About

Norskere is a comparative of the adjective norsk, which means Norwegian. Norskere means «more Norwegian»,  in the same way easier means «more easy».

I have previously worked as a Norwegian teacher, and I wrote a master thesis about some of the phonological difficulties immigrants typically face when learning Norwegian, and I wanted to do more to help those learning Norwegian. I hope this page can help you understand some of the details of Norwegian that they never explained to you in Norwegian class. It will hopefully help you speak better Norwegian, both when it comes to your pronunciation and your grammar.

I’m writing this in English to make it accessible to those whose Norwegian is still not advanced enough to understand the explanations in Norwegian. Hopefully it can also give some valuable input to language geeks around the world interested in learning some facts about Norwegian without knowing enough about Norwegian to be able to read articles in Norwegian.

Not all of my terms are explained, and occasionally I use Norwegian words in my examples without translating them or explaining them in English. I advice you to use google translate if there is something you need to have translated.

Norwegians are of course also most welcome to learn more about their own language on this page. Hopefully teachers can find some explanations here as well.


Hannah Helmers

I am Hannah Helmers, a Norwegian linguist and language geek, fascinated by phonology, grammar, etymology, writing systems and the history of languages.  I am also fond of comparative linguistics.

Norwegian

Norwegian is my native language, and I have lived in Norway most of my life. I have taught Norwegian to foreigners. In my master thesis, written in Spanish, I compared Spanish and Norwegian phonology. Read it here. I love Norwegian dialects, to the extent that when moving away from Oslo, one of the main reasons I chose to move where I now live is because I love the dialect!

English

English is my second language. I am half English, and I have family members in England. I lived one year in the United States as an exchange student when I was 17 years old, living with an American family. I have taught English in upper secondary school.

Other languages

In high school I learned French and Italian in addition to English, and I studied Spanish and a bit of Portuguese at the university. I have lived in Spain, and taught Spanish in Norway. I’ve learned a bit of Arabic and Japanese in my spare time, and enjoy reading about different languages.

Why a blog about Norwegian in English?

I love reading about different languages, and it’s nice to be able to do so without being fluent in that language. There is quite a lot to be found about Norwegian in Norwegian, but not in English. As I want fellow language geeks around the world to be able to read about Norwegian, I decided to go by English, the de facto international language, and a language I’m quite comfortable writing in.

This blog is mainly about the linguistic aspects of Norwegian.


Technical

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