A Norwegian smörgåsbord


Okay, “smörgåsbord” is a Swedish borrowing, but close enough. It’s appropriate for this post, which will be a buffet of miscellaneous facts about the Norwegian language.

I became interested in and started learning Norwegian because my brother has been living in Oslo for the past several years, where he is getting his Ph.D. in lichenology.[1] My family and I traveled to visit him last summer. To characterize the country in a few words, I’d say Norway is – more iconically – Vikings, fjords, trolls, nature, Norse mythology, and – more personally – lichens, stellar black coffee, gross sweet brown cheese, overly-restricted booze-purchasing hours, part of my paternal ancestry, and vampires.[2]

Heddal stavkirke (stave church), built in the early 13th century

So what’s cool about Norwegian?


First (as I mentioned in one of the recent dialect posts), Norwegian forms a dialect continuum with Swedish and Danish, languages with which it is, to a greater or lesser extent, mutually intelligible. These are Scandinavian or North Germanic languages, along with Icelandic and Faroese. My brother, who now has a decent command of Norwegian, says he can understand Swedish relatively well too, although Danish is harder. Have a listen to differences between Danish and Norwegian in this video.

However, there are also a staggering number of Norwegian dialects spread across Norway. People claim it’s often harder to understand someone from a different part of the country (for example, Oslo inhabitants vs. speakers of trøndersk, a group of sub-dialects in north-central Trøndelag county) than it is to understand a Swede speaking Swedish. Wikipedia corroborates: “Variations in grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation cut across geographical boundaries and can create a distinct dialect at the level of farm clusters. Dialects are in some cases so dissimilar as to be unintelligible to unfamiliar listeners.”

There are two official standard forms for the written language, even if there is no standard for spoken Norwegian (since local dialects rule in most situations). Bokmål (literally “book tongue”) is used in the majority of publications, and Nynorsk (“new Norwegian”) in under 10% of written communication.

Lexicon and Morphology

Onto smaller language-y bits: words and morphemes. Norwegian is super fun because it is prone to extensive compounding (like German), and these compounds often break down into etymologically amusing or charming pieces. By this I mean that the component words reveal interesting (but usually sensible) semantic relationships with the larger compound. Let me give you some examples:

Norwegian compound English word Individual morphemes
fruktkjøtt “pulp” frukt (“fruit”) + kjøtt (“meat”)  ⇒  “fruit meat”
matbit “snack” mat (“food”) + bit (“bite”)  ⇒  “food bite”
sommerfugl “butterfly” sommer (“summer”) + fugl (“bird”) ⇒  “summer bird”
morkake “placenta” mor (“mother”) + kake (“cake”)  ⇒  “mother cake”
verdensrommet “(outer) space” verden (“world”) + s (possessive) + romm (“room”) + et (“the”)  ⇒  “the room of the world”
skyehus “hospital” skye (“sick”) + hus (“house”)  ⇒  “sick house”
grønnsak “vegetable” grøn (“green”) + sak (“thing”)  ⇒  “green thing”
støvsuger “vacuum cleaner” støv (“dust”) + suger (“suck[er]”)  ⇒  “dust suck[er]”
flaggermus “bat” flagger (“flying”) + mus (“mouse”)  ⇒  “flying mouse”
piggsvin “hedgehog” pig (“spike”) + svin (“pig”)  ⇒  “spike pig”



Rest stop on the road back to Oslo. Rømmegraut is the Nynorsk word for a traditional porridge – kind of like cream of wheat, but sweeter and topped with butter.

One facet of Norwegian morphosyntax that was novel to me is the structure of its determiners. In English, both definite (“the”) and indefinite (“a / an”) articles are independent words that always precede their noun or noun phrase. So we have:

“the house”          “the big blue house”
“a house”             “a big blue house”

The same is true for the Romance languages I know about (French, Spanish, Italian), the other Germanic language I’m familiar with (German)… and it is simply not relevant for the Asian languages I’ve dabbled in (Japanese, Cantonese) because they lack articles entirely.

