Learn Norwegian for Travel, Work and Study

The alphabet is the Latin one with æ, ø and å at the end, and the spelling is more honest than English without being perfectly regular. Most consonants sound as written; “kj” and “skj” are soft hushing sounds, a “g” before i or y becomes a y, and a final “-et” on nouns is often said without its t. The feature that marks the language is the pitch accent: nearly every word of two or more syllables carries one of two tones, and a handful of word pairs are told apart by it alone. Learners are understood without it and sound Norwegian with it.

The grammar is Germanic at its simplest. Nouns have gender — two in Bergen and in conservative writing, three almost everywhere else — and the definite article is attached to the end of the word, so “a house” is “et hus” and “the house” is “huset”. Verbs take one form for all persons, there are no cases, and adjectives agree in a small set of endings. Word order follows the Germanic rule that the verb stands second, so that “i dag kommer han”, today comes he, is the natural order. A learner from English spends their time on vocabulary, which is largely cousin-words, and on the ear.

Norway has two official written standards and no spoken one. Bokmål, used by the large majority and in nearly all learning materials, grew out of Danish; Nynorsk, built from the rural dialects, is used by a minority in the west and in some public documents, and every Norwegian learns both at school. In speech, dialect is the norm and a matter of pride: a newsreader from Trondheim and a minister from Stavanger speak as they grew up, and a learner of Bokmål must get used to hearing “I” as “jeg”, “eg” or “je” depending on the speaker.

Address is radically informal. “Du” is used with everyone — the boss, the professor, the police officer, the king in principle — and the old polite “De” survives only in a few shops and in letters from the tax office. First names are universal and titles unused. Politeness lives in small rituals instead: “takk for maten” after a meal, “takk for sist” on meeting someone again, “hyggelig” and “koselig” for anything pleasant, and an unhurried silence that is not awkward.

For an English speaker Norwegian is among the fastest languages to learn: the US Foreign Service Institute allows around 600 classroom hours to professional working proficiency, in the same group as Dutch and Swedish. Reading comes almost at once, because so many words are recognisable and the grammar puts up no wall; speaking follows within months; listening is the long task, since the dialects differ in sound, in pronouns and in whole words, and a learner who understands the Oslo television news perfectly may be lost in a Bergen shop for the first year. Norwegians are patient with this, because they are used to it among themselves.

A visitor needs no Norwegian anywhere in the country; English works from the fjords to the far north. Residents meet Norwegian in the places English does not reach: the municipality's letters, the school's parent meetings, the doctor's receptionist, the neighbours. Oil, shipping, technology and the universities' research groups work in English, and master's programmes are often taught in it; the public sector, healthcare, schools, retail and most other employers expect Norwegian, and the newcomer who can show a Norskprøven level has a different job market from the one who cannot. Bachelor's degrees are taught in Norwegian almost without exception.

• Farmers and beans: “Bønder” and “bønner” are spelled differently but sound the same except for the tone, and Norwegians use the pair to show foreigners what pitch accent means.
• Takk for maten: Said to the host after every meal, including a sandwich at a friend's kitchen table. Leaving the table without it is noticed.
• Koselig: The Norwegian version of cosy — candles, wool socks, a cabin, good company — and the quality every evening is judged by. Its cousin “hyggelig” covers anything pleasant, including meeting you.
• Dugnad: The day when the whole street or the whole school turns out to paint, rake and tidy together. Newcomers are expected and welcomed; it is where many learn their first Norwegian.
• Three words for I: “Jeg” in Oslo, “eg” on the west coast, “je” or “æ” elsewhere: the first thing a dialect gives away is its pronoun.
• A country with two spellings: Bokmål and Nynorsk are both official, and a form from the state may arrive in either; “Norway” itself is “Norge” in one and “Noreg” in the other.
• Ski, fjord, slalom: All three are Norwegian words that English took without changing, along with “lemming” and the “berserk” of the old sagas.

Norwegian levels follow the CEFR, and one exam covers nearly every purpose: the Norskprøven, the Norwegian test for adult immigrants, set by the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills and sat several times a year at adult-education centres across the country. It comes in tiers — a paper reporting A1 or A2, one reporting A2 or B1, one reporting B1 or B2, and a separate C1 test for academic and professional Norwegian — and it reports listening, reading, writing and oral results separately, which matters because the residence rules look only at the oral result. The certificate does not expire.

Permanent residence requires a pass in oral Norwegian at A2 together with the social-studies test; Norwegian citizenship requires oral Norwegian at B1 and the citizenship test, with exemptions for age and health in both cases. Universities admit to Norwegian-taught degrees on the Norskprøven at B2 in all four skills, or on the Bergenstesten, the older university-entrance test of Norwegian at a higher level, which many institutions still accept. Employers in the public sector and in health name Norskprøven levels in their advertisements, most often B1 or B2. With steady classes, most adults reach A2 in a few months and B1 within about a year, which is why Norway's integration programme is built around that span.

Norwegian is unusually well served for self-study because the state makes its own learning materials free: the public broadcaster's news in simplified Norwegian, a full online course from the directorate that runs the Norskprøven, and television with Norwegian subtitles on nearly every programme. A learner needs a dictionary that shows the gender and the plural of each noun, a dose of slow Norwegian daily, and then — the step that matters — the dialects, which no textbook carries and every Norwegian channel does.

What a tutor gives in Norwegian is the ear and the stubbornness. The two tones and the soft “kj” are heard in your own speech only when a Norwegian repeats the word back; the dialects are learned only by talking to people who speak them; and the switch to English, which every Norwegian makes out of kindness, is refused only by someone paid to refuse it. A tutor from the region you are moving to is worth more than one from Oslo if Oslo is not where you will live.