Introduction to the Norwegian Language 

Because going to bed early is for people who don't have internet.

I knew everything in this video and speak norwegien, but I still wanted to watch it.

wtf i found an osu player on a random video

Laughing Orange same, why does this happen every time....

Laughing Orange SaMe

Not far from the truth. There's a new dialect for almost every small place outside of the cities. They don't differ too much, but still there are always a few local words and pronounciations.

And he didn't lie

TheOisannNetwork You guys all speak and write English so amazingly well!! I live in Australia, and I’m just curious, if you were speaking with someone from a different part or Norway or Scandinavia and finding it hard to understand, do you ever switch to English?

@@jameswalker68 if it's not possible to communicate with that person, then we will begrudgingly switch to English.

@@jameswalker68 Yea. But we swich back to our own language.

Ser eg ble tatt på fersken 😂

Ja du har rett🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

Gutten er svensk, hans udtale burde være god nok

I wish my accent were as good as his ;-;

Is his pronunciation discernible from a native Norwegian speaker?

hey how u doing, hope you are fine💗💗💗

Damn bro your country crazy atm

@@eddie4179 L rizz, dork

enilec , jeg vet ikke , jo , jeg vet ! Det er bågruna du liker Norge , vårt land ! Ja vi elsker dette landet

@@CallMeThyme You are a very proud nation! I'd love to go to Norway on the 17. mai. I'm from England. Sorry, I'm speaking English, I have been learning Norwegian for a year and a half but I don't feel comfortable writing to natives just yet. I can understand everything you're writing though😊

Säg det.. Jag såg den svenska versionen nyss och nu fortsätter jag med den norska. 😂

@@CallMeBeautifulRacoon I'm from Denmark, but lived in Norway for 25 y. Speak, read and write both but I still get errors if I've visited my Danish family. I can't write nynorsk, but I can read it and understand most dialects. And we've got a lot lol

Samme her!

Norsk er mykje likare svensk enn dansk. Dansk hadde vore veldig vanskeleg for oss å skjøna om vi ikkje hadde bokmål og standard austnorsk.

Growing up in Oslo in the 1960s I would listen to Swedish radio and watch Swedish television all the time. The Norwegian broadcasting monopoly was more or less a stupid joke, with one radio and one television channel. Thus I have no problems understanding Swedish, at least the standard conventional variety. Local dialect words probably not so much. (The same goes for many Norwegian dialects, for that matter.) Or perhaps my three Swedish great grandparents have an influence on me, who knows. I can also speak Swedish quite fluently, should the need arise. Which it rarely does, since we understand each other's languages so well. I had a Swedish neighbour who basically would speak Swedish to me, but he would use specifically Norwegian words intermittently. That always sounded like garbled noise to me, as my "mental frequency" was tuned to hear pure Swedish.

@@dan74695 Hvis du har en mer bokmål-nær dialekt, så er dansk også svært forståelig. Som f.eks hvis en er fra Bergen.

@@dan74695 Norsk slik det er nå, er sterkt påvirket av dansk og er en del av dagens norske språk enten vi vil det eller ei.

Wait so you send the complaint in Nynorsk to annoy the bureaucrats when they have to respond in Nynorsk?

@@MrGreendayrulz Exactly! This works best in non-Nynorsk counties, however. In tne Nynorsk counties, you send the comp in Bokmål, of course. ;) Companies are also obliged to answer in the same language they got the letter, but it's not like they'll get fined if they don't. It's usually just very annoying for them to have to read and write something they're not good at.

That was my impression, too: New Norwegian has a much more poetic sound than Book language (and I could follow the text much better, but that's not important). I'm a native german speaker, born next to the danish border and I have learned sweedish some decades ago.

@@kebman I do the same with my birth certificate: It is written in part by hand with the old "Sütterlin" letters (corresponding to the "fracture block letters". Don't know the correct english words for it.) When I want to annoy bureaucrats I use this old document, though I have got a newer one typed in ordinary letters.

