40 Fun Facts About Norwegian Language

The Norwegian word 'gift' means 'married' and also which far less romantic thing?

Poison and marriage share one spelling in Norwegian, making 'gift' a classic false friend for English speakers. In German, the same word carries only the toxic meaning.

Which number is meant by the Norwegian word 'fire', a notorious trap for English-speaking learners?

Four is 'fire' in Norwegian, said in two syllables rather than like the English word for flames. It descends from Old Norse 'fjórir', a distant cousin of the English number.

In Norwegian, the everyday word 'barn' has nothing to do with farm buildings; what does it mean?

Child is the meaning of 'barn' in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish alike. Its close cousin 'bairn' is still used for a little one in Scotland and northern England.

Lørdag, the Norwegian word for Saturday, comes from an Old Norse name marking which weekly chore?

Washing gave Saturday its Nordic name, from Old Norse 'laugardagr', literally washing day. Unlike most weekday names, it honours no Norse or Roman god.

English borrowed 'ski' from Norwegian; in Old Norse the word first described a piece of which material?

Split wood is the root sense: Old Norse 'skíð' meant a cleft stick before it meant the gear. Before 1920, English speakers often wrote the word as 'skee'.

In Norwegian slang, saying a party was 'helt' plus the name of which US state means it was wild?

Texas is Norwegian slang for craziness, a nod to the Wild West. A typical use is to say that a chaotic evening 'was completely texas'.

The English word 'window' comes from Old Norse 'vindauga', which literally means what?

Wind eye is the literal meaning: a window was at first an unglazed hole in a roof. The Norse loan pushed out Old English 'eagþyrl', which literally meant eye-hole.

Which Norwegian politician's surname became an English word for a traitor after he sided with Nazi occupiers?

Quisling became a byword after Vidkun Quisling's failed 1940 coup. That April, The Times of London ran an editorial headed 'Quislings Everywhere', and the name stuck.

Which Norwegian exclamation of dismay became a catchphrase of Scandinavian Americans in the Upper Midwest?

Uff da sailed to America with 19th-century emigrants, and Rutland, North Dakota, now holds an annual Uffda Day festival. Back in Norway, 'uff' is just a mild, polite groan.

The Norwegian word 'utepils' names the simple pleasure of drinking what outdoors on a sunny day?

Beer is the 'pils' in utepils, literally 'outdoor beer'. The word was first recorded in 1963, in a newspaper phrase about the first one of spring.

Which self-taught linguist toured rural Norway collecting dialects to create the written standard Nynorsk?

Ivar Aasen began the work at 22 and was a botanist as well as a linguist. He published his new written Norwegian in several books between 1848 and 1873.

Bokmål, the written standard used by most Norwegians, has a name that literally translates as what?

Book tongue became the official name in 1929, replacing Riksmål. A rival proposal to call the standard Danish-Norwegian lost in parliament by a single vote.

By what name was Nynorsk officially known until the Norwegian parliament renamed it in 1929?

Landsmål was the name its creator chose, meaning 'national language', though it is often misread as 'rural language'. The new name stressed a link to Old Norwegian.

Which planned 'common Norwegian', meant to merge Bokmål and Nynorsk into one, was officially abandoned in 2002?

Samnorsk had the support of 79% of Norwegians in a 1946 poll. A mass protest movement then rose against it in the 1950s, angered by the 'radical' forms in school textbooks.

Which language group of an indigenous Arctic people is official in Norway alongside Norwegian?

Sami is a group of languages rather than a single one, and it belongs to the Uralic family, so it is unrelated to Norwegian. It is official in northern municipalities such as Kautokeino and Karasjok.

Which letter, the last in the Norwegian alphabet, officially replaced the double 'aa' in a 1917 spelling reform?

Å tidied up some startling place names: before 1917 a ridge now spelled Blååsen was written Blaaaasen. Denmark made the letter official only in 1948.

Because Z appears only in loanwords, how does Norwegian spell the name of the striped animal 'zebra'?

Sebra shows how Norwegian respells borrowed words to match its own sounds. The letters c, q, w, x and z turn up only in loanwords and in a few family names.

Norwegian has a special word for 'yes' that contradicts a negative question; what is it?

Jo is the reply when someone asks 'Don't you speak Norwegian?' and you do. German 'doch' and French 'si' do the same job, a third answer word that modern English lacks.

Which gender-neutral pronoun joined the official Norwegian written standards in 2022, beside 'han' and 'hun'?

Hen was accepted for both Bokmål and Nynorsk at once. The Norwegian Academy's own dictionary had already listed the pronoun in December 2017, almost five years earlier.

Which Norwegian city's dialect is unusual for having dropped the feminine gender entirely, leaving only two?

Bergen stands apart because Norwegian dialects have traditionally kept the three genders inherited from Old Norse. In Bergen, masculine and feminine merged into a single common gender.

