Textbooks teach you the Norwegian people write; this page teaches you the Norwegian young people actually speak. Slang and youth language are a real register with its own intensifiers, suffixes, fillers, and — in multicultural urban areas — an entire variety with its own grammar. You need to recognise all of it to follow casual speech, social media, and TV, and you need a clear sense of when not to produce it, because slang in the wrong setting (a job interview, an email to a professor) lands badly. The morphology of intensifying prefixes is treated on the diminutives/augmentatives page; here we focus on register and meaning.
Intensifiers: how young Norwegians say "very"
Casual Norwegian almost never uses plain veldig (very) for strong feeling. Instead it reaches for a stack of intensifiers, most of which started life as something stronger or cruder.
- sykt (literally "sickly/insanely") — the all-purpose youth intensifier. Sykt bra = "insanely good."
- dritt- (literally "shit-") — a crude but extremely common intensifying prefix. Drittkult = "damn cool."
- fett / fete (literally "fat") — "cool, great" and also an intensifier. (informal)
- kjempe- — "giant-," a softer, family-friendly intensifier usable across ages.
- mega- — borrowed, very common in youth speech.
- helt ("completely") + adjective — helt sykt, helt rått.
Det var sykt bra, altså! Beste konserten jeg har sett.
That was insanely good, seriously! Best concert I've ever seen. (sykt = youth intensifier)
Den filmen var drittkjedelig.
That film was bloody boring. (dritt- intensifier; mildly crude, informal)
Maten var helt rå.
The food was absolutely killer. (rå/rått 'raw' = 'awesome' in slang; helt = completely)
Core youth slang vocabulary
A starter set of high-frequency casual words. All are (informal) unless flagged otherwise.
| Slang | Meaning | Note |
|---|---|---|
| kult | cool | now near-neutral, very common |
| digg | lovely, delicious, great | of food, music, anything pleasurable |
| fett / fete | cool, awesome | "fat"; also an intensifier |
| rått / rå | awesome, sick | "raw"; strong praise |
| keen | up for it, eager | borrowed straight from English |
| chill / chille | relaxed / to relax, hang out | English loan, fully verbed |
| keit / keitete | awkward, embarrassing | older slang, still used |
Er du keen på å chille hjemme hos meg i kveld?
Are you up for chilling at my place tonight? (keen and chille, both English loans fully integrated into youth speech)
Den nye låta hans er skikkelig digg.
His new track is really lovely. (digg + skikkelig as intensifier)
The -is suffix
A productive, very Norwegian slang move is clipping a word and adding -is to make it cosy and familiar. It is one of the few slang patterns that feels home-grown rather than borrowed.
- kompis — buddy (from kompanjong/kamerat)
- kjekkas — a good-looking guy (from kjekk, "handsome"; here the variant -as)
- godis — sweets/candy (informal)
- bestis — best friend (from beste venn)
- kondis — fitness/stamina (from kondisjon)
Skal jeg ta med godis til kompisen din?
Should I bring sweets for your buddy? (godis, kompis — the -is suffix at work)
Hun er bestisen min.
She's my bestie. (bestis from beste venn)
Discourse fillers and quotatives
Casual speech is held together by small filler words that carry attitude rather than content. The big ones — liksom (like/sort of), altså (you know/I mean), bare (just) — have their own dedicated pages, but you should hear them as register markers: pile them up and you sound relaxed and young; strip them out and you sound formal.
A characteristically youthful quotative is ba (reduced from bare, "just"), used to report speech and even sounds, exactly like English "I was like…":
Og så ba jeg 'hæ?', og hun ba bare 'glem det'.
And then I was like 'huh?', and she was just like 'forget it'. (ba as quotative — youth speech)
Det var liksom litt kleint, altså.
It was kind of a bit awkward, you know. (liksom and altså as fillers)
The multiethnolect (kebabnorsk)
In multicultural neighbourhoods of Oslo and other cities, young people of varied backgrounds speak a distinctive variety often nicknamed kebabnorsk. It is important to frame this respectfully: it is not "broken Norwegian" and not a learner interlanguage — it is a genuine, identity-laden multiethnolect, a real youth variety with its own consistent features, spoken natively by people who also command standard Norwegian and code-switch fluently between them. (Note: "kebabnorsk" is the popular label and can be used dismissively; "multietnolekt" is the neutral linguistic term.)
Its hallmark features:
- Loanwords from Arabic, Urdu/Punjabi, Turkish, Kurdish, Somali, Berber and more — e.g. lo (no/man, from Berber/Arabic), sjpa / schpaa (handsome, cool), baosj (police), avor (leave/go), jalla (hurry/cheap), tæsje (steal).
- wallah — "I swear (to God)," an emphatic oath marker borrowed from Arabic, used to stress sincerity.
- The baa quotative — a reporting marker similar to standard ba/bare but characteristic of the variety.
- Word-order quirks, notably V2 violations: standard Norwegian forces the finite verb into second position, but the multiethnolect often keeps subject–verb order after a fronted adverbial, which standard grammar forbids.
