I remember my Norwegian professor (the only native professor I had at St. Olaf) telling our class one time that the Norwegian language is barbaric. Think of what it would have sounded like to listen to barbarians talk to each other. “He go to movie theater.” “She want to Spain.” In current American English, we would say “He wants to go to the movie theater.” “She wants to travel to Spain.” In Norwegian these phrases would translate to “Han går på kino.” “Hun skal til Spania.” They are a lot shorter and quite frankly, just more simple. They look and sound a bit barbaric, don’t they?

The simplicity of the language is one of the reasons why I love it so much. Norwegian verbs do not require conjugation. For example, “I go, you go, he/she goes, we go, you (pl.) go, they go” in Norwegian is “jeg går, du går, han/hun går, vi går, dere går, and de går.” The verb stays the same regardless of the subject. When you think about it, why would verbs in the same tense ever need to be conjugated? As far as I’m concerned, there is no purpose.

Not only are verbs in the same tense not conjugated, but sometimes you can simply leave a word out and people will completely understand you. In the first paragraph I shared a couple of phrases that seem like they are missing something. In Norwegian when you say you are going to the movies or going skiing or going on a walk you can simply say “jeg går på kino” or “jeg går på ski” or “jeg går på tur.” The key of course is knowing which of these phrases operate this way and which do not. Just thought I’d applaud the language for being so simple sometimes.

As I was writing the above pronouns, I caught myself capitalizing pronouns such as I. In Norwegian, the only time the pronoun “I” (jeg) is capitalized is when it begins a sentence. Days of the week and months of the year follow the same rule-only at the beginning of a sentence are they capitalized. And back to “I” not being capitalized…I think I might have an idea about why this is the case…perhaps the Janteloven. I will write a post on this at a later date.

Stay tuned!

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