“What languages are spoken in Norway?” is something foreigners often ask, given the confusion about Bokmål and Nynorsk. Let’s make it clear in this blog post. Norwegian is the administrative language in Norway, with two written standards of equal value, Bokmål and Nynorsk.
Two official spoken languages in Norway
One last time for posterity – Bokmål and Nynorsk are written standards; nobody speaks these per se. Some of the dialects are closer to one or the other, but that is what is spoken in the country – dialects. And many of them.
Language-wise, what do these people way up North actually speak then? Easy, they have two official spoken languages: Norwegian and Sami. So, while there are three official written standards, Bokmål, Nynorsk and Sami, there are only two official spoken languages, Sami and Norwegian.
A few quick facts about the Norwegian language
The language spoken in Norway by the majority is Norwegian. It belongs to the North Germanic group of languages and it has approximately 5.5 million speakers mainly confined to the Kingdom of Norway.
Together with Danish and Swedish, as well as Icelandic to a much lesser extent, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum. It means that different dialects of these languages are mutually intelligible to a certain extent. We’ll dedicate a separate post to the dialects of Norway, but today we’re keeping it simple.
