When a child is two they are scheduled for a check-up at the health clinic with a child nurse.  The main aim of the check-up is to see how the child is doing with language development.  Before the appointment the clinic will send out a little questionnaire about your child’s basic language achievements – words, [...]

Old Norse had a great impact on the English language during the Viking Age.  However, even in modern day speech, with the introduction of new words, I find many parallels to English and Norwegian.  In Australia (at least) we have a word ‘more-some’.  I don’t know how it started – it could have been inspired [...]

Sometimes English-speaking movie titles don’t translate well into Norwegian so the titlists have to get creative.  Sometimes they just don’t bother and other times they put in a little too much effort.  Here are some of the more common changes in titles:
Movie Title: The Pacifier
Norwegian Title: Opperasjon barnevakt
English Translation: Operation Babysitter
Movie Title: Enchanted
Norwegian Title: Eventyr [...]

I was at the movies with my Norwegian friend the other day and she asked me ‘Har du en bong med deg? (Have you a ‘bong’ with you?’)  I stopped ‘I didn’t think it was that kind of movie!’  A moment of ‘what the?’ passed.  In her sentence I knew every word except bong and [...]

Hei, alle sammen!
In this Podcast we revise some of the basic conversational questions and answers from the last couple of podcast lessons.  The exercises encourage you to listen, think and speak.  Make sure you say the sentences out loud so you can judge if you are pronouncing them properly.
NOTE: You will notice a difference between [...]

One thing you may notice when traveling or comminucating internationally is that every country has their own way of placing dots, commas and other symbols. Norway certainly is no exception. Here is a short list of “the Norwegian Way” of writing:
Thousands separators:
Norway does not use commas to separate thousands, millions etc. Instead, they use spaces:
5 [...]

Morphology is the study of words.  How words are structured, patterned and evolve tell us a lot about who influenced what language.  In How Vikings Changed the English Language: Spelling we discussed how words were spelt in Old English and Norse – phonetically.  However, as English went through the Great Vowel Shift English spelling was [...]

I always hear from other immigrants that Norwegians are rude as they don’t talk to you on the street.  However, this is always due to the misunderstanding of Norwegian culture and character.
The Norwegian language is about saying something with as little fuss as possible.  In English, to be polite when you meet a friend you’d [...]

The origin of Modern Norwegian is fairly straight forward.  One language evolved into another and so forth without too much complication (compared to English).  As mentioned in How Vikings Changed the English Language: First Contact, one of the ways that scholars announce that a language existed is by written evidence.  A lot of the earlier [...]

I never thought I would have a bilingual family. Language is never an issue when you marry one of your own countrymen. However, I married a Norwegian, and so language has become an everyday battle in my family’s life.
When raising children in a bilingual family you need to decide how you are going [...]