In Norwegian (as well as in Swedish and Danish), indefinite articles are, familiarly, the independent words which precede the noun, while definite articles are actually suffixes, which attach to the end of the noun they modify. What’s more – if you place something in front of the noun, like an adjective or a number, there’s another set of determiners to use, called demonstratives (in English: this, that, these, those). These precede the noun phrase (adjective/number + noun), where the noun already contains its definite suffix. Again, a table might help illustrate:

Norwegian (Bokmål) determiners

Indefinite articles

Definite articles

Masc. singular

Fem. singular

Neuter singular

Masc. singular

Fem. singular

Neuter singular







en sykkel
“a bicycle”

ei jente
“a girl”

et hus
“a house”

“the car”

“the door”

“the house”

Demonstratives + noun phrase




den røde bilen
“the red car”

den røde døra
“the red door”

det røde huset
“the red house”

Because Norwegian and English are closely related in their linguistic genealogy, a native English speaker may have less trouble learning Norwegian than, say, Taa (also known as !Xóõ, a southern African language with possibly the largest phoneme inventory in the world, including dozens of clicks) – but as the determiner situation here demonstrates, it’s still no piece of bløtkake.


View (!) from our rental house deck on Hardangerfjord

Phonology and Prosody

Norwegian is what’s called a pitch-accent language. There are roughly three categories of languages when it comes to stress and pitch. Here’s a super abridged breakdown [3]:

  1. Stress-accented languages

Stress (emphasis) is placed on a syllable in a word, or on a word in a phrase/sentence. This can create a difference in word meaning, but it doesn’t have to. Stress is a combination of loudness, length, and higher pitch.

  • Example languages: English, Czech, Finnish, Classical Arabic, Quechua, Italian
  • Example words/phrases [English]:
    • On a word in a sentence (no difference in meaning) – “I REALLY like your jacket”
    • On a syllable in a word (meaning difference) –

REcord vs. reCORD
INcrease vs. inCREASE
PERmit vs. perMIT

  1. Pitch-accented languages

A syllable on a word/morpheme is accentuated by a particular pitch contour (instead of by stress). So only pitch is involved, not loudness or length. Distinct tonal patterns occur in words that otherwise look and sound the same, giving them different meanings.

  • Example languages: Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish, Filipino, Yaqui (a Native American language)
  • Example words/phrases [Norwegian]:
    • Norwegian has two kinds of tonal accents or pitch patterns:


(Audio extracted from video by “Norwegian Teacher – Karin”)

hender – “hands” vs. hender – “happens”
ånden – “the spirit” vs. ånden – “the breath”
bønder – “farmer” vs. bønner – “beans”
været – “the weather” vs. være – “to be”

  1. Tonal languages

Each syllable of the language has an independent tone or pitch contour. Tones are used to distinguish between words (they create a difference in meaning between words that otherwise look and sound the same).

  • Example languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Zulu, Navajo, Yucatec (a Mayan language)
  • Examples words/phrases [Mandarin]:
    • Tones combine with the syllable ma, resulting in different words:
  1. “mother” [high level tone]
  2. “hemp” [mid pitch rising to high pitch]
  3. “horse” [low with slight fall]
  4. “scold” [short, sharply falling tone]
  5. ma (an interrogative particle) [neutral, used on weak syllables]


The pitch-accent feature of Norwegian contributes to the language’s sing-song quality. Just listen to the melodiousness of Norway’s King Harald V as he gives a speech:

(Audio extracted from full NRK video)


Norwegian writing uses the same Latin alphabet as English, except that it has three additional letters at the end – æ, ø, and å. I highly recommend insist that you watch this ridiculous video to hear how the vowels are pronounced, as well as be entertained in musically nerdy fashion. (Final note: Contrary to the video’s main argument, several letters – c, q, w, x, and z – are not actually used to spell Norwegian-native words, although they’re sometimes used in loan words. One could therefore quibble that they shouldn’t count towards the alphabet size…)




[1] If you want to ogle some gorgeous macrophotography of lichens, scope out his Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/lichens_of_norway/.