@@grauwolf1604 That's interesting! In Norway, until at least the 70's, the kids learned something called _skjønnskrift_ in school, which translates to "beautiful handwriting" (schönes Schreiben), and they had to practise with dip pens with subsequent ink stains. I think there was a slight change of style in the 30's, but it fell out of favour after the war as pencils were used far more than nib-and-shaft pens at that point. While somewhat similar to the more "pointy" Kurrentschrift, this kind of writing was built upon the so-called _Italic_ handwriting from Britain, said to originate from Carolingian minuscule (or more likely Round Hand, which itself was based upon French Rhonde). Though I'm pretty sure I've also seen older Norwegian handwriting samples that look far more like Kurrent than Round Hand, possibly because of trade. After 1970 the schools switched to _løkkeskrift,_ however, which translates directly to "noose writing" or "loop writing" (Schleifenschreiben), because of the long and rounded curves they use to sew together flowing words. This kind of handwriting is almost an exact replica of the Deutschen Normalschrift / Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift, adapted for the Nordic alphabets. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but Sütterlin seems like an intermediary between Normalschrift and Kurrent) It was used together with _stavskrift_ a.k.a. _formskrift_ (stave or rod writing for single characters) (Rechtschreibung?) until 2012, when they stopped using flowing "loops" altogether due to the prevalence of PCs. Aside from this, a version of Fraktur (A germanic Gothic font) was also used for printing books in Norway, especially in bibles, but it fell out of favour around 1900, with a few bibles being printed in those types as late as the 30's. Instead Courier / Times type fonts (serifs) were used, and it still largely is, except for the odd newspaper that dared to use some form of grotesque instead (the horror), probably because it was popularized in Sweden. Sorry, I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to these things since calligraphy is a hobby of mine...

Where in England did you live? I feel like it was North

Charlotte Jones billy joel👍

@@NONAMEGTAV Thanks. Billy Joel is my favourite singer.

You have a good taste in music

You can learn it

@@dan74695 I'm trying to learn it. I only know the basics.

Jack Capener as a 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿/🇳🇴 able to speak norwegian, english and gaelic (also scots lol) i definitely can agree. when norway came to shetland people say thats how some parts of gaelic sound like norwegian

It’s actually very closely related to English. They’re both Germanic, and Old English was greatly influenced by Old Norse, which itself evolved into the Scandinavian languages. An example of a language that is distantly related to English would be Russian or even Hindi die to the Indo-European language family! (Although you wouldn’t know it just by looking.)

Parts of Scotland and northern England were once ruled and settled by the Danes and Norwegians, and Scots has preserved more of that than English has.

Omg, I didn't know that? I see what your refrences are. Crazy I didn't know bout this till' now 🤔

Jack Capener - I have read that the north country English accents would be better understood in Oslo than in the south of England. Very interesting comment - thanks for posting! 💕

Eg elskar språket vårt.

Har du høurt nordnorsk?

You're spot on! I want to think that I can usually get a quite decent Norwegian accent, but trying to say single words that only differ from Swedish intonation-wise while speaking English proved... harder >_

Academia Cervena I wanted to see if after a year of studying Norwegian, my American ears would be able to detect the difference in intonation and accent. You do very well, and I think it would be very difficult for me to speak in either Norwegian, talking about Swedish, or vice versa. I'm just learning your native language. It sounds like it has the inverse of pitch accents that Norwegian has. Swedish pronunciation rules are a little more complicated than Norwegian too, in my opinion.

Thanks! It's my opinion as well that Swedish pronunciation is slightly more complicated than Norwegian. As for the pitch accent, it really depends on the dialect :) Norwegian and Swedish share the same pitch accent types, but they are differently distributed. The accent type found in eastern Norway (Oslo) is the same as the one in western Sweden (Gothenburg), for instance!

Academia Cervena That's interesting to learn. Is it their close proximity to each other?

