Most learner materials present Norway as a country of two written norms — Bokmål and Nynorsk — and stop there. That picture is incomplete and, in one respect, misleading. Norway is and has long been multilingual: alongside Norwegian, the country is home to the Sámi languages, which are indigenous and belong to an entirely different language family, and to Kven, a recognised Finnic minority language. This page explains what these languages are, the painful assimilation history that nearly erased them, their present legal status, and — the part most relevant to a learner — the marks they have left on Norwegian itself, in loanwords, place names and the bilingual signage you will meet the moment you travel north of the Arctic Circle. The tone here is deliberately descriptive and respectful: these are living languages and the histories of their speakers, not curiosities.
The single most important fact: Sámi is not Norwegian
If you take one thing from this page, take this: the Sámi languages are not dialects of Norwegian, and not even related to it. Norwegian is a North Germanic (Indo-European) language, a cousin of Danish, Swedish, German and English. The Sámi languages belong to the Uralic family (the Finno-Ugric branch), whose other members include Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Sámi and Norwegian are no more genetically related than English and Finnish are. A Norwegian speaker hearing Northern Sámi understands essentially nothing of it.
This is not one language but several. The most widely spoken is Northern Sámi (davvisámegiella), by far the largest, with estimates of roughly fifteen to twenty-five thousand speakers across Norway, Sweden and Finland (most of them in Norway). Lule Sámi (julevsámegiella) and Southern Sámi (åarjelsaemien gïele) are much smaller and are spoken in Norway and Sweden; several other Sámi languages exist beyond Norway's borders. Treating "Sámi" as a single tongue is itself an oversimplification — these varieties are not always mutually intelligible.
Sámi is written in a Latin alphabet extended with letters Norwegian does not have. Northern Sámi uses á and the consonants č, đ, ŋ, š, ŧ, ž. So a written Sámi word such as giella ("language") or boazu ("reindeer") or the place name Guovdageaidnu carries letter-shapes a Norwegian keyboard cannot easily produce — a small but constant reminder that you are looking at a different writing tradition.
Kven: the Finnic language of the far northeast
Kven (kvääni / kvensk) is a distinct minority language spoken in Troms and Finnmark, descended from Finnish-speaking settlers — the Kvens — who migrated to northern Norway largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Linguistically Kven is Finnic, very close to (and historically part of the continuum with) Finnish, though centuries in Norway have layered it with Norwegian loanwords and preserved older Finnish features. Whether Kven is "a language" or "a dialect of Finnish" is partly a political question; Norway's answer, since 2005, has been to recognise Kven as a minority language in its own right under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, with the Kven people recognised as a national minority since 1998.
So the linguistic map of northern Norway is genuinely layered: Norwegian, one or more Sámi languages, and Kven, often within the same valley.
Fornorsking: the assimilation policy
You cannot understand the present status of these languages without the history that nearly destroyed them. From roughly the 1850s to the 1960s, the Norwegian state pursued an official policy of fornorsking ("Norwegianisation"): the deliberate assimilation of Sámi, Kven and Forest Finn populations into Norwegian language and culture. Sámi and Kven were banned as languages of instruction; children at state boarding schools were punished for speaking their mother tongue; land and naming policy favoured Norwegian. The policy's effects were severe and lasting — whole generations grew up unable, or afraid, to pass on their language, and several Sámi varieties were pushed close to extinction.
In recent decades Norway has reversed course. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the Storting in 2018, delivered its report in June 2023, and in November 2024 the Storting issued a formal apology for the Norwegianisation policy and its consequences for the Sámi, Kven/Norwegian Finns and Forest Finns. This is recent, live history — the reckoning is ongoing, not closed.
Present-day status: co-official, not merely tolerated
Today Sámi has real legal weight. Under the Sámi Act (the language provisions date from 1990, in force from 1992), Sámi and Norwegian have equal official status within the forvaltningsområdet for samisk språk — the administrative area for the Sámi language — a set of municipalities in the north (including Kautokeino/Guovdageaidnu, Karasjok/Kárášjohka, Tana/Deatnu, Nesseby/Unjárga, Kåfjord/Gáivuotna and others, with Lule and Southern Sámi municipalities added over time). Within this area you have the right to be served by public bodies in Sámi, to receive certain documents in Sámi, and so on.
The Sámi Parliament — Sametinget, Northern Sámi Sámediggi — opened in 1989, seated in Karasjok, and is the elected representative body for Sámi affairs, including language policy. Revitalisation is now active: Sámi-medium schooling, media, dictionaries, and a younger generation reclaiming the language their grandparents were forbidden to speak.
Sør-Tromsøya er tospråklig: skiltene står på norsk og samisk.
