Native Name
Norsk, Bokmål

Official Language: Norway

Background
It belongs to the Indo-European family, Germanic group, Scandinavian subgroup, and is spoken by over 4 million people. Norwegian developed from the Old Norse spoken in the Viking age and is closely related to both Danish and Swedish. Norway has hundreds of dialects of spoken Norwegian but there are two main varieties: «Bokmål» (book language), based on literary Norwegian Danish, and serving as the written norm for most of the dialects of the larger urban centres, and «Nynorsk» (new Norwegian), created by philologist Ivar Andreas Aasen and serving as the written norm for most of the dialects of rural areas and smaller urban centres. It is worth noting that Nynorsk and Bokmål are pure written languages. At school most pupils choose to learn Bokmål, while Nynorsk is a minority language protected by law. Attempts to combine the two into “Samnorsk” (common Norwegian) have so far been unsuccessful. English words of Norwegian origin include “fiord”, “slalom”, “troll”, “lemming”, “auk” and “narwhal”.

Reprinted from www.unhchr.ch/udhr/