Since there is a whole array of other traits connecting those areas with regards to their traditional dialects, I'd assume so :) (Note however that most other pitch accent types do not connect geographically, so there appears to be a large coincidental aspect to it as well, generally speaking)

I'll have to disagree with you there. Speech adaptation is a universal language feature in language contact scenarios between mutually intelligible language varieties. It doesn't matter that Norwegians take pride in their varieties; they, like everyone else, adapt their dialect, sociolect and ideolect depending on their interlocutor. This is usually a subconscious choice, which may be both a communication strategy as well as a way of projecting overt prestige. Commonly this takes the form of adapting certain features associated with the Eastern dialect, which is percieved as a standard. That doesn't mean speakers drop their accents, but that they may drop certain pronunciation features and word stock associated with their local variety. Conversely speakers of similar dialects may exaggerate their local features for covert prestiege. Both globally and in norwegian specifically these features have been widely studied by linguists.

@@2Zemog If a person from Nerpes, fårö or Bornholm who speak the genuine dialect of the region meets a person from another city they tend to switch to Riksfinlandssvenska, rikssvenska and rigsdansk. Norwegians do avoid some of the words that are unique to their dialect but you would never hear anyone from Stavanger or Trondheim that would switch over to Riksnorsk.

@@Felixxxxxxxxx No, of course not. But they do assimilate features associated with Eastern Norwegian into their dialects to ease communication. This phenomenon can be observed in diverse urban centers, as these are the places where language mixing is more likely to occur. For instance, Trondheim-trøndersk has less apocopation, accenting and uses a smaller regional lexis than Fosen, Værdal and other inner-Trøndersk varieties. Similar things can be observed in most urban centers; Stavanger versus Jæren, Bergen versus strilemål. Most Norwegians call this phenomenon "forfining", and it occurs to widely different extents, with changes from minor to major in both the lexis, phonology and morphology.

@@2Zemog This is not unique to Norwegian, so I thought it would be obvious to everyone that you don't use your own unique words outside of your own area. I am saying that especially in Sweden people with strong dialects tend to be bilingual. Dialect and rikssvenska.

Thank you very much!

I was about to say I've spoken to Swedes without having issues understanding them but they had trouble understanding what i was saying.

Makes sense as the nynorsk standard primarily was created through combining and standardizing dialects from Western Norway , which obviously is/was much farther from the Swedish variants on the dialect continuum. If I had not been frequently exposed to the western dialects and imagined it as the same language, I, as a Norwegian from the eastern parts of the country, would probably find Swedish more comprehensible than these variants as well.

Nynorsk is literally more similar to Swedish than Bokmål is.

"Skei" og "kniv" er "skjei"(uttala "skjai") og "nív'e"(uttala "næive") på vallemål.

Tack så mycket! Väldigt roligt att höra! :) ('pitch accent' heter förresten _tonaccent_ på svenska :) )

You can do it!

And Faroese

Tack! Planen är att fortsätta göra båda delarna, det är kul att variera sig :)

wouldn't stop at 7 personally, there is also "Eig" and prob some others

There's at least _thirteen_ ways to say it in Norwegian: jæi, jæ, je, ieg, i, e, eg, æ, æg, ækk, æi, eig, ei.

@@Dragmirejr Minst tretten måtar å segje det på.

Swedish also has jao, ji, i, ig, je and jö.

Norsk og svensk er det same språket.

Northern Norwegian is very different from Urban East Norwegian and Bokmål.

Kan du snakke Nord norsk?

Svensk er nærmare nynorsk enn bokmål.

In Bardu, the dialect is mostly influenced by "dølamål". Not its military presence really. Settlers from gudbrandsdalen and nord-østerdalen which speaks dølamål settled there because of the great flood "stor-ofsen". The danish king granted them new land to settle, because many people had no house or livestock.

@@HR-in8yt Yeah. ^^ Thank you for specifying. I wasn't sure exactly what it was.

Yes, none of the scandinavian peoples would want to be identified as one of the other. I wouldn't want to be called a dane or a swede. Sure we can understand eachother, that doesn't mean we like eachother. They haven't exactly deserved that either.

Haha yes! I'm from Bergen, and whenever I'm in Denmark, people think I'm from Skåne. I admit feeling a little hurt when they do, but would never show it.