[2] The ancient stave churches for some reason reminded me of True Blood (plus three of the show’s main characters, Eric, Pam, and Godric, were Swedish and Norwegian); also I was coincidentally reading The Vampire Lestat while we were there… but NO I’m not generally obsessed with vampires.

[3] This subject gets really complex. There are a lot more subtleties and distinctions than I make above.

O Syntax Tree, O Syntax Tree!






  • The words of a phrase/sentence
  • Part of speech for each word, usually abbreviated
  • Larger phrases, also abbreviated
  • Relationships between all of the words and phrases










  1. A set of rules like:



VP → VP PP  (etc.)


  1. A start symbol: S













* * * * *







I heart hangry bagel droids (or: How new words form)


You’re probably familiar with the old adage “the only thing that’s constant is change.” Still, so many people tend to think about language as a relatively fixed affair. I’ve said it before (and will inevitably say it again): all living languages change all the time, and at all levels – phonological (sounds!), morphological (word-bits!), lexical (words!), syntactic (clauses!), and semantic (meaning!).

Historical linguistics (also known as diachronic linguistics) is the study of how and why languages change over time. In this post I’m going to discuss categories of change at the morphological and lexical levels – how new words come into being. In the future, I’ll explore semantic and perhaps phonological change.

Without further ado, here are the main mechanisms of word formation. Almost all examples are for English, but these formation types apply to other languages as well. (NOTE: Processes are not mutually exclusive. It is quite possible for a word to undergo multiple processes simultaneously, or one on the heels of another.)

  1. Derivation

New words are born by adding affixes to existing words. Affixes are bound[1] morphemes that can be prefixes, suffixes, and even (for certain languages, although not really for English) infixes and circumfixes. Derivation is a very common process cross-linguistically.

Zero derivation (also known as conversion) is a special case where a new word, with a new word class (part of speech) is created from an existing word of a different class, without any change in form.

(Derivation) hater [hate + -er], truthiness [truth + -i (-y) + -ness], deglobalization [de- + globalization], hipsterdom [hipster + -dom]

(Zero derivation) heart as verb, as in “I heart coffee” [heart as noun]; friend as verb, as in “he friended me on Facebook” [friend as noun]; green as noun, in the golf lawn sense [green as adjective]; down as verb, as in “Hector downed a beer” [down as preposition]

  1. Back-formation

This process creates a new word through the removal of true or incorrectly assumed affixes. It’s kind of the opposite of derivation. This one is easier to explain through examples:

New word

Derived from older word


donate, automate, resurrect


donation, automation, resurrection


The nouns were borrowed into English first from Latin. The verbs were back-formed later by discarding the -ion suffix, which speakers did through analogy with other Latinate verb and (-ion) noun pairs that already existed in English.



The older form was initially a mass noun (like water or sand), but was reanalyzed as plural. People then dropped the “plural” -s(e) to form the “singular” count noun pea.

beg, edit, hawk


beggar, editor, hawker


Speakers mistook the -ar, -or, and ­-er on the ends of these nouns (respectively) for the agentive suffix (that did/does exist in English), and removed it to form corresponding verbs.

lime-a-rita, mango-rita

appletini, kiwini



Actually examples of folk etymology, which is related to back-formation. Here, speakers incorrectly assumed that -rita in margarita and –(t)ini in martini were separate morphemes (indicating the class of cocktail). Under that assumption, they switched out the rest of the word and substituted it with morphemes indicating new twists/ingredients.

  1. Blending

Also known as portmanteaus. Blends are produced by combining two or more words, where parts of one or both words are deleted.

