Norwegian - interesting facts
Norwegian is the native language of about 5 million people (about 0.07% of the world's population). In terms of the number of native speakers, this language ranks above the top 100 most widely spoken languages in the world.
Norsk is the official language of Norway.
Norwegian belongs to the group of Germanic languages, specifically to the North Germanic subgroup. This language evolved from the Western dialects of the Old Norse language. 12th century – the oldest monuments of Norwegian literature come from this period. Following the union with Denmark between the 16th and 19th centuries, Danish became the dominant language in Norway. The modern version of Norwegian, now called bokmål (literary language), began to take shape in the 18th century based on the Oslo dialect and the Danish language.
An interesting phenomenon concerning the Norwegian language is the legally sanctioned coexistence of two equivalent variants of the Norwegian language. These are bokmål and nynorsk – a New Norwegian language is spoken by 10-20% of the population, mainly from suburban areas. The body dealing with regulatory issues is the Norwegian Language Council (Språkrådet).
There are four main Norwegian dialects in Norwegian: North Norwegian, Trønder, East Norwegian and West Norwegian. Essential differences occur at the level of pronunciation and vocabulary; to a lesser extent they relate to morphology and syntax.
Due to its genetic affinity, Norwegian (in the bokmål variety) is very similar to the Danish and Swedish languages. These three languages are considered mutually understandable, as evidenced by the fact that Norwegians communicate effectively in their native language with the inhabitants of Denmark and Sweden.
Norwegian is one of the official languages of the Nordic Council.
In Norwegian, as in Swedish, there is a large number of vowels. There are 19 vowel phonemes.
Unlike many modern European languages, Norwegian does not have a pronunciation variation that is considered standard. Therefore, all regional varieties have equal status.
Norwegian has a tonic accent (the syllable is pronounced in a special tone). There are two tones.
The longest word in Norwegian is the 33-letter noun menneskerettighetsorganisasjonene, which means‘ human rights organizations’.
English and Norwegian have a shared linguistic history as Germanic languages and have had significant mutual influence. However, Norwegian's impact on English is particularly noticeable in the realm of loanwords, many of which date back to the Viking Age. Common English words like 'egg', 'sky', 'window', and 'husband' have Old Norse origins, introduced to English during periods of Norse settlement in the British Isles. Moreover, Norwegian place names have influenced English geographic nomenclature, particularly in North England and Scotland, where Norse settlement was most prevalent. These borrowings from Norwegian have left a lasting legacy on English vocabulary.
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