@@TheVaff3l Well, I have a Stockholm dialect, and when I was in Copenhagen last time, I was asked by several Danes about which part of Oslo I came from...

@@oskich Hahaha, really? They're not even close to sounding similar to each other

@@TheVaff3l Yeah, I was kind of surprised myself :)

My mistanke. The up and down tonefall with western and eastern is very right. Dialects are still pretty diffrent.

Det er ingen dialekter som berre er nærmare nynorsk, dei som er det er det _på grunn av_ bokmål; alle dei tradisjonelle dialektene var nærmare nynorsk, til og med den tradisjonelle oslodialekta. Bokmål, som er berre litt fornorska skriven dansk, passar berre med standard austnorsk, som er dansk med norsk uttale. Nynorsk er betre for alle dialektene.

"Bare", "ikke", "fra", "da", "å se", "å høre", "å kjøre", "å hete", "å si", "å mene", "å synes", "kommer", "sang", "snø", er ikkje nordnorsk, forresten, dei fleste av deim er ikkje norsk eingong, men dansk. På nordnorsk er det: "bærre", "ikkje", "frå", "då", "å sjå", "å høyre", "å kjøyre", "å heite", "å segje", "å meine", "å synast", "kjæm", "song", "sny".

@@dan74695 Det er flere forskjeller på nordnorsk, men de fleste du la ned der brukes ikke av meg. Høres mer ut som vestdialekter. Bruker heller "Bare", "ikke", "fra", "da", "å se", "å hør", "å kjør", "å het", "å sei", "å mein", "å synes", "kommer", "Sang", "snø", "lyd"

@@overjee Næi, det e ækte nordnorsk. Det som e nærmare bokmål e mæst sannsynlig det _på grunn av_ bokmål.

My computer wanted to be special as I typed this, so that is why the setup is a littel werd. Also Urban East Norwegian is not a dialect.

I think Urban East Norwegian is supposed to be a collection of eastern Norwegian dialects that share similar traits.

@@Neophema So-called Urban East Norwegian is Dano-Norwegian.

Det er for di dei yngre snakkar vanlegvis nærmare bokmål, som er dansk.

wat

I live by the Swedish border and I have never heard inte been used in a normal sentence, only in a mock-formal way. In my dialect we say itte.

As a foreigner, learn the East-Norwegian (Oslo) dialect. It is closer to written bokmål than anything else, and everyone understands you. If people don't understand you, they'll flip over to English in a heartbeat. (This is actually an issue when English speaking people want to learn Norwegians, as the Norwegians will just speak English back instead).

Learning Nynorsk will help you understand both the dialects and Swedish.

For di han er ein av våre brødrar frå aust

Nice

Det er bra

Christine Grunert traitor

Samme her.

Ganske vanlig at det skjer i de store byene da.

samme her

er det sidemålet ditt? eller hovedmål?

Svensk liknar meir på nynorsk enn bokmål.

Nynorsk er ikkje(inte) så vanskeleg(svårt) viss ein kan svensk, og det blir lettare å forstå dialektene og færøysk og islandsk viss ein kan det, så det er bra å læra seg det.

Quite a few dialects have remnants of the old norse case system. In my urban eastern dialect they are all gone, except for in some expressions.

@@Neophema Hmmm, I supposed that nynorsk was more "conservative" and bokmål more simplified due to the danish influence. I also thought that Icelandic and nynorsk were relatively close (at least more than bokmål), therefore nynorsk may had declination in general. Do you know any example of that declination? Could you write it below? ↓ and thanks for the answer! 😄

And northern Norwegian.

Christer Endrè Pedersen, or more like Swedish.