Examples: smog [smoke + fog], brunch [breakfast + lunch], infomercial [information + commercial], bromance [bro + romance], hangry [hungry + angry], clopen [close + open][2]

  1. Borrowing

Also known as loan words. These are expressions taken from other languages. Pronunciation is usually altered to fit the phonological rules of the borrowing language.

Examples: algebra [from Arabic], ménage à trois [from French], whisky [from Scots Gaelic or Irish], bagel [from Yiddish], doppelgänger [from German], karaoke [from Japanese]

  1. Coinage

Words can be created outright to fit some purpose. Many of these are initially product names.

Examples: Xerox, Kleenex, Jell-O, Google, zipper, Frisbee

  1. Compounding

Two or more words join together to form a compound. Frequently the joining words are nouns, but they can belong to different parts of speech, including verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc. Compounds can be separated by spaces, by hyphens, or glued to each other with nothing intervening.

Examples: homework, grocery store, mother-of-pearl, first world problem, binge-watch, weaksauce, fake news

  1. Eponyms

These are words that derive from proper nouns – usually people and place names. If a proper noun is used frequently enough and across multiple contexts, it eventually becomes a common noun (or verb or adjective).

Examples: sandwich [after the fourth Earl of Sandwich], gargantuan [after Gargantua, name of the giant in Rabelais’ novels], boycott [after Capt. Charles C. Boycott], mesmerize [a back-formation from mesmerism, in turn after Franz Anton Mesmer], sadism [after the Marquis de Sade]

  1. Reducing

Several types of reducing processes exist.  The main ones are clipping, acronyms, and initialisms.

a. Clipping

New words can be formed by shearing one or more syllables off an existing longer word. Syllables can be removed from the word’s beginning, end, or both.

Examples: fax [facsimile], flu [influenza], droid [android], fridge [refrigerator], blog [weblog]

b. Acronyms

Words are created from the initial letters of several other words. Acronyms are pronounced as regular words (in contrast to initialisms below).

Examples: NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], RAM [random-access memory], FOMO [fear of missing out]

c. Initialisms

Also known as Alphabetisms. Like with acronyms, a word is created from the initial letters of other words, but the resulting term is pronounced by saying each letter. This usually happens when the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word according to the phonological rules of the language.

Examples: NFL [National Football League], UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], WTF [what the fuck]

  1. Reduplication

Reduplication is one of my favorite phenomena.[3] It’s a process whereby a word or sound is repeated or nearly repeated to form a new word/expression. This is a productive morphological process (meaning, it’s part of the grammar and happens frequently and rather systematically) in many languages – South-East Asian and Austronesian languages particularly (e.g. Malay, Tagalog, Samoan). It’s not an especially productive process in English, although it does still happen.

(English) wishy-washy, teensy-weensy, goody-goody, cray-cray, po-po

(Samoan) savali [‘he travels’ – third person singular + verb]; savavali [‘they travel’ – third person plural + verb]

* * * * *

Phew! Since hopefully you can see the light at the end of this long lexical tunnel, I’ll mention that of course languages lose words as well. Diverse factors motivate word loss, but that’s a subject for another post. A few quick examples of words that have fallen out of favor in English:

pell-mell [in a disorderly, reckless, hasty manner]; davenport [couch/sofa – my grandma used to say this]; grass [for marijuana – my mom still says this]; porridge [an oatmeal-like dish boiled in water or milk]; tumbrel [a farmer’s cart for hauling manure]; fain [gladly or willingly]

* * * * *

And now… ADD WORDS TO THE SPREADSHEET – Word shenanigans!

I’ve got almost 200 in there to start us off. If you’re not sure about the process for any particular word, just leave it blank or take a guess. Free bagel droids[4] to all who contribute.


[1] Bound meaning they cannot exist on their own, but must be attached to another morpheme.

[2] Describes a shitty situation where one has to work a closing shift followed by an opening shift. We used this term as bartenders, although I’d never seen it in print until recently. It came up in some paperwork I had to sign relating to work week ordinances, and then I saw it here as well.