Wallah, jeg lover, det var sjpa!
I swear, I promise, it was awesome! (wallah oath + sjpa 'cool' — multiethnolect)
Etterpå jeg gikk hjem.
Afterwards I went home. (multiethnolect: subject 'jeg' before the verb after a fronted adverb — a V2 violation; standard Norwegian requires 'Etterpå gikk jeg hjem.')
Standard: Etterpå gikk jeg hjem.
Afterwards I went home. (the V2-correct standard form, for contrast)
English-heavy youth speech
Beyond fixed loans like keen and chill, young Norwegians freely code-switch into English for emphasis, irony, and internet culture — whole phrases, not just words ("det var lowkey ganske awkward", "jeg er done", "random", "cringe"). This is its own register marker: heavy English signals online-native youth identity, and it reads as out of place in formal Norwegian.
Det var lowkey ganske awkward, men whatever.
It was lowkey pretty awkward, but whatever. (English code-switching woven into Norwegian youth speech)
Register and attitude: when to use it
The whole point of knowing slang is knowing its boundaries. Slang and multiethnolect features signal closeness, youth, and casualness. Used among friends, in chat, and on social media, they are natural. Used in a job interview, a formal email, an exam, or with someone you should show respect to, they read as inappropriate, immature, or even disrespectful. The skill is recognition first, controlled production second — and never producing the multiethnolect as an outsider, where it can come across as mockery.
Common Mistakes
❌ Using 'sykt bra' or 'drittkult' in a job application or to a professor.
Incorrect register — these intensifiers are casual/crude; use veldig bra or svært godt formally.
✅ Among friends: Det var sykt bra! / Formally: Det var veldig bra.
That was insanely good! / That was very good.
❌ Hearing 'Etterpå jeg gikk hjem' and 'correcting' the native speaker's grammar.
Incorrect assumption — that V2 word order is a deliberate multiethnolect feature, not an error to fix.
✅ Recognise it as multiethnolect; the standard equivalent is 'Etterpå gikk jeg hjem.'
Afterwards I went home.
❌ Translating 'wallah' as a content word or ignoring it.
Incorrect — wallah is an emphatic oath marker ('I swear'), signalling sincerity, not a noun.
✅ Wallah, jeg så det selv!
I swear, I saw it myself!
❌ Treating 'kebabnorsk' as broken or learner Norwegian.
Incorrect and disrespectful — it's a real multiethnolect spoken by fluent bilinguals who code-switch.
✅ Det er en egen ungdomsvariant, ikke 'dårlig norsk'.
It's its own youth variety, not 'bad Norwegian'.
❌ Forming '-is' slang wrongly, e.g. '*venis' for venn.
Incorrect — the lexical -is/-as items are fixed (kompis, bestis, kjekkas); you can't freely coin new ones.
✅ kompis, bestis, godis, kjekkas
buddy, bestie, sweets, good-looking guy
Key Takeaways
- Youth speech replaces veldig with intensifiers: sykt, dritt- (crude), fett, helt rått, kjempe- (safe), mega-.
- Core slang: kult, digg, fett, rått, keen, chille — many borrowed straight from English.
- The -is/-as suffix makes cosy clipped words (kompis, bestis, godis, kjekkas) — but the set is fixed, not freely productive.
- The urban multiethnolect ("kebabnorsk") is a real variety with foreign loanwords (lo, sjpa, baosj), the oath wallah, the baa quotative, and grammatical V2 violations (Etterpå jeg gikk vs standard Etterpå gikk jeg).
- Slang's value is recognition; control your production by register, and never appropriate the multiethnolect as an outsider.
Now practice Norwegian
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Start learning Norwegian→Related Topics
- Diminutives and Intensifying PrefixesB2 — Norwegian has no productive diminutive suffix — it sizes things down with små-/lille compounds and the affectionate -is and -en, and sizes them UP with intensifier prefixes kjempe-, super-, mega-, kanon-, dritt- and adverbs like skikkelig and sinnssykt.
- English Influence on Modern NorwegianB2 — English shapes contemporary Norwegian on every level: anglicisms get borrowed and then fully Norwegian-inflected (å like → liker/likte, en app → appen → apper), young people code-switch freely, whole domains (tech, academia, business) tilt toward English, and Språkrådet pushes back with native coinages like e-post, nettbrett and programvare — so knowing which anglicism is accepted versus marked is a real register skill.
- Discourse Particles: altså, liksom, jajaB2 — How the discourse particles altså, liksom and the reduplicated jaja/neinei/joda manage clarification, hedging and attitude in spoken Norwegian.
- Fillers, Hesitation and BackchannelsB2 — How Norwegians buy time and keep a conversation flowing — the hesitation sounds eh/øh, the stalling fillers altså, liksom, på en måte, du vet, the floor-holders, and above all the backchannels mm, ja, akkurat that signal you're listening (and whose absence makes English speakers seem cold or absent).