ABSTRACT
Norwegian is spoken and written by roughly five million Norwegians, who mostly live in Norway; it is also spoken by expatriate Norwegians elsewhere in the world. There are additionally some few residents of the American Midwest who have Norwegian as a hereditary language. The difficulties in the case of Norwegian are compounded by several interesting facts. Firstly, Norwegian comes in two different written standards; secondly, each of these standards contains a great deal of variation. Learning a foreign language is not necessarily plain sailing, and meeting a lot of variation from the very outset can be confusing. However, the power of the Norwegian kingdom waned in the late 14th century; Norway came to be ruled from Denmark and to be seen as part of that kingdom. Once Norway was administered largely from Copenhagen and the written language was associated with church and crown, it is understandable that the language of written texts came to be Danish.
