It is a North Germanic language, closely related to Swedish and Danish, all linguistic descendants of Old Norse.

The language has two separate written standards: Nynorsk ("New Norwegian", "New" in the sense of contemporary or modern as opposed to old Norse) and Bokmål ("Book Language/Tongue/Speech"), both of which are official.

The adoption of a few elements of Norwegian orthography into the Danish language gave rise to the written standard of Riksmål, which later became Bokmål.

By 1920, Nynorsk was being used widely in western Norway and the mountain valleys, where it still has its stronghold, and Bokmål was used in the more populous areas of the country.

It differs from its mostly Danish predecessor Riksmål in terms of genders, lexicon, counting system, a tendency to permit concrete noun endings in abstract situations and diphthongs versus single vowels.

It has few active users, but is supported by the Ivar Aasen-sambandet organization, founded in 1965 in response to the samnorsk policy of the government at the time.

Mirroring the situation of Meänkieli in Sweden, Kven is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Finnish, and has a large degree of mutual intelligibility with the language.

Spoken by the Indigenous Norwegian Travellers, a traditionally Itinerant population who almost exclusively inhabit Southwestern and Southern Norway which have a mixture from Romanisæl, also known as Tater (Norwegian & Swedish Romani) and Yeniche (German Traveller) populations.

Despite the lexicon of Romani and German Rotwelsch origin, the syntax, grammar and morphology of Rodi is entirely Nordic.

[9] The ten most common countries of origin of immigrants residing in Norway are Poland (97,197), Lithuania (37,638), Sweden (36,315), Somalia (28,696), Germany (24,601), Iraq (22,493), Syria (20,823), Philippines (20,537), Pakistan (19,973) and Eritrea (19,957).