at the Beverly Hills Lingual Institute
Did you know?
Sales of electric and hybrid cars in Norway outpaced those running on fossil fuels in 2017.
Hallo! Spoken by almost five million people, Norwegian is one of the Scandinavian languages, and is relatively easy for English speakers to learn.
The standard languages of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are mutually intelligible, meaning that the populations of each country can more or less understand each other's languages in both written and spoken form. Norwegian and Danish are particularly close, as Denmark and Norway were unified for 400 years prior to 1814. If your aim is to communicate in all three countries, learn Norwegian first. A Dane can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much less so with Swedish. A Swede can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much less so with Danish. A Norwegian is comfortable with both Swedish and Danish.
In any list of non-English-speaking countries with the highest percentage of people fluent in English, the three Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—are close behind Holland. You may never need their language no matter where you go or who you deal with in Scandinavia, but Scandinavians are among the most appreciative people on earth if you're prepared to make the effort.
Besides, the Scandinavian languages are relatively easy for Americans to learn. They're Germanic languages, related to English, but vastly easier to learn than German. The verbs don't change for person and number, and only slightly for tense. The word order follows English obligingly most of the way.
Norwegian has two official forms: the more formal Bokmål (influenced by Danish and dating from the Danish Empire period), and the more modern (and Norwegian) Nynorsk. Although Norwegians are educated in both, Bokmål enjoys much more widespread usage in formal writing, whereas Nynorsk - which is based on everyday Norwegian—tends to be more informal.