dialect samples, and a set of readings as he devleoped Nynosk (called then landsmål).

In 2003, approximately 15% of primary school pupils were in school districts that taught Nynorsk as the primary written standard.

There are also many spoken variations (dialects) of Norwegian, and even to Norwegians, some of them can be really hard to understand if you are not used to them. Because of radio, TV, and other mass communication, the situation is normalizing towards a language more similar to how it is written (Bokmål or Nynorsk).

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