[3] Some languages even have triplication – where the sound/word is copied twice!

[4] Kidding! These do not exist outside of my head. Sorry.

What is linguistics, and what do linguists do?


I love patterns. They’re how we learn and evolve, and they’re everywhere.

Here’s a pattern for you.
When I tell someone new that I do linguistics, their response often goes like this:

Nod and/or smile and/or give small verbal acknowledgment.
Slight awkward pause.
“And what is linguistics again exactly?”[1]

People know that linguistics has to do with language, but beyond that, things get fuzzy. My goal with this post is to unfuzz (defuzz? disfuzz?) the basics of the field.

Most succinctly put, “Linguistics is the scientific study of language”. Like all sciences, linguistics is about patterns. Identifying them, analyzing them, making generalizations about them, making predictions (or hypotheses) from the generalizations, and then testing the predictions. What does that mean more specifically?

Well, what is language? Language is a conventionalized and arbitrary pairing of form and meaning. The form is usually sound, but it can also be gesture – in the case of sign language. There are many levels at which we might observe and analyze such form-meaning pairings, and these levels comprise the main subfields of the linguistics discipline. I’ll introduce each subfield through a couple of questions:

  1. How do our mouth, tongue, and throat produce consonants versus vowels? How do we segment a continuous stream of speech into words, so that we may understand it? How do we perceive sounds as belonging to our native language(s) versus other languages?

The study of speech sounds is Phonetics, and speech patterns, Phonology.

  1. What is going on when we add the prefix un- to the word happy, and the resulting word (unhappy) means the opposite of happy? How do words like steampunktoberfest, appletini, or totes come about? Why is the plural for cat cats, while the plural for mouse is mice?

The study of word structure and formation is Morphology.

  1. Why do we say the red car in English (with the adjective before the noun), when French has la voiture rouge and Spanish el coche rojo (both with the adjective after the noun)? Why is the interpretation of John saw the man with a telescope ambiguous?

The study of sentence structure is Syntax.

  1. How do we know that a poodle is a type of dog, or that if something is alive it cannot also be dead, or that Maddie plays the drums like a rock star must imply that Maddie plays the drums?

The study of meaning is Semantics.

  1. Why do we understand that it is annoying to say “Yes” (and take no subsequent action) in answer to your dinner partner’s question “Can you pass the salt”?

The study of discourse in context is Pragmatics.


Once we’ve discussed what linguistics is, the question that inevitably follows looks something akin to: where does studying language patterns get you in the real world? What do linguists actually do for a living? Until more recently, linguists were generally constrained to teaching and researching within academia. Many still do follow that path. However, in the last couple decades, various industrial sectors have realized the necessity of employing people with serious language knowledge. Here is a short list of possible careers outside of academia for those with a linguistics background:

  • Computational Linguist (works on improving computers’ ability to “understand” and generate human language – often in machine learning contexts)
  • Conlanger for Movie/TV Industry (invents new languages based on attested linguistic principles)
  • Data Scientist (statistically analyzes large amounts of data to provide business insights)
  • Field Linguist/Researcher (documents endangered or dying languages – although often from a university position)
  • Forensic Linguist (analyzes legal and judicial language; provides linguistic evidence in legal proceedings)
  • Lexicographer (builds dictionaries)
  • Naming/Branding Consultant
  • Nonprofit sociolinguistic research
  • Second or Foreign Language Instructor
  • Speech-Language Pathologist (diagnoses and treats communication, voice, and swallowing disorders)
  • Translator & Interpreter

Here are a few cool examples of actual people using their linguistics training in the real world:

One of my acquaintances is an interactional sociolinguist at the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on sociopolitical and scientific topics like aging, criminal justice, and climate change. FrameWorks investigates the language used in talk about these subjects, and teaches ways of reframing each issue. The woman I know manages the Institute’s Learning Unit, where she organizes professional learning events for advocates who want to change particular social dialogues.

