What language spoken in Norway

1. Norwegian: the country’s everyday tongue and its two written faces

Norwegian is the primary language of Norway and belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo‑European family; it exists in a wide range of spoken dialects while official written life is organised around two co‑equal standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk ^{[4] [1]}. Bokmål is the dominant written form used in most schools, commerce and media, especially around Oslo and the eastern lowlands, while Nynorsk has stronger roots in the west and mountain regions and is the preferred written standard in many rural municipalities ^{[5] [2]}.

2. What “two written standards” means in practice

The split into Bokmål and Nynorsk is primarily orthographic and institutional rather than a simple spoken/dialectal split: people speak many local dialects that do not map cleanly onto one written form, and both written standards are officially equal for administration and education ^{[1] [6]}. Schools generally teach one as the main written standard and the other as a subject, and public bodies must comply with rules for Bokmål and Nynorsk spelling ^{[7] [2]}.

3. Sámi: the indigenous languages with legal protection

Sámi languages are recognised and protected as indigenous languages in Norway; Northern Sámi is the most widely spoken Sámi variety in Norway with roughly on the order of tens of thousands of speakers, and Lule and South Sámi have much smaller speaker bases ^{[1] [8]}. In designated Sami administrative areas you will encounter bilingual signage and public‑service rights in Sámi—Sámi enjoys constitutional and legal recognition alongside Norwegian ^{[1] [6]}.

4. Other minority and migrant languages visible in Norway

Beyond Norwegian and Sámi, Norway is linguistically diverse: the Kven language, Romani, and immigrant languages such as Tigrinya and Dari are present in communities across the country, and some of these enjoy varying degrees of local recognition or protection ^{[8] [9]}. Available sources do not list an exhaustive census of every migrant language but note that English is widely spoken as a second language by most Norwegians ^{[1] [3]}.

5. Legal and policy context: state efforts to manage language use

Norway’s Language Act and institutions such as the Language Council set orthographic standards and promote Norwegian while safeguarding minority languages: the law codifies Norwegian sign language’s status and imposes duties on public bodies to use plain, correct language and to follow official orthography for Bokmål and Nynorsk ^[7]. The policy balance is explicit: strengthening Norwegian as a unifying language while preserving Sámi and other minority languages in the public sphere ^{[7] [6]}.

6. Practical takeaways for visitors, students and journalists

If you go to Norway you will overwhelmingly hear Norwegian; in urban areas and across media, Bokmål predominates in writing, but dialects vary widely and people commonly understand neighbouring Scandinavian languages to some degree ^{[5] [4]}. English functions as a near‑universal second language for practical interaction, while Sámi and other minority languages appear mainly in northern communities and in institutional contexts with legal protections ^{[3] [1]}.

Limitations and differing emphases in sources: some outlets frame Sámi as one of “two official languages” (counting Norwegian and North Sámi) while others emphasise that Norwegian (with its two written forms) and Sámi are both officially recognised—this reflects different editorial choices in summarising Norway’s legal and cultural arrangements rather than a factual contradiction ^{[10] [1]}. Available sources do not provide a single, unified numeric tally of exact speaker counts for every language; when numbers are cited they vary by source and by year ^{[1] [8]}.