Southern Tromsøya is bilingual: the signs are in Norwegian and Sámi.
I forvaltningsområdet har du rett til å bli betjent på samisk.
In the administrative area you have the right to be served in Sámi.
What Sámi left in Norwegian: loanwords
Centuries of contact in the north flowed both ways. Norwegian borrowed a cluster of words from Sámi, concentrated exactly where the two cultures met most intensively — reindeer herding, the high tundra, snow and dwellings. These are everyday Norwegian words today; most Norwegians have no idea they are Sámi in origin.
- lavvo — the Sámi conical tent (now also a general word for a tepee-style tent)
- pulk — the boat-shaped pulling sled (from Sámi bulki)
- kåte / gamme — turf hut / Sámi dwelling
- sennegress — the dried sedge stuffed into traditional footwear for warmth
- and a body of reindeer-herding vocabulary describing the animals by age, sex and colour
Vi overnattet i en lavvo og dro pulken opp på vidda.
We spent the night in a lavvo and pulled the pulk up onto the high plateau.
Ordet «pulk» er et samisk lånord — det visste jeg ikke.
The word 'pulk' is a Sámi loanword — I didn't know that.
The traffic ran the other way too: Sámi has absorbed many Norwegian loanwords, especially for goods, institutions and modern life that arrived through the Norwegian-speaking state and economy. Borrowing between neighbouring languages is normal and mutual; it does not make either one "less pure."
Place names: the map is bilingual
Northern Norway's map is, quite literally, two maps overlaid. A great many northern place names are Sámi or Finnic in origin, and in the administrative area official signage now shows the Sámi (and sometimes Kven) name alongside the Norwegian one. Some of the best-known pairs:
| Norwegian name | Sámi name |
|---|---|
| Kautokeino | Guovdageaidnu |
| Karasjok | Kárášjohka |
| Tana | Deatnu |
| Nesseby | Unjárga |
| Kåfjord | Gáivuotna |
Note that even the Norwegian name Kautokeino is not native Norwegian — it is a Norwegianised rendering of the Sámi name. Many "Norwegian" northern place names are like this: Sámi or Kven roots filtered through Norwegian spelling. When you drive into Finnmark and see a road sign with two names, you are seeing the linguistic history of the region written on the landscape.
På veiskiltet sto det «Kautokeino — Guovdageaidnu».
On the road sign it said 'Kautokeino — Guovdageaidnu'.
Mange stedsnavn i Finnmark er opprinnelig samiske eller kvenske.
Many place names in Finnmark are originally Sámi or Kven.
Contact effects on northern Norwegian speech
Generations of bilingualism left traces in the Norwegian of the north too — in vocabulary, in some local idioms, and in the simple sociolinguistic fact that in parts of Finnmark a person may move between Norwegian, Sámi and Kven within a single conversation. (The grammatical and phonetic features of Northern Norwegian as a Norwegian dialect are covered separately on the Northern dialects page; here the point is only that those dialects developed in a multilingual setting, not a monolingual one.)
Common Mistakes and Misconceptions
❌ Samisk er en dialekt av norsk.
Incorrect — Sámi is not a dialect of Norwegian; it is a separate Uralic language.
✅ Samisk er et eget språk i den uralske språkfamilien, ikke beslektet med norsk.
Sámi is a language of its own in the Uralic family, not related to Norwegian.
❌ Det finnes ett samisk språk.
Incorrect — there is no single 'Sámi language'; there are several (Northern, Lule, Southern, and more).
✅ Det finnes flere samiske språk, og nordsamisk er det største.
There are several Sámi languages, and Northern Sámi is the largest.
❌ Kven er bare gammeldags norsk.
Incorrect — Kven is not old-fashioned Norwegian; it is a Finnic language related to Finnish.
✅ Kvensk er et finsk-beslektet minoritetsspråk, anerkjent siden 2005.
Kven is a Finnic-related minority language, recognised since 2005.
A fourth, subtler error is treating this history as settled and distant. It is not: the Storting's apology came in 2024, and revitalisation is happening now. Speak of these languages as living and contemporary, because they are.
Key Takeaways
- Sámi = indigenous, Uralic, not Norwegian and not a dialect of it; several distinct languages (Northern the largest).
- Kven = recognised Finnic minority language (2005), related to Finnish.
- Fornorsking (c. 1850s–1960s) nearly destroyed both; Norway's Truth and Reconciliation report came in 2023 and the Storting's apology in 2024.
- Sámi has co-official status with Norwegian in the administrative area, with the Sámi Parliament (Sametinget/Sámediggi) since 1989.
- Norwegian borrowed reindeer/nature words (lavvo, pulk, kåte, sennegress) from Sámi; the northern map is bilingual (Kautokeino/Guovdageaidnu).
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