ABSTRACT
Danish and Norwegian are both Indo-European languages, historically and structurally related to Dutch, English and German. With the exception of Finnish, the Scandinavian languages constitute the sub-group termed ‘Nordic’, but Danish and Norwegian belong to different subtypes: Danish (with Swedish) belongs to the East Nordic group, Norwegian (with Icelandic and Faroese) to the West Nordic. However, the language situation in Norway is complicated by the fact that for over 400 years (1397–1814) Denmark and Norway formed one state, to which also belonged Schleswig-Holstein, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and, after its rediscovery in the eighteenth century, Greenland.
