Norwegian is the language in Norway, a country that has about 5 million inhabitants and approximately only 19 million people, the Scandinavians, do understand it effortlessly. Norwegian belongs to the Scandinavian language group, Germanic language group and the Indo-European family. This language originated from the Old Norse language that was spoken during the Viking area. The language is closely linked to both Swedish and Danish. There are hundreds of spoken dialects in Norway, but there are only two main written languages of Norwegian.

The first written language is Nynorsk also known as the New Norwegian. It was developed by philologist Ivar Aasen and serves as the written standard for many of the dialects of the rural regions and the small urban areas. The second is Bokmal also known as the book language. It has its basis on the literary Norwegian-Danish and serves as the written standard for many of the dialects used in larger urban centers. It is more like Swedish than Danish in terms of pronunciation, but similar to Danish in terms of the written form. Both Bokmal and Nynorsk are pure written languages.

Most pupils choose to learn Bokmal at school while the law protects Nynorsk as a minority language. There have been efforts to combine these two languages into "Samnorsk" or common Norwegian but these attempts have so far been futile. It is important to note that there are words with Norwegian origin in the English language such as 'slalom', 'lemming', 'narwhal', 'auk', 'troll' and 'fiord'.

There are number of reasons why one would want to learn Norwegian. These can range from having relatives who currently live in Norway, a planned vacation to Norway so as to visit and see the fabulous nature and get to experience the culture of the Vikings, having your ancestry rooted in Norway or that you want to learn Norwegian in order to get a job in Norway.

Norwegian is easy in terms of grammar and has an advantage of general vocabulary as with most languages in Western Europe. It is very easy for an average English speaker to learn and understand. Its word order is closer to English and differs from the other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch and therefore the learner is able to get by on many occasions without having to consider the word order all the time.

One can learn Norwegian online free of charge by utilizing the free resources that are available online. In most of these sites, there are various learning methods. One can learn phrases in the language by choosing the phrases that they want to learn from the lists on the sites. These phrases cover a wide selection of Norwegian topics such as Norwegian greetings, the numbers in Norwegian as well as the days of the week and months. These phrases are audio recorded by a native Norwegian speakers. When getting started with Norwegian language lessons, it is recommended that one begin with the pronunciation guide as part of the tutorial. In most cases it will be beneficial with a teacher who can guide you and give you the necessary feedback in order to truly master the language and give support with these tutorials. There are other options for learning a little Norwegian as well e.g. online learning games to make language learning fun.