Norwegian language News Weather Horoscopes E-mail Visit our sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It is spoken by about 4 million people in Norway and another million in the other Scandinavian countries and North America. Developed by Ivar Aasen, nynorsk was introduced by him in 1853 as part of a nationalistic desire to have a purely Norwegian language for the country. It is based on rural dialects and spoken principally in rural areas.
Norwegian grammar is fairly simple.
The form of the noun is changed only to indicate possession and the plural, and personal inflection of the verb has been discarded. Like Swedish, Norwegian uses pitch accents, but to a lesser degree. The pitch accents give the language a musical quality and are sometimes employed to distinguish the meanings of homonyms. Norwegian employs the Roman alphabet, which was introduced in Norway in the 11th cent. Licensed from Columbia University Press.