Norwegian Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Norwegian Language

The Norwegian language is the official language of Norway. It is spoken by over four and a half million people, and it belongs to the group of North Germanic languages which are spoken in Scandinavia. These include Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faeroese.

The Norwegian language exists in two forms: bokmål (which means "book language") and nynorsk (which means "new Norwegian"). Bokmål developed from the Dano-Norwegian koiné language that evolved under the union of Denmark-Norway in the 16- and 17-century, while Nynorsk was developed based upon a collective of spoken Norwegian dialects. Norwegian is one of the two official languages in Norway. The other is Sami, spoken by some members of the Sami people, mostly in the Northern part of Norway. Norwegian and Sami are not mutually intelligible, as Sami belongs to the Finno-Ugric group of languages. Sami is spoken by less than one percent of people in Norway.

From the 1840s, some writers experimented with a Norwegianised Danish by incorporating words that were descriptive of Norwegian scenery and folk life, and adopting a more Norwegian syntax. Knud Knudsen proposed to change spelling and inflection in accordance with the Dano-Norwegian koiné, known as "cultivated everyday speech." A small adjustment in this direction was implemented in the first official reform of the Danish language in Norway in 1862 and more extensively after his death in two official reforms in 1907 and 1917.

Meanwhile, a nationalistic movement strove for the development of a new written Norwegian. Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, began his work to create a new Norwegian language at the age of 22. He traveled around the country collecting words and examples of grammar from the dialects and comparing the dialects among the different regions. He examined the development of Icelandic, which had largely escaped the influences under which Norwegian had come. He called his work, which was published in several books from 1848 to 1873, Landsmål, meaning "national language". The name "Landsmål" is sometimes interpreted as "rural language" or "country language", but this was clearly not Aasen's intended meaning.

The name of the Danish language in Norway was a topic of hot dispute through the 19th century. Its proponents claimed that it was a language common to Norway and Denmark, and no more Danish than Norwegian. The proponents of Landsmål thought that the Danish character of the language should not be concealed. In 1899, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson proposed the neutral name Riksmål, meaning national language like Landsmål, and this was officially adopted along with the 1907 spelling reform. The name "Riksmål" is sometimes interpreted as "state language", but this meaning is secondary at best. (Compare to Danish rigsmål from where the name was borrowed.)

After the personal union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905, both languages were developed further and reached what is now considered their classic forms after a reform in 1917. Riksmål was in 1929 officially renamed Bokmål (literally "book language"), and Landsmål to Nynorsk (literally "new Norwegian"). A proposition to substitute Danish-Norwegian (dansk-norsk) for Bokmål lost in parliament by a single vote. The name Nynorsk, the linguistic term for modern Norwegian, was chosen to contrast with Danish and emphasis on the historical connection to Old Norwegian. Today, this meaning is often lost, and it is commonly mistaken as a "new" Norwegian in contrast to the "real" Norwegian Bokmål.

Norwegian Translation Expertise

Norway has two official written standards — Bokmal and Nynorsk — and translators must correctly identify which form a source document uses, as vocabulary and grammar differ between them. Bokmal, used by the majority, is closer to Danish, while Nynorsk draws on rural Norwegian dialects. Norwegian compound words can be extremely long and must be unpacked carefully into English, and the language has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) with corresponding article and adjective agreement.

Norwegian uses the Latin alphabet with 29 letters, including the three additional characters ae, o, and a. These are distinct letters at the end of the alphabet, not mere variants, and their correct use is essential — for example, "for" means "for" while "for" (with a stroke) means "drove".

Common Norwegian Documents

Norwegian documents commonly requiring translation include the fødselsattest (birth certificate), vigselsattest (marriage certificate), vitnemål (academic transcript), and politiattest (police clearance certificate).

NAATI certification for Norwegian is available but the number of certified translators is small, given the limited demand. Norwegian speakers in Australia typically have strong English proficiency, reducing the volume of translation work, but official documents still require NAATI-certified translation for immigration purposes.

About the Norwegian Language

Norway is the only country in the world with two official written forms of the same language — Bokmål (based on Danish-influenced urban Norwegian) and Nynorsk (constructed from rural Norwegian dialects) — and all government bodies are legally required to accept both. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are so mutually intelligible that speakers of all three can generally converse with each other in their own languages without switching, a phenomenon linguists call a "dialect continuum." The Norwegian word koselig, roughly meaning a feeling of warmth, togetherness, and contentment, is considered culturally untranslatable and has been called Norway's equivalent of Danish hygge.