Nominalisation and Verbal Nouns | Norwegian Grammar

Nominalisation is the act of packing a verb or a whole clause into a single noun: behandle ("treat") becomes behandling ("treatment"), at prisene øker ("that prices rise") becomes økningen i prisene ("the rise in prices"). It is one of the most powerful — and most dangerous — stylistic tools in written Norwegian. Powerful, because it lets you compress a clause into a phrase, name an abstract process, and build dense, precise prose. Dangerous, because overused it produces the grey, agentless, hard-to-read style of bureaucratic Norwegian that the klarspråk ("plain language") movement has spent two decades fighting.

This page is not a list of noun suffixes (that lives on word-formation/noun-suffixes). It is about nominalisation as a stylistic control — how it works syntactically, what it does to a sentence, when it sharpens precision and when it obscures meaning, and how an advanced writer decides between the noun-heavy version and the verb-heavy one. For an English speaker this matters doubly, because English academic writing encourages heavy nominalisation, and that habit transfers straight into clumsy Norwegian.

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Nominalisation trades a clause for a noun phrase. You gain compactness and the ability to make a process the subject of a sentence; you lose the verb's tense, the agent, and often the clarity. The advanced skill is knowing which trade is worth it.

How a clause becomes a noun

The mechanism is simple: take the verb, attach a deverbal suffix, and the action becomes a thing you can put in any noun slot — subject, object, after a preposition.

Verb (clause)	Suffix	Nominalised noun
å behandle (to treat)	-ing	en behandling (a treatment)
å løse (to solve)	-ning	en løsning (a solution)
å organisere (to organise)	-ing	en organisering (an organising/organisation)
å realisere (to realise/implement)	-ing / -sjon	en realisering / en realisasjon
å bevege (to move)	-else	en bevegelse (a movement)
å oppleve (to experience)	-else	en opplevelse (an experience)
å mulig(gjøre) (to enable) / adj. mulig	-het	en mulighet (a possibility)
å kaste (to throw)	zero (ablaut/conversion)	et kast (a throw)

The four productive engines are -ing/-ning (the most general: behandling, løsning, betaling, utvikling), -(a)sjon (Latinate, on -ere verbs: organisasjon, realisasjon, produksjon), -else (bevegelse, opplevelse, hendelse, følelse), and the abstract -het / -skap / -dom group plus bare zero-derivation (et kast, et håp, en støtte). Each turns a verb's action into a noun you can manipulate.

A note on gender, the classic English-speaker stumble: -ing/-ning nouns are almost all masculine (en løsning, en behandling, en utvikling); -else nouns are overwhelmingly masculine too (en bevegelse, en følelse, en opplevelse); -het and -dom are masculine (en mulighet, en sykdom); -sjon nouns are masculine (en organisasjon). The one suffix that genuinely splits is -skap: it is neuter in et vennskap, et selskap, et medlemskap but masculine in en kunnskap, en vitenskap — so that group must be checked word by word. The safe default for deverbal nouns is masculine, but -skap and zero-derived nouns must be learned individually.

Watch the compression: clause → phrase

The real power of nominalisation is compression. A finite clause carries a subject, a tensed verb and often a conjunction. Nominalise it and the whole thing collapses into a noun phrase you can slot anywhere:

At prisene øker, bekymrer regjeringen.

That prices are rising worries the government. (full clause as subject)

Økningen i prisene bekymrer regjeringen.

The rise in prices worries the government. (clause compressed to a noun phrase)

The second version is tighter and lets the rise itself become the grammatical subject — handy when you want to talk about the process rather than report it as an event. The same move turns a verb-driven sentence into a noun-driven one:

Kommunen behandler søknaden nå.

The municipality is processing the application now. (verb behandler)

Behandlingen av søknaden pågår.

The processing of the application is under way. (nominalised behandlingen)

Notice what happened to the object. When behandle was a verb, its object søknaden was a direct object. Once behandle becomes the noun behandlingen, that object can no longer be a direct object — a noun cannot take one — so it is re-attached with the preposition av: behandlingen *av søknaden. This is the famous *av-genitive, and it is the syntactic signature of nominalised Norwegian.

The av-genitive chains

Because every nominalised verb sheds its object into an av-phrase, heavy nominalisation breeds chains of av-phrases stacked one after another. This is where formal Norwegian becomes a slog:

Vurderingen av effekten av innføringen av de nye reglene er ikke ferdig.

The assessment of the effect of the introduction of the new rules is not finished. (a four-link av-chain)

That sentence is grammatical, precise — and exhausting. Each noun (vurdering, effekt, innføring) is a frozen verb, and each av re-links the object the verb used to take directly. The verb-driven paraphrase is far easier to follow:

Vi har ennå ikke vurdert hvilken effekt det har å innføre de nye reglene.

We haven't yet assessed what effect introducing the new rules has.

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An av-chain three links deep (vurderingen av effekten av innføringen av …) is a red flag. Each av hides a verb whose subject and object have gone missing. Unpacking even one link back into a verb usually rescues the sentence.

