Norwegian · Norsk

About Norwegian

Language family

Indo-European, North Germanic

Where it's spoken

Norway

Speakers

roughly 5 million speakers

Norwegian uniquely has two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, reflecting a 19th-century debate over whether to base the modern written language on Danish-influenced urban speech or on rural dialects closer to Old Norse. It is close enough to Danish and Swedish that Scandinavians often converse across languages without switching. Like Swedish, it retains the pitch-accent distinctions inherited from Old Norse.