Norway S Languages

John Landrø

EN-113English CommunicationAugust24 2005

Lesson03

Norway’s languages

By professor Eyvind Fjeld Halvorsen

Of Norway's population of just over four million, 95 percent speak Norwegian as their native language. Everyone who speaks Norwegian, whether a local dialect or one of the two standard languages, can be understood by other Norwegians. In Norway - as in other countries - not everyone understands everyone equally well, and especially people from the capital claim that they have a tough time understanding their countrymen from outlying districts, while those from the rural areas have no problems understanding the language of Osloites. In the areas where Norwegian is spoken, there are no real language obstacles. However, the minority Sami language is not related to Norwegian, and it is incomprehensible to Norwegian speakers who have not learned it. Norway has two official written languages, standard Norwegian and New Norwegian. They have equal status, i.e. they are both used in public administration, in schools, churches, and on radio and television. Books, magazines and newspapers are published in both languages. The inhabitants of local communities decide themselves which language is to be used as the language of instruction in the school attended by their children. Officially, the teaching language is called the primary tongue and the other language the second tongue. Students read material written in the second language and the at the upper secondary school level they should demonstrate an ability to write in that language. This is a consequence, among others, of a requirement of public employees to answer letters in the language preferred by the sender.

Over 80 percent of the Norwegian school children have standard Norwegian as their primary language, between 16 and 17 percent are New Norwegian speakers. The primary language of all cities is standard Norwegian; the same applies to the relatively thickly populated areas surrounding the Oslo fjord, and the lowlands of East Norway. New Norwegian dominates in the fjord country along the west coast and the mountain districts of central Norway. The rules regarding the selection or possible change of a school's main language are established by law.

While the percentage-wise distribution of the two languages in the schools has been fairly stable over the last 15-20 years, this does not mean that perfect peace and harmony prevail among the two tongues. From the percentage claimed by the respective languages, it's clear that standard Norwegian predominates, as it always has done. Standard Norwegian is the language of choice of the major newspapers, the weekly magazines, and paperback novels. Because the cities and most industrial areas use standard Norwegian to train new employees, the language prevails in business and advertising. Standard Norwegian was developed from a form of Danish that was freely spoken by government officials and by leading social circles in the cities; it therefore had the prestige of being the preferred speech of people with higher education and aspirations. It has the same function as standard speech in other countries, as well as serving as a status symbol.

New Norwegian has the upper hand in districts where the population is stable and most speak their traditional dialect. Standardised New Norwegian is therefore usually not spoken in the local communities where it is the teaching language and is mainly used in places where the inhabitants hail from different places where the inhabitants hail from different parts of the country.

All the Nordic countries now have official bodies concerned with national languages. In Norway the entity is called the Norwegian Language Council. It has 38 members, half from each of the two language camps. The Council's purpose is to foster mutual tolerance and respect between everyone who uses Norwegian in one or another form, and to carry out practical language work - orthography, terminology, advisory functions, etc. The rules for handling cases are set up so that questions that mainly concerns one language are resolved by representatives for this language without interference from the other half.

(Extract from an article on Norway's languages produced for the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by NORINFORM. The author alone is responsible for the content of the article. Issued in May 1989.)

II. An English-speaking world

The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist. Five hundred years later, Englisc, a language we would not understand, did exist, but only a few people spoke it. Nearly a thousand years later, at the end of the sixteenth century, when William Shakespeare was writing his plays, there were still only between five and seven million speakers.

Four hundred years later, the contrast is extraordinary. Between 1600 and the present, speakers of English have travelled into every corner of the globe carrying their language and culture with them. Today English is used by at least 750 million people and barely half of those speak it as a mother tongue. At the end of the twentieth century, English is more widely spoken and written than any other language has ever been. It has become the first truly global language.

Of all the world’s languages (which number some 27,000) it is the richest in vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words. There are half a million more technical and scientific terms that remain un-catalogued.

About 350 million people use English as a mother tongue. Native speakers of English, about one-tenth of the world’s population, are outnumbered only by speakers of the many varieties of Chinese. Three-quarters of the world’s mail, its telexes and cables are in English. So are more than half the world’s technical and scientific periodicals: it is the language of technology. 80 per cent of the information stored in the world’s computers is in English. Nearly half of all business deals are made in English. It is the language of sports and glamour. English is the official voice of the air, of the sea and of Christianity: it is the language of the World Council of Churches. Five of the largest broadcasting companies in the world transmit in English to audiences that total more than one hundred million people.

III. A second language

Speakers of English as a native language live scattered all over the world, in places like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Equally important is the fact that English is spoken by three or four hundred million people for whom it is not a native language. English is spoken as a second language in countries like India, Nigeria and Singapore where it is used for administration, broadcasting and education. When Rajiv Gandhi appealed for an end to the violence that broke out after the assassination of his mother, Mrs Indira Gandhi, he spoke English on television. In Africa seizures of power are announced in English.

In countries like India and Nigeria, English is used at all levels of society: in local English-language newspapers and broadcasting, in major industries, in university education, in the courts and civil service. Indeed, with nearly 200 languages, India needs English to unify the country. Professor Lal, a champion of Indian English, claims that in India with its population of 750 million, more people speak, read and write English than in England itself.

IV. A foreign language

Then there is English as a foreign language. Used in countries like Norway and the Netherlands, the language helps people in these countries gain contact with people in other lands, it promotes trade and scientific progress. In fact, the more English becomes a global language, the more people want to speak it.

The demand of modernization, technological change and international banking provide the main reason for global English, the language of multinational corporations. Many multinational Japanese companies (like Nissan or Datsun) write international memoranda in English. The Chase Manhattan Bank gives English instructions to staff members on three continents. English is used on the oil rigs of Norway, and Aramco, a big oil multinational, teaches English to more than 10,000 workers in Saudi Arabia.

For developing countries like Singapore, Indonesia or China, English is vital. In the 1980s China’s decision to develop its industrial and technological base has led to a crash programme of English teaching. As well as being the language of international trade and finance, it is the language of technology, especially computers, of medicine and international agencies like the United Nations, UNESCO, WHO, the Olympic Committee and world summits

The story of English is as exiting as the people in the world who make use of it. For if people in the west recognize English as the language of commerce and technology, people in the third world see it as the language which will help them give voice to their aspirations and their culture. For the youth of the world it is the exciting language of protest, rock music and slang. It is a language that gives people a voice and new worlds of words, but it is also a language that absorbs and creates words by the thousands.

‘The English language’, wrote the American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘is the sea which received tributaries from every region under heaven … Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.’

(From The Story of the English language)