Questions with Prepositions (Stranding)

When a question asks about the object of a preposition — "Who are you talking to?", "What are you waiting for?" — Norwegian leaves the preposition exactly where it would stand in a statement: at the end of the clause. This is called preposition stranding, and it is one of the rare corners of Norwegian grammar where the language behaves more like casual English than like the prestige form many English speakers were taught to imitate. The good news: you can throw away the "never end a sentence with a preposition" rule entirely. In Norwegian, ending a question with a preposition is not just acceptable — it is the only natural option.

The rule: the preposition stays put

In a normal statement, a preposition sits in front of its object: du snakker med Kari ("you're talking with Kari"). When you turn that object into a question word and move it to the front, the preposition does not travel with it. It is stranded at the end:

Notice the mechanics. The question word (hvem, hva) jumps to the very front of the clause, the verb comes second (Norwegian's strict V2 rule), and the preposition — med, på, til — is simply left behind, sitting where its object used to be. Nothing fills the gap; the preposition dangles, and that is correct.

"Where are you from?" — fra stays at the end

The single most useful instance of this is the question every learner needs on day one: "Where are you from?" Norwegian does not say fra hvor ("from where"). It fronts hvor and strands fra:

The same logic produces "what is it made of", where av sits at the end:

If your instinct is to front the preposition — Fra hvor kommer du?, Om hva handler boka? — suppress it. Those are not how Norwegians speak.

Why English speakers get this wrong

Here is the irony. Spoken English also strands prepositions ("Who are you talking to?", "Where are you from?"). But generations of English speakers were taught a prescriptive rule — supposedly borrowed from Latin — that one should never end a sentence with a preposition, and should instead "pied-pipe" the preposition to the front: "To whom are you talking?", "From where do you come?". Many learners carry that anxiety into Norwegian and try to produce the equivalent Med hvem snakker du?.

The result is not ungrammatical, but it is stilted, old-fashioned, and often sounds comically formal — like saying "Whither goest thou?" at a bus stop. In modern Norwegian, fronting the preposition (pied-piping) is reserved for very formal written registers and a handful of frozen expressions, and even there it is rare. For everyday speech, always strand.

So the mental adjustment for an English speaker is liberating: take the relaxed, "incorrect" spoken-English instinct — the one your English teacher tried to drill out of you — and apply it everywhere in Norwegian. The preposition belongs at the end.

With hvilken (which) and hva slags (what kind of)

Stranding works the same way when the question word is a longer phrase like hvilken ("which") or hva slags ("what kind of"). The whole question phrase fronts; the preposition stays behind:

Again, you could not say På hvilken stol satt du? in normal speech without sounding like a courtroom transcript.

The preposition is glued to its verb

A key insight: in Norwegian, many verbs require a particular preposition, and that pairing is what survives in the stranded question. Vente på ("wait for"), tenke på ("think about"), høre på ("listen to"), se på ("look at / watch"), snakke med ("talk to"), komme fra ("come from") — these are fixed verb + preposition units. When you question the object, the preposition cannot be dropped, because the verb would lose part of its meaning. So the stranded preposition is not optional decoration; it is grammatically obligatory.

If you forget the preposition, the question is simply wrong — Hva venter du? is not a shorter version of Hva venter du på?; it is broken Norwegian. The preposition is the part that tells you it is "waiting for" rather than just "waiting".

Embedded questions also strand

The same pattern holds when the question is embedded inside another clause ("I don't know who she's waiting for"). The word order inside the embedded clause changes (no V2 inversion there), but the preposition is still stranded at the end:

Common Mistakes

English speakers reliably trip on this in a few specific ways. None of them are about Norwegian being hard — they are about importing English prescriptive habits.

The first two errors come from over-formalising — fronting the preposition out of misplaced politeness. The third comes from dropping the preposition because English sometimes lets you ("What are you waiting?" feels almost possible, though it isn't really English either). The fourth is the same fronting reflex with om.

Key Takeaways

• A question targeting the object of a preposition strands the preposition at the end of the clause: Hvem snakker du *med?*
• Build it from the statement: front the question word, leave the verb and its preposition where they were.
• Never front the preposition (Med hvem…, Fra hvor…) in normal speech — that is archaic and stilted, the opposite of how Norwegian works.
• The preposition is obligatory because it belongs to the verb (vente på, komme fra); dropping it breaks the sentence.
• English speakers should discard the "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule entirely — in Norwegian, the preposition must end the question.