Norwegian translations for your company

The Norwegian language, commonly called “Norsk,” is spoken by approximately five million people. It is made up of two different individual languages, which have had equal official status since 1885, and which have been called “Bokmål” (literally “book language”) and “Nynorsk” (modern Norwegian) since 1929. Both belong to the North Germanic language group of the Indo-European language family. Because of the natural topography, there are numerous extremely varied dialects.

The Norwegian language has a turbulent history: Old Norwegian (about 1050–1350) was severely undermined by the plague of 1349/50, and Middle Norwegian (about 1350–1525) was exposed to numerous foreign language influences – such as Low German, Swedish and Danish – and was completely displaced by Danish by the end of the 18th century following unification with Denmark (1397). After the union with Denmark ended (1814), the revival of Norwegian began as part of a national romantic movement. On the one hand, Danish was “Norwegianized” which resulted in today’s “Bokmål” and on the other hand, ancient dialects including vocabulary and grammar were adopted, which today form the basis of “Nynorsk”.
Both languages are purely written languages, which means that neither of them has a uniform pronunciation. About 90 percent of Norwegians speak and write “Bokmål”, which is grammatically less complex and very similar to Danish, while “Nynorsk” is only spoken and written by about ten to twelve percent of Norwegians, although linguistically most Norwegian dialects are closer to it.