Another friend of mine is a Speech-language Pathologist, or SLP. She works with veterans at the VA Hospital in San Francisco. Her patients have swallowing conditions, aphasia, and other disorders that interfere with speaking or understanding. The SLP path requires a master’s in Communicative Disorders/Speech-Language Pathology. Although it doesn’t require a degree in linguistics, my friend has this too, and she says that it has lent her a deeper understanding of the disorders she’s trying to treat, as well as the subtleties involved in clinician-patient communication.

David Peterson is neither a friend nor an acquaintance, although I wish he was one. He is a conlanger who created Dothraki and Valerian for the HBO series “Game of Thrones”. Dothraki and Valerian are not just random sets of made-up words. They are full languages, with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax. For example, to form a question in Dothraki – as in Hash yer ray tih zhavors chiorisi anni (“Have you seen my lady’s dragon?”) – one must include a word whose main purpose is to formulate questions, hash. English lacks a single separate word with just this function; instead, we use multifunctional auxiliary verbs like do, be and have, or rising intonation. French on the other hand does have a word with this unique function: est-ce que (subject-verb inversion and rising intonation are other possible strategies). Conlanging for film basically started in the eighties with Marc Okrand, the inventor of Vulcan and Klingon, used in the Star Trek movies. With sci-fi/fantasy shows becoming more and more involved these days, the opportunity for such constructed language work seems to be growing.

And then, take a watch of these videos. Anna Marie Trester, author of the Career Linguist blog, has interviewed and recorded multiple linguist folks (me among them!) working in different areas of industry.


I’d like to wrap up with some historical and contextual nuggets about the field.

Linguistics termed as such, and as its own independent discipline, is relatively new. It arose at the beginning of the twentieth century; the University of California (Berkeley) formed America’s first “Department of Linguistics” in 1901. Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield were two prominent linguists early on. There was also structuralism or structural linguistics which dealt with signs, syntax, and other formal units of language. Main characters included Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky devised his generative theory of language and Universal Grammar, and the discipline really took off. Chomsky is thus usually known as the “father of modern linguistics”.

Pre-twentieth century, philology (the study of ancient languages and texts), and then comparative philology (studies comparing European languages and language groups) existed from the middle ages through the 1800s. The first formal study of language comes from India; in the fifth century BC a man named Pāṇini categorized Sanskrit consonants and vowels, word classes like nouns and verbs, and other patterns.

One curious aspect of linguistics is that it has borrowed a good bit of terminology (and corresponding concepts) from biology. My brother is getting his PhD in lichenology, a little-known subfield of biology, and it’s super fun for us to chat about our respective fields because there’s an immediate overlap of understanding. For instance, linguistics uses the terms root, stem, tree to describe words and phrase structures. It adopts jargon like morphology, genealogy, diachronic, convergent and divergent evolution. A fascinating “language as organism”[2] metaphor appears frequently.

Lastly, linguistics is a small field. Even large university departments usually count no more than twenty to twenty-five graduate students at a time. Meeting another linguist randomly, outside of dedicated school or work contexts is, for me at least, a rare treat. Meeting people who want to talk about language, however, is wonderfully common! And understandably so – it applies to us all. I hope my post has provided a sprinkling of insight into this universal human subject.


Please check back soon for upcoming content – planned posts include a linguist’s perspective on speech errors, an explanation of the nifty phenomenon of metathesis (where sounds, syllables, or words are switched around), and summaries of Japanese and Korean writing systems.


[1] Another frequent response is: “So how many languages do you speak?” See this great post addressing the topic: http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/48473292525/why-linguists-hate-being-asked-how-many-languages

[2] Janse, M., Verlinden, A., & Uhlenbeck, E.M. (1998). Productivity and Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E.M. Uhlenbeck. Trends in linguistics, 116, 197.