English Usage: Norway
English is used by 840 million Norwegians as a second language and is seen as the universal language of business in these times. As such, we see that English is highly used both in business and media advertising in Norway. We have examined this in more depth below.
ENGLISH IN THE GENERAL POPULATION
- Approximately 840 million people around the world are said to speak English. Of this, Norway has approximately 4.5 million speakers in its population of 5 million.
- The native language of Norway is Norwegian existing in two written forms, Bokmål and Nynorsk.
- They are rated among countries with the highest English proficiency, 90% of the Norwegian population speak English.
- The ease of the Scandinavians’ use of English is partly attributed to the likeliness of the languages which are all considered Germanic.
- English is taught in Norwegian schools from the age of 8 between grades 2 and 7. As a result, Norwegians are mostly fluent in English by the time they reach teenage years.
ENGLISH IN BUSINESS
- English is known as the universal language of business. As a result, Norwegians have seen the importance over the years to practice the language.
- With globalization, increasing, English is being viewed as a critical part of business skill. By 2020, over 2 billion people will be studying the popular language.
- Over the years, many global companies make English their mandatory corporate language, a trend now seen in Norway. It is used when discussing their business cards and other business related materials.
- Although business is a reason for Norwegians to focus on English since its prevalence is so high in the sector, this focus has been marked as an upcoming problem.
- The Language Council of Norway in 2017 expressed its concern for the amount of English being used in teaching in universities.
- A representative from the council noted the commonality of both languages being used in higher education. He, however, stated that for new students the excessive use of English may be detrimental to their lives following graduation. He cited this as a concern as most students graduating will join the Norwegian labor force, a sector dominated by the Norwegian language.
ENGLISH IN ADVERTISING OR MEDIA
- Another contributing factor to Norwegians utilizing English as much as they do is the saturation of the language in Norwegian media.
- With no specific rules concerning the language used in Norwegian advertisements, advertising in English is very common in Norway.
- Many Norwegian television shows are based on English without subtitles with many American and British television series also airing on Norwegian channels.
- Media platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and more have also influenced the use of English amongst Norwegians.
- A post in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten showed that the use of English in the daily communication with young people was increasing significantly.
- Some linguistic experts have even said that with the heavy infiltration of the English Language in Norwegian society, the native language will die out in fifty years.
To conduct our research to find the prevalence of English being used as a first or second language in Norway we visited news and press articles, government and scholastic websites, and the web pages of language service experts.
To find how widely English is being used in the general population of Norway we first visited language experts K-International who gave us the population of Norwegians speaking the language. We further visited blog websites Fluent in 3 Months, and Life in Norway, who provided us with additional insights about the prevalence of English in the general Norwegian population.
In searching for the prevalence of its use in business we visited press articles posted on Santander Trade, Times Higher Education and by language specialists at Speak Lab. Although we were not provided with quantitative information about the prevalence of the language in the business sector we were provided with general trends experienced. Visiting further sources, including Forbes, Speak Labs, and the NDLAS, no quantitative representation of the use of English for business in Norway was found. This quantitative information may not have been available due to the wide array of business done in Norway, both nationally and internationally. As a result, one would not be able to grasp an actual number value depicting the use of the language in the sector. We however can infer from the given information that local Norwegian workforce labor is conducted mostly in Norwegian language whilst bigger business is conducted mostly in English.
The prevalence of the use of English in advertising and media in Norway was found through visiting language experts Cappelen Demm, government website of the NDLA (National Digital Learning Arena), and news articles found on Daily News, and Forbes. These sources provided us with general trends in the use of English in the media in Norway. They, however, didn’t provide any quantitative data highlighting the actual valued prevalence of its use. In the further sources examined such as The Higher Education, Fluent in 3 Months, and Life in Norway, no quantitative data for the use of English in Norwegian advertising was found. This may have been as a result of the vast spread of media in this day and age. From web media, social media and live media there are too many avenues of exposure to English based media to develop a numeric comparison of its use in Norwegian media. We, however, found that printed media in Norway are predominantly seen in Norwegian languages, with a few English translated sources available in print but mostly available online.