Norwegian translations for your company

The Norwegian language, commonly called “Norsk,” is spoken by approximately five million people. It is made up of two different individual languages, which have had equal official status since 1885, and which have been called “Bokmål” (literally “book language”) and “Nynorsk” (Modern Norwegian) since 1929. Both belong to the North Germanic language group of the Indo-European language family. Because of the country’s natural topography, there are numerous extremely varied dialects.

The Norwegian language has a turbulent history: Old Norwegian (about 1050–1350) was severely undermined by the plague of 1349/50, and Middle Norwegian (about 1350–1525) was exposed to numerous foreign language influences – such as Low German, Swedish and Danish – and following unification with Denmark (1397) was completely displaced by Danish by the end of the 18th century. After the union with Denmark came to an end (1814), the revival of Norwegian began as part of a national romantic movement. On the one hand, Danish was “Norwegianized”, which resulted in today’s “Bokmål”. On the other, ancient dialects (including their vocabulary and grammar) were adopted, which today form the basis of “Nynorsk.”
Both languages are purely written languages, which means that neither of them has a uniform pronunciation. About 90 percent of Norwegians speak and write “Bokmål” – it is grammatically less complex than and very similar to Danish; “Nynorsk” is spoken and written by about ten to twelve percent of Norwegians, although linguistically most Norwegian dialects are closer to it.