The agentless effect — nominalisation as a cousin of the passive

Nominalisation does something else the passive also does: it deletes the agent. A verb forces you to name (or at least imply) a subject — someone treats, decides, rises. The noun does not. Behandlingen tok lang tid ("the processing took a long time") never says who did the processing. Like the passive (see complex/passive-advanced), this is sometimes exactly what you want — the agent may be obvious, irrelevant, or diplomatically best left unnamed — and sometimes a way of dodging responsibility.

Det ble fattet en beslutning om nedleggelse av avdelingen.

A decision was made about closure of the department. (passive + two nominalisations — nobody is named as deciding or closing).

Ledelsen bestemte seg for å legge ned avdelingen.

Management decided to close the department. (verbs + a named agent — clear who did what).

Both are correct Norwegian. The first is the natural voice of a bureaucratic memo: agentless, abstract, no one accountable. The second is what klarspråk asks for: a named subject, finite verbs, plain order. The advanced writer chooses on purpose.

When nominalisation earns its keep

Nominalisation is not a vice — it is a tool that is overused, which is different. It genuinely aids precision when:

You need to name an abstract process as a thing to discuss it: digitaliseringen av offentlig sektor ("the digitalisation of the public sector") — there is no neat verbal way to make that a topic.
You need a technical term: fotosyntese, oksidasjon, inflasjon — the nominal is the concept.
You want the process to be the subject: Utviklingen gikk raskere enn ventet ("the development went faster than expected").
You are compressing known information so you can move on to the new point — nominalising old content and putting it first is good information flow.

Digitaliseringen har endret hvordan vi jobber.

Digitalisation has changed how we work. (the abstract process is the natural subject — a verb would be clumsy here).

Behandlingen var vellykket, men opplevelsen var smertefull.

The treatment was successful, but the experience was painful. (precise, idiomatic nominals).

When it obscures — and the klarspråk fix

Nominalisation obscures when it stacks up, deletes agents you actually need, and replaces vivid finite verbs with grey abstract nouns. The Norwegian state's klarspråk programme (run by Språkrådet, the Language Council) teaches public servants to reverse exactly this: turn nouns back into verbs, name the agent, and shorten the av-chains.

❌ (heavy) Iverksettelsen av tiltakene vil skje etter en vurdering av søknadene.

(noun-heavy) Implementation of the measures will take place after an assessment of the applications.

✅ (klarspråk) Vi setter i verk tiltakene etter at vi har vurdert søknadene.

(verb, with agent) We will implement the measures after we have assessed the applications.

The klarspråk version names vi ("we"), uses finite verbs (setter i verk, har vurdert), and dissolves the av-phrases. It is shorter and clearer. The lesson is not "never nominalise" — it is "nominalise on purpose, and resist the bureaucratic reflex to nominalise everything".

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The klarspråk test: find the buried verb inside each nominalisation and ask whether the sentence reads better with the verb let out of its noun. If the agent is missing and matters, name it. Behandling av → behandle; vurdering av → vurdere.

English speakers: the over-nominalising habit

English academic and professional writing actively rewards nominalisation — "the implementation of the optimisation of the process" is normal in an English report. That habit transfers straight into Norwegian, where it lands even heavier because of the obligatory av-chains. An English speaker writing formal Norwegian should consciously dial it down one notch from their English instinct, not match it. Norwegian readers — and Norwegian style guides — prefer more verbs than English ones do.

Common Mistakes

❌ et behandling / et løsning

Incorrect gender — most -ing/-ning deverbal nouns are masculine: en behandling, en løsning.

✅ en behandling, en løsning, en utvikling

Correct — -ing/-ning verbal nouns take en (masculine).

❌ Behandlingen søknaden tar tid.

Incorrect — a nominalised verb cannot take a direct object; the old object must be re-attached with av.

✅ Behandlingen av søknaden tar tid.

The processing of the application takes time. (av-genitive required).

❌ Realiseringen av forbedringen av effektiviteten av systemet er målet.

Incorrect style — a four-deep av-chain that buries four verbs; grammatical but unreadable bureaucratese.

✅ Målet er å gjøre systemet mer effektivt.

The goal is to make the system more efficient. (one verb, plain and clear).

❌ Etter en grundig vurdering av situasjonen ble det tatt en beslutning om en endring.

Incorrect register for plain writing — fully agentless noun-style; nobody assesses, nobody decides, nobody changes.

✅ Etter at vi vurderte situasjonen grundig, bestemte vi oss for å gjøre en endring.

After we assessed the situation thoroughly, we decided to make a change. (named agent + finite verbs).

Key takeaways

Nominalisation packs a clause into a noun; the verb's old object then needs the av-genitive (behandlingen av søknaden).
The productive engines are -ing/-ning, -(a)sjon, -else and the -het/-skap/-dom
- zero-derivation group; deverbal nouns default to masculine (but check -skap and zero-derived ones).
Like the passive, nominalisation is agentless — useful for abstraction, risky for accountability.
It aids precision for naming processes and technical concepts; it obscures when av-chains stack and agents vanish.
The klarspråk fix is to release the buried verb and name the agent. English speakers should nominalise less in Norwegian than their English habits suggest.

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