I have a problem when it comes to learning languages. I cannot stay on just one language!
I have been studying Irish in ernest now for three or four months. I used Duolingo, took three free online courses, and was working hard every day to improve my Irish. Then the Norwegian bug bit me and it all went spiraling out of control.
I have learned not to worry too much about this. I will return to Irish again, and only have to retrace a few steps. I could learn one language much faster if I would just concentrate on it, but I figure this is my brain’s way to keep from getting burned out. It’s possible your brain works like mine, or it could be totally different. Do what your brain wants you to do.
I grew up in a family and culture that valued language and knowledge of the world. I had always heard that Norwegian was a very difficult language to learn, and in this post I hope to show how that is both true and untrue.
Norwegian is a language in the North Germanic Language family, which also contains Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese. Danish is the dominant language in modern Scandinavian history. Both Norways and Sweden were part of the Danish kingdom for many years and the three modern languages of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are able to be understood in some respect by those in all three countries.
The story of Norwegian’s linguistic evolution is an interesting one which I can only give a summation of. There are many great articles online about the subject that can go into much greater detail than I have time to relate.
Norway was part of the Kingdom of Denmark until the Treaty of Keil made Norway a part of Sweden. Norway was not too keen on this idea and the Swedish-Norwegian war of 1814 happened, ending with a kind of “Well maybe we should just be friends” kind of deal in which Sweden and Norway were separate but equal nations.
As Norway started its journey as an independent nation, the question of language was long debated. In the 1840’s two linguists began to tackle the question of national language. Knud Knudsen proposed a written language that kept Danish as a base but used a more Norwegian spelling and inflection. This sytem eventually became Bokmål or “Book Language”. Ivar Aasen, a self-taught linguist and botanist, traveled around the country recording as many local dialects as he could; then he “averaged” them out. If a particular word was used by a majority of the dialects he kept it over other words. This system became Nynorsk (New Norwegian). Today, both systems are taught somewhat equally, through Bokmål is more prevalent as it is used in metropolitan areas and in the news media. Nynorsk is used more in rural parts of the country and is seen as a more conservative way of writing.
Having two official written forms of the same language makes Norwegian slightly more complicated to learn, though the vast majority of learning resources outside Norway stick to Bokmål.
Spoken Norwegian, however is another story altogether. Though many of the words are recognizable to English and German speakers, the difficulty in spoken Norwegian is that there is no official spoken standard. Everyone’s particular local dialect is correct. Because of this there is a great variety of words and phrases that mean the same thing.
To get an Idea of what the various dialects sound like I found this video that is part of a series about languages and cultures meant to prepare LDS youth who are preparing to serve missions across the world for what the languages and cultures they are about to immerse themselves in are actually like. Keep in mind this guy is American, and learned Norwegian just for his missionary service, but it will give you an idea of what the languages sound like in different parts of Norway.
There is a geographic spectrum of spoken Norwegian where someone who lives near the Swedish border may speak a Norwegian that has more in common with Swedish than with the spoken Norwegian of his cousin who lives across the country.
Despite these difficulties I think Norwegian is an enjoyable language for English speakers to learn. The spelling can be intimidating but once you learn the pronunciation it is actually quite intuitive.
For instance in the video above he says the sentence “I come From Bergen” in three different dialects.
Jeg kommer fra Bergen
Some of the words look very different and strange, but others look pretty familiar. Spoken the sentence sounds very much like how we would say it “I come from Bergen”.
Another example of the intuitive nature of Norwegian for me is the word for hospital.
Sykehus
Now this word looks really weird at first but it is pronounces quite close to this “Sick-House”, and indeed the word is a compound word composed of Syke (Sick) and Hus (House). Many of the Scandinavian languages make intensive use of compound words like this, which is easily a topic for its own post.