That is rather doubtful, because of things such as the Hanseatic trade, and the close relations with Sweden, that persisted even through-out Danish rule. It is equally likely that we might adopt a language more similar to Sweden if we kept our sovereignty. Iceland and the Faroe Islands kept more of the Old West Norse language due to their relative remoteness from the Norwegian mainland. Meanwhile Danish and Swedish stem from the East Norse strain. But when you look at the difference between West and East Norse, you'll notice that it is rather small, and smaller even than todays differences between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Thus it is clear that it is the interchange due to the relative closeness between these three countries that has developed the languages together in such a similar fashion. But setting conquest and foreign domination aside, it would be good to put Jämtland, Härjedalen and Bohuslän back into the fold. ^^

On second thought, they can keep Bohuslän. I don't want to go all the way to Gothenburg just to buy cheap cigarettes and alcohol...

kebman, yeah, the relative short period of time where Norway was under Swedish controle, probaly didn’t have any majore effect on the language. But I often wonder how the Scandinavian languges would look today, if they hadn’t been strongly influenced by low German during the middelages, more appart or more alike? About 30% of modern Danish are loanwords from low German, although the majority is spelt different it’s quite easy to tell the relation with the language. Also in Norwegian you see words of German origin like Mole, Svart where the Danish words are Muldvarp and Sort, and in Swedish as an exampel Edderkop/p is Spinne -as far as I recal. Finally, here we are writing English whice I find abit odd.

It's mostly due to simple _proximity._ AFAIK the Swedes never tried to make Norwegians write Swedish, and so their lingual influence was _the same_ as even under Harald Fairhair. Still the languages evolved to be very similar. It's because the vikings travelled a lot, and they were always in contact with each other through-out Scandinavia, including those small islets. Moreover, free trade and travel between the Scandinavian countries were always encouraged. Say, did you know that Sweden, Denmark and Norway had a monetary union for almost 50 years since 1875? So yeah, there has always been close cooperation (except for when we had small wars lol). As for Denmark having German loanwords, man, Norse basically _is_ German lol. :) But yeah, I get that the words are a more recent addition. As for English, it is _heavily_ influenced by Norse and Germanic trade and rule. It became _lingua franca_ because of spread of Anglo Saxon culture, for instance through movies and such, especially from Hollywood, but also because of British imperialism. You could find an British colony just about anywhere in the world, so it was the natural language to learn first if you wanted to go abroad. Chances were that you'd always run into someone knowing English way _before_ the other big European languages. And so here we are.

It is quite unusual for a standardized language to permit such optionality. Also yes, it would; there are a lot of correspondences between the Germanic languages in terms of gender assignment :)

Yet the examples for the 3 gender (bil, bok, hus) are all neutral in German even though all 3 words have the same roots as Auto°, Buch, Haus. °Auto & bil both come from the word "automobil".

It's optional in Bokmål, which is Dano-Norwegian, and Danish only has two, standard Danish anyway. It's not optional in Nynorsk.

Nynorsk is very similar to Swedish as well.

This dialect reminds me of Icelandic and Faroese: vallemal.no/talemalet/forteljingar/natur-og-folkekarakter/

Bare ta en titt på håndskriften din

@@eitak7840 Den e stygg som f.

This is irrelevant but ta det med ro, 95% av alle nordmenn har stygg håndskrift

@@nicolaikstaubo5387 Nættop! Det e dærfor runedkrift e svaret😁

Jo, det ville være en god ide, kun 16 tegn at lære.

Jeg synes alltid det er vanskeligt å svare på det spørsmålet... Det kommer jo an på åssen man teller :) Til vanlig pleier jeg å si at jeg snakker fire språk: svensk, engelsk, fransk og tysk, med varierende nivå! Sia kan jeg bruke flere andre språk til en viss grad òg, men jeg ville nok ikke si at jeg _kan_ dem :)

Kannst du dann auch ein Video über Deutsch machen? Das würde mich mega freuen :)

Das möchte ich sehr gerne machen, aber wie immer ist es eine Frage der Zeit! Mal sehen, was passiert :)

Är du svenska?

Norsk, svensk, dansk, tysk og engelsk. Og 10 mill dialækta...

I can talk with you if you have Discord

kebman You are right. I’m Danish and I visit my companys Norwegian office this summer and I was pretty frustated with the Norwegian keyboard having swift the 2 letters😂

@@markmedka1342 Velkommen til Norge! :D

kebman 👍😂

At least the Norwegian Æ is in the same position as the Swedish/Finnish Ä key - The Danish one is just plain wierd ;)

It's custom made for this video.

