- Government and society
- Cultural life
The Norwegian language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language group. The Norwegian alphabet has three more letters than the Latin alphabet—æ, ø, and å, pronounced respectively as the vowels in bad, burn, and ball. Modern Norwegian has many dialects, but all of them, as well as the Swedish and Danish languages, are understood throughout all three of these Scandinavian countries. Until about 1850 there was only one written language, called Riksmål, or “Official Language,” which was strongly influenced by Danish during the 434-year union of the two countries. Landsmål, or “Country Language,” was then created out of the rural dialects. After a long feud, mostly urban-rural in makeup, the forms received equal status under the terms Bokmål (“Book Language”) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian), respectively. For more than four-fifths of schoolchildren, Bokmål is the main language in local schools, and it is the principal language of commerce and communications. In daily speech Bokmål is predominant in the area around Oslo and the eastern Norwegian lowland, while Nynorsk is widely spoken in the mountainous interior and along the west coast.
Almost all educated Norwegians speak English as a second language. Indeed, so widespread is its use that some commentators have voiced concern that English may displace Norwegian in commerce and industry.
About nine-tenths of all Norwegians belong to the Evangelical Lutheran national church, the Church of Norway, which is endowed by the government. The largest groups outside this establishment are Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Lutheran Free Church members, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, and Baptists. As a result of Asian immigration, there also are small groups of Muslims and Buddhists.
Østlandet contains more than half of Norway’s population, most of whom live in the metropolitan area of the national capital, Oslo, and in the many industrial cities and urban agglomerations on both sides of Oslo Fjord. With the lion’s share of the national wealth in mining and manufacturing and the concentration of economic activity around Oslo Fjord, Østlandet has the highest average income per household of Norway’s traditional regions.
Norway has never had the agricultural villages that are common elsewhere in Europe. The more densely populated areas of the country have grown up around crossroads of transportation, from which people have moved to the cities and suburbs. Thus, there is actually little borderline between the rural and urban populations. For many years Oslo has attracted settlers from throughout the country, becoming a national melting pot surrounded by the most important agricultural and industrial districts of Norway. The coastline facing Denmark across the Skagerrak passage, stretching from Oslo Fjord to the southern tip of Norway, is densely populated and contains many small towns, coastal villages, and small farms. Centred on the city of Kristiansand, this area is sometimes set apart as a fifth region: southern Norway, or Sørlandet. In Vestlandet the industrial city of Stavanger has attracted large numbers of settlers and has continued to expand as Norway’s oil capital. Bergen, the capital of Vestlandet and Norway’s largest city from the Hanseatic period to the mid-19th century, is a centre for fish exports. Trondheim, the third largest city in Norway and for long periods the national capital, dominates Trøndelag. Tromsø is the capital of Nord-Norge and is a hub for various Arctic activities, including fishing, sealing, and petroleum exploration.
Largely as a result of a significant increase in the proportion of the population over age 80, the population of Norway continued to grow slowly but steadily at the end of the 20th century. The birth rate fell slightly during the 1990s—to about half the world’s average—but so did the death rate, as life expectancy (about 75 years for men and about 81 years for women) was among the highest in Europe.
Migration from rural to urban areas slowed in the 1980s, but movement away from Nord-Norge increased. At the beginning of the 21st century, about three-fourths of the population lived in towns and urban areas. Norway has a small but varied population of foreign nationals, the great majority of them living in urban areas. Of these, more than half are from other European countries—primarily Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, with small groups from Pakistan and North and South America (primarily the United States). Since the 1960s Norway has practiced a strict policy concerning immigrants and refugees. Emigration—of such great importance in Norway in the 19th and early 20th centuries—ceased to be of any significance, although in most years there is a small net out-migration of Norwegian nationals.
2Includes Svalbard and Jan Mayen.
|Official name||Kongeriket Norge (Kingdom of Norway)|
|Form of government||constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Storting, or Parliament )|
|Head of state||Monarch: King Harald V|
|Head of government||Prime Minister: Erna Solberg|
|Official languages||Norwegian; Sami1|
|Official religion||Evangelical Lutheran|
|Monetary unit||Norwegian krone (pl. kroner; NOK)|
|Population||(2013 est.) 5,084,000|
|Total area (sq mi)||148,7212|
|Total area (sq km)||385,1862|
|Urban-rural population||Urban: (2011) 79.4%|
Rural: (2011) 20.6%
|Life expectancy at birth||Male: (2012) 79.2 years|
Female: (2012) 83.5 years
|Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate||Male: 100%|
|GNI per capita (U.S.$)||(2012) 98,860|