Norwegian and German: Language Similarities and Differences

Oslo, the capital of Norway, is about 440 miles away from Hamburg (a large city in northern Germany). You can even travel by train from Germany to Norway because there is a bridge between Denmark and Sweden.

People often ask if Norwegian is similar to German.

Well, Norwegian is a Germanic language. And so is German.

But they are on different branches of that language family: Norwegian is a North Germanic language, whereas German is a West Germanic language (so is English).

Norwegian is somewhat similar to German. The two languages have plenty of similar words. The differences in grammar, however, make Norwegian easier to learn than German.

Norwegian is relatively easy to learn when your native language is English. But German is more difficult because it has some complex grammatical features (like grammatical case-based declensions) that have mostly disappeared from Norwegian.

German & Norwegian: similarities and differences in vocabulary

It is easy to notice similarities between Norwegian and German when you look at vocabulary words from both languages.

As Germanic languages, Norwegian and German evolved from a common ancestor language that existed thousands of years ago. Linguists have reconstructed that ancient extinct language and named it the Proto-Germanic language.

Many similar words in German and Norwegian come from the Proto-Germanic language.

Often, where a Norwegian word has the letter ‘d’ the corresponding German word has the letter ‘t’ instead. For example:

• «kald» in Norwegian → «kalt» in German
• sjelden → selten
• arbeid → Arbeit
• nødvendig → notwendig

It turns out that this is part of a more general linguistics phenomenon called the High German consonant shift.

About 15 centuries ago, the German language went through a series of changes in the way the consonants were pronounced. Many consonant sounds shifted to other consonant sounds, and the (d → t) shift is one of these.

This consonant shift happened only in German, and not in the other Germanic languages, leading to a divergence of German relative to the other Germanic languages (such as Norwegian and English)

Below is a table of vocabulary words in Norwegian and German which illustrate this (d → t) consonant shift.

Notice how the (d→t) consonant shift has affected only German vocabulary, while Norwegian and English have kept the original consonant.

Besides the (d→t) consonant shift, there are other consonant shifts which result in differences between Norwegian and German vocabulary words. For example the (p→f) and (k→ch) consonant shifts:

Some German-Norwegian vocabulary words that are very different

Here is a list of German and Norwegian vocabulary words which are significantly different:

This table serves to illustrate that there are differences in vocabulary between Norwegian and German which go beyond the consonant shifts discussed previously.

Many of the Norwegian words in this table come from Old Norse. For instance, the words «kjærlighet», «kvinne», «fattig» and «stygg» come from Old Norse.

The Norwegian word «sjalusi» comes from the French word "jalousie". Similarly the Norwegian word «avis» which is a loanword from French, but in French it means an opinion, or a notice.

German-Norwegian vocabulary "false friends"

In the context of language learning, the term “false friends” refers to pairs of vocabulary words which appear to be similar between two languages, but which have different meanings.

Here are some German-Norwegian vocabulary false friends:

• In German, « artig » means "kind, well-behaved ".
  But in Norwegian « artig » means "fun/amusing"
• « Geld » means "money" in German
  But in Norwegian « gjeld » means "debt"
• « beklagen » means "to complain" in German
  In Norwegian, « beklage » means "to regret/to give excuses"
• « bereden » means "to discuss" in German
  « berede » means "to prepare/to process" in Norwegian
• « Öl » means "oil" in German
  « øl » means "beer" in Norwegian « blöd » means "stupid" in German
  « bløt » means "soft/mushy/moist" in Norwegian

German & Norwegian: other similarities and differences

Norwegian and German are similar in how these languages create compound nouns.

Compound nouns are nouns that are formed by combining several words (for example “swimming pool”). While compound nouns are common in Germanic languages, there are some differences between how they are formed in different languages.

When it comes to constructing compound nouns, Norwegian and German are alike in that they typically put no spaces between the words which the compound noun.

For example:

• The word “swimming pool” is “svømmebasseng” in Norwegian, it is composed of the word “svømme” (swim) + ” basseng” (pool)
• The German word for “swimming pool” is “Schwimmbad”, it is composed of the word “schwimm” + “bad”

In the English language, some compound nouns have spaces (like “swimming pool”) and some don’t (like “toothpaste”). German and Norwegian are languages where the absence of spaces is most common even when compounding many words.

• «city council member» (In English this compound noun has spaces)
• In German it doesn't: «Stadtratsmitglied» (Stadt : city, Rat: council, Mitglied : member)
• Neither does it in Norwegian: «bystyremedlem» (by, city, styre: board; medlem: member )

A consequence of this is that longer words are more common in Norwegian and particularly in German than they are in English.

Verb conjugations in Norwegian vs. German

Verb conjugation is an aspect of language learning where Norwegian is easier than German.

In contrast to German in English, Norwegian verbs are not conjugated according to the subject pronoun.

For example, here are the conjugation tables for the verb "to be" in English, Norwegian and German:

Grammatical cases make learning German harder than learning Norwegian

The common ancestor of Germanic languages had a system where word endings would change to indicate the grammatical function of that word in the sentence. The linguistic term for this phenomenon is declension.

Declension is common in several languages of the Indo-European family (which is the parent family of the Germanic languages). For example, Latin, Russian, and Sanskrit are Indo-European languages in which grammatical cases are indicated using declension.

The use of declension to indicate grammatical cases has been preserved in the German language, while it has mostly disappeared from Norwegian and English.

In languages like English, grammatical function is made clear through prepositions (like “in”, “to”, “of” .. ) and word order, instead of using declensions.

Because of this, the use of declensions for grammatical cases is not something that English speakers are very accustomed to. English speakers typically find that learning a language that doesn't use them (such as Norwegian) is easier than using a language that does (such as German).

Learning Norwegian is a good entry point to the Scandinavian languages. This is because Norwegian is probably the easiest Scandinavian language for English speakers to learn.

After acquiring a knowledge of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish become quite accessible, because Swedish is similar to Norwegian, and - although it is more difficult in terms of pronunciation - Danish is also very similar to Norwegian.

Although learning German is more difficult than learning Norwegian, there are some good reasons to learn German as well. The most obvious one is that German is the 2nd most spoken Germanic language (after English which is also a Germanic language).

As a West Germanic language, German is similar to Dutch. So someone who has learned German will have a much easier time learning Dutch.

To continue learning about the similarities and differences between Norwegian and German, have a look at these lists of the 1000 most common Norwegian words, and the 1000 most common German words.