Norwegian language

Norwegian (Norwegian: norsk [ˈnɔʂːk] ^ⓘ) is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties; some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages. Faroese and Icelandic are not mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them. While the two Germanic languages with the greatest numbers of speakers, English and German, have close similarities with Norwegian, neither is mutually intelligible with it. Norwegian is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

Quick facts: Norwegian, Pronunciation, Native to, Eth... ▼

Norwegian
norsk
Pronunciation	[ˈnɔʂːk] (East, Central and North) [ˈnɔʁsk] (West and South)
Native to	Norway
Ethnicity	Norwegians
Native speakers	4.32 million (2020)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Germanic Northwest Germanic[2] North Germanic West Scandinavian (disputed) Norwegian
Early forms	Old Norse Old West Norse Old Norwegian Middle Norwegian
Standard forms	written Bokmål (official)  • written Riksmål (unofficial) written Nynorsk (official)  • written Høgnorsk (unofficial)
Writing system	Latin (Norwegian alphabet) Norwegian Braille
Official status
Official language in	Norway
Regulated by	Language Council of Norway (Bokmål and Nynorsk) Norwegian Academy (Riksmål) Ivar Aasen-sambandet (Høgnorsk)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	no
ISO 639-2	nor
ISO 639-3	nor – inclusive code Individual codes: nob – Bokmål nno – Nynorsk
Glottolog	norw1258
Linguasphere	52-AAA-ba to -be; 52-AAA-cf to -cg
Areas where Norwegian is spoken, including North Dakota (where 0.4% of the population speaks Norwegian), western Wisconsin (<0.1% of the population), and Minnesota (0.1% of the population) (Data: U.S. Census 2000).
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Today there are two official forms of written Norwegian, Bokmål (Riksmål) and Nynorsk (Landsmål), each with its own variants. Bokmål developed from the Dano-Norwegian language that replaced Middle Norwegian as the elite language after the union of Denmark–Norway in the 16th and 17th centuries and then evolved in Norway, while Nynorsk was developed based upon a collective of spoken Norwegian dialects. Norwegian is one of the two official languages in Norway, along with Sámi, a Finno-Ugric language spoken by less than one percent of the population. Norwegian is one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries who speak Norwegian have the opportunity to use it when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable for any interpretation or translation costs.[3][4]