Academic and Scientific Norwegian

Academic Norwegian is a distinct register with its own grammar of distance: it nominalises actions into nouns, it removes the author from the sentence through man and the s-passive, it hedges claims rather than asserting them flatly, and it stitches arguments together with a small set of formal connectors (følgelig, imidlertid, således). Learning to read and write it is partly vocabulary and partly a whole stance toward the reader. This page assumes you already handle general formal written Norwegian; here we focus on what is specifically scholarly. One thing makes Norwegian academic prose unusual among the world's academic languages: it is a register under genuine pressure, because so much Norwegian research is now published in English instead.

Nominalisation: turning verbs into nouns

The single most recognisable feature of academic Bokmål is nominalisation — packaging an action that everyday speech would express with a verb into an abstract noun, usually one ending in -ing, -ning, -else or the Latinate -sjon. Where conversation says prisene økte (prices rose), a scholarly text writes en økning i prisene (an increase in prices) and makes that noun the subject of a further claim. This lets the writer treat processes as objects that can be measured, compared and caused.

The same density that makes nominalisation precise also makes it heavy, and the klarspråk (plain-language) movement — discussed below — pushes back against piling too many abstract nouns into one clause.

Impersonality: man, the s-passive and det

English academic style has, over the last few decades, grown comfortable with I: "I argue that...", "In this paper I show...". Norwegian academic prose has not made that shift to anything like the same degree. The default scholarly stance is impersonal, and a thesis written in the first person can read as naive or unscholarly to a Norwegian examiner. Three tools carry this impersonality.

The pronoun man generalises a claim to anyone: man kan anta (one may assume), man finner (one finds). It is the workhorse of the genre.

The s-passive (-es on the verb) removes the agent entirely, foregrounding the process and not the researcher who carried it out. It is far more frequent in academic Norwegian than the bli-passive of everyday speech.

Impersonal det opens claims without naming who holds them: det kan hevdes at... (it can be argued that...), det viser seg at... (it turns out that...).

For an English speaker the instinct is to write jeg mener (I think) or jeg vil argumentere for (I will argue), and in modern English that is now acceptable. In a Norwegian masteroppgave or article, convert it: det kan hevdes at, man kan argumentere for at, or simply state the claim impersonally.

Hedging: claiming carefully

Scholarly writing rarely asserts baldly; it hedges, calibrating confidence so the reader sees exactly how strongly a claim is held. This is the register's politeness toward evidence. The core hedging devices are worth memorising as a set:

The construction synes å + infinitive ("appears to") is itself a marker of evidential caution: the writer reports an appearance, not a fact.

Formal connectors

Academic Norwegian threads its argument with connectors that are themselves register-marked. Several have everyday synonyms a learner already knows, but the scholarly choice signals the genre:

A point of grammar: imidlertid is an adverb, not a conjunction, so when it opens a clause it triggers Norwegian's verb-second (V2) inversion — the verb still comes second, and the subject follows it.

Citation and metatext

Scholarly writing constantly points the reader to sources and to its own structure. The standard signposts:

• ifølge X — according to X
• jf. (jamfør) — cf., compare
• som nevnt (ovenfor) — as mentioned (above)
• som vist i tabell 2 — as shown in table 2
• i det følgende — in what follows

Orthography in academic prose

Academic Bokmål conventionally leans toward the conservative/moderate end of the optional forms (see the page on consistent form choices): -en feminines and -et verbs read as more scholarly than boka and kasta. The vocabulary is heavily Latinate — signifikant, empirisk, implikasjon, korrelasjon — and these words keep their international spelling. Watch the æ/ø/å in native abstract nouns: påstand (claim), sammenheng (connection), forutsetning (premise), målbar (measurable), redegjøre (account for).

A register under pressure: domain loss and klarspråk

Two forces shape academic Norwegian today, and a C1 reader should understand both.

First, domain loss (domenetap). A large share of Norwegian research — especially in the natural sciences, medicine and economics — is now published in English, because English is the language of international journals and citation counts. The consequence is that Norwegian sometimes lacks an established native term for a new concept, and academics reach for the English word or calque it. Universities and Språkrådet actively counter this, requiring Norwegian summaries and developing Norwegian terminology, precisely because a language that loses its academic register loses the ability to think about advanced topics in its own words. When you read academic Norwegian, expect English loanwords and English-shaped phrasing, and recognise them as symptoms of this pressure.

Second, the klarspråk (plain-language) movement has reached academia. The classic IMRaD article structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and a broad push for clearer public-sector and scholarly writing encourage authors to break up nominal pile-ups, prefer active verbs where they do not violate impersonality, and write shorter sentences. The result is a slow shift: the most modern academic Norwegian hedges and stays impersonal, but it nominalises a little less obsessively than the heavy bureaucratic prose of a generation ago.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Nominalise to treat actions as analysable objects — but klarspråk warns against overdoing it.
• Stay impersonal: prefer man, the s-passive (analyseres) and impersonal det over jeg; Norwegian academia tolerates first-person far less than modern English does.
• Hedge with kan tyde på, synes å, det kan hevdes at, muligens — calibrate, don't assert.
• Use formal connectors (imidlertid, følgelig, således) and remember imidlertid triggers V2 inversion.
• Academic Norwegian is a register under real domain-loss pressure from English, which explains both its loanwords and its deliberately maintained native terminology.