Norwegian grandparent words reveal the family side; who exactly is a person's 'mormor'?

Mother's mother is spelled out by simply doubling 'mor'. The same logic builds farmor, morfar and farfar, so a Norwegian never has to add 'on my dad's side'.

The Norwegian word 'kjæreste', used for a boyfriend or girlfriend alike, is literally a superlative meaning what?

Dearest is the literal sense, the superlative of the adjective 'kjær'. One word covers a romantic partner of any gender, where English has to choose between two.

Norwegians say 'tusen takk' for a warm thank-you; which number does 'tusen' add to the thanks?

A thousand thanks is the literal meaning of the phrase, which works as a very polite 'many thanks'. Plain 'takk' on its own covers an everyday thank-you.

The everyday Norwegian goodbye 'ha det' is short for 'ha det bra', which literally means what?

Have it well is the word-for-word meaning: 'ha' is the command form of 'to have', 'det' is 'it' and 'bra' is 'well'. The clipped two-word farewell simply drops the last part.

When Norwegian friends greet each other with 'takk for sist', what are they thanking each other for?

The last time they were together is what the greeting recalls: the phrase means 'thanks for last time'. Icelandic has a matching formula, 'takk fyrir síðast'.

The word 'frokost' means lunch in Danish, but which meal does it name in Norwegian?

Breakfast is 'frokost' in Norway, so a Dane and a Norwegian agreeing to meet for frokost could turn up hours apart. Swedish 'frukost' sides with the Norwegians.

Brunost, a sweet Norwegian staple often sliced onto waffles, has a name that literally means what?

Brown cheese comes from boiling down whey, a Scandinavian practice at least 2,500 years old. The firm modern kind is credited to milkmaid Anne Hov, who devised it on a mountain farm in 1863.

Lutefisk, the Norwegian Christmas dish of dried cod, takes the first half of its name from what?

Lye is the caustic bath the dried cod soaks in for two days, until it swells and turns jelly-like. The name of the dish simply means 'lye fish'.

Akevitt, the Norwegian caraway spirit, takes its name from a Latin phrase with which meaning?

Water of life translates the Latin 'aqua vitae'. Whisky hides exactly the same meaning, since it comes from the Gaelic 'uisce beatha'.

Which Norwegian word, meaning 'small fry of fish', does English use for the tiny crustaceans eaten by whales?

Krill kept its Norwegian spelling when English adopted it. In its home language the word is also often applied to young fish, not just to the shrimp-like animals.

Which pidgin did Pomor traders and northern Norwegian fishermen use for about 150 years to barter flour for fish?

Russenorsk blended two languages into a tiny vocabulary built around fish, weather and trade. Its speakers came from Kola and Tromsø, and until about 1850 it was respectable for every social class.

Which extinct language of Orkney and Shetland descended from the Old Norse brought by Viking-age settlers?

Norn faded after Norway pledged the islands to Scotland in 1468–69 and Scots took over. Its last known speaker, Walter Sutherland of Unst, died around 1850.

Many Norwegian dialects tell 'bønder' (farmers) from 'bønner' (beans) by using two contrasting what?

Pitch accents are what give Norwegian its 'singing' quality. The simpler one usually marks words that had a single syllable in Old Norse, the more complex one words that had several.

Where does Norwegian usually put its equivalent of 'the' when turning 'a house' into 'the house'?

On the noun's end is where it goes: 'et hus' becomes 'huset'. The other Scandinavian languages do the same, so one word does the job of an English pair.

What do Norwegians call the second written form of Norwegian that every pupil must also study at school?

Sidemål is whichever of the two official standards a pupil was not assigned as a main form, and it stays compulsory through high school. For most pupils that means Nynorsk.

Which official body needs approval from the Ministry of Culture before changing Norwegian spelling rules?

Språkrådet oversees both official written standards, and its rulings have stirred controversy for years. The unofficial Riksmål standard answers instead to the Norwegian Academy.

Norwegian is a working language of which regional body, whose 1987 convention lets citizens use it abroad?

Nordic Council rules let a Norwegian deal with tax offices, police or courts in a neighbouring member country in their own language, with no bill for translation.

Which Norwegian word for unpaid communal work was voted the country's word of the year in 2004?

Dugnad usually ends with a shared meal for everyone who pitched in. In 2020 the word was used to rally the whole country behind shutting down public life during the pandemic.

Which skiing event takes its name from Norwegian dialect words for a gentle slope and a ski track?

Slalom began as the gentler trail for boys and girls not yet ready for the more challenging runs. The word comes from the dialect of Morgedal and Seljord.

Before Christianity brought the Latin alphabet around 1030, which script was used for inscriptions in Norway?

Runes on Norway's Hole Runestone were carved around 2,000 years ago, making it the oldest datable runestone known anywhere in the world.