News •
The Norwegian language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language group. The Norwegian alphabet has three more letters than the Latin alphabet—æ, ø, and å, pronounced respectively as the vowels in bad, burn, and ball. Modern Norwegian has many dialects, but all of them, as well as the Swedish and Danish languages, are understood throughout all three of these Scandinavian countries. Until about 1850 there was only one written language, called Riksmål, or “Official Language,” which was strongly influenced by Danish during the 434-year union of the two countries. Landsmål, or “Country Language,” was then created out of the rural dialects. After a long feud, mostly urban-rural in makeup, the forms received equal status under the terms Bokmål (“Book Language”) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian), respectively. For more than four-fifths of schoolchildren, Bokmål is the main language in local schools, and it is the principal language of commerce and communications. In daily speech Bokmål is predominant in the area around Oslo and the eastern Norwegian lowland, while Nynorsk is widely spoken in the mountainous interior and along the west coast.
More than 15,000 Norwegians, mostly in scattered pockets of northern Norway, speak North Sami as a first language. A Uralic language, Sami is the official language of a number of municipalities.
Almost all educated Norwegians speak English as a second language. Indeed, so widespread is its use that some commentators have voiced concern that English may displace Norwegian in commerce and industry.
Religion
More than four-fifths of all Norwegians belong to the Evangelical Lutheran national church, the Church of Norway, which is endowed by the government. The largest groups outside this establishment are Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Lutheran Free Church members, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, and Baptists. As a result of Asian immigration, there also are small groups of Muslims and Buddhists.
Settlement patterns
Østlandet contains more than half of Norway’s population, most of whom live in the metropolitan area of the national capital, Oslo, and in the many industrial cities and urban agglomerations on both sides of Oslo Fjord. With the lion’s share of the national wealth in mining and manufacturing and the concentration of economic activity around Oslo Fjord, Østlandet has the highest average income per household of Norway’s traditional regions.
Norway has never had the agricultural villages that are common elsewhere in Europe. The more densely populated areas of the country have grown up around crossroads of transportation, from which people have moved to the cities and suburbs. Thus, there is actually little borderline between the rural and urban populations. For many years Oslo has attracted settlers from throughout the country, becoming a national melting pot surrounded by the most important agricultural and industrial districts of Norway. The coastline facing Denmark across the Skagerrak passage, stretching from Oslo Fjord to the southern tip of Norway, is densely populated and contains many small towns, coastal villages, and small farms. Centred on the city of Kristiansand, this area is sometimes set apart as a fifth region: southern Norway, or Sørlandet. In Vestlandet the industrial city of Stavanger has attracted large numbers of settlers and has continued to expand as Norway’s oil capital. Bergen, the capital of Vestlandet and Norway’s largest city from the Hanseatic period to the mid-19th century, is a centre for fish exports. Trondheim, the third largest city in Norway and for long periods the national capital, dominates Trøndelag. Tromsø is the capital of Nord-Norge and is a hub for various Arctic activities, including fishing, sealing, and petroleum exploration.
Demographic trends
Largely as a result of a significant increase in the proportion of the population over age 80, the population of Norway continued to grow slowly but steadily at the end of the 20th century. The birth rate fell slightly during the 1990s—to about half the world’s average—but so did the death rate, as life expectancy (about 75 years for men and about 81 years for women) was among the highest in Europe.
Migration from rural to urban areas slowed in the 1980s. The movement away from Nord-Norge, however, increased. At the beginning of the 21st century, about four-fifths of the population lived in towns and urban areas.
In the 2010s Norway’s small but varied population of foreign nationals (most of whom lived in urban areas) increased significantly, primarