Today there are two official forms of written Norwegian, Bokmål (Riksmål) and Nynorsk (Landsmål), each with its own variants. Norwegian is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. While the two Germanic languages with the greatest numbers of speakers, English and German, have close similarities with Norwegian, neither is mutually intelligible with it.

Faroese and Icelandic are not mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close. Norwegian (Norwegian: norsk ( listen)) is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Areas where Norwegian is spoken, including North Dakota (where 0.4% of the population speaks Norwegian), western Wisconsin (<0.1% of the population), and Minnesota (0.1% of the population) (Data: U.S.

Norsk to english