Unless you plan on living in Norway for extended periods, go with Russian.

Nej, det tycker jag egentligen inte. Skillnaderna mellan BrE och AmE är i jämförelse väldigt obetydliga, och gäller väl mest några mindre grejer i stavningen förutom de lite större skillnaderna i ordförråd. Och den amerikanska stavningsnormen är från början en anpassad variant av den brittiska, vilket också skiljer sig från den norska situationen där båda varianterna har helt olika ursprung. Det är egentligen en så ovanlig situation att det inte finns någon bra jämförelse att göra, jag försökte själv komma på någon utan att lyckas...

Bah, not at all. Bokmål is the traditional standard, so it's like what you call British English (better described as just English). Nynorsk is an attempt to be purer, so that's like speaking standard English and making a special effort not to use Americanisms or other foreign words, perhaps using more Germanic than Romance vocabulary. The equivalent of American English in Norwegian would be if people spoke Swedish and insisted on calling it Norwegian, and every time Norwegian people said, "But this is actual Norwegian" they got told, "Oh, you're just speaking that funny Norway Norwegian. I speak Sweden Norwegian. We have a higher population and invented Ikea, so it's ours now." Then, every time you chose _Norsk_ on your spellcheck, it would actually be in Swedish. You'd have to choose _Norsk (Norge)_ on the rare occasions they even let you have the option. Add to this situation the phenomenon of Swedes being, instead of the charming hippies that they are, a nation of gun-toting sociopaths.

This doesnt make any sense at all.

@@Correctrix This could be the greatest thing I've ever read. :D

@@Correctrix Haha, du gick in hårt på den förklaringen! :)

Because the only other Scandinavian language is Danish and they have a potato stuck in their throat, so they're not able to sing when they speak.

@@sugarinmywounds: Yes, I know that old joke. But seriously, by "Scandinavian" I also mean Faroese and Icelandic, the latter of which, as you know, is the closest to "Proto-Scandnavian" that's still spoken today, and neither of these two have that same upward-downward pitch, either.

@@519djw6 Well, first of all, sorry, but Iceland and the Faroe Islands are not part of Scandinavia. Though they in many ways could be. But they just aren't. Scandinavia is only referring to Norway, Sweden and Denmark. (I don't want to exclude them, but that's just the way it is. I actually adore both Icelandic and Faroese, I can understand some Faroese and love the culture on the islands and kinda want to move there some day.) They're Nordic though. Like Greenland and Finland. Anyway, to answer your question: I'm no linguist or an expert in any way, so I actually don't know. But I don't think all Norwegian and Swedish dialects are that sing-songy. And I kind of think Faroese and Icelandic sometimes are sing-songy in some kinda way. So I think it depends. I think an easy explanation would be that the Danish got their potato from Germany and the Netherlands. Norway and Sweden (and Faroese) got some sing-songy-ness from English or Latin. I think Finnish and Sami also brought alot of sing-songy-ness and that that mixed through Norwegian and Swedish, while Icelandic and Faroese might not have been influenced by anyone in that way, so they kept their harsh consonants and other sounds and the languages developed further towards that than the sing-songy-ness. Now that I think about it I definitely think the Sami and the Kvens influenced us. Sapmi is in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, so that would make sense. Of course all of these are just speculations. A brain dump of what may be some reasons.

@@519djw6 Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese are West-Nordic languages. Swedish and Danish are East-Nordic languages. That's the way they're most often divided.

@@sugarinmywounds: First, I know that neither Iceland nor the Faroe Islands are part of Scandinavia *geographically*--but they *are* Scandinavian languages (all North Germanic languages are Scandinavian, regardless of where they are spoken). And as for Finnish, I used to live in Finland, and know perfectly well that it's not even an Indo-European language. Sorry to be pedantic--but if you don't believe me, please look it up in any reference book. Og jeg ønsker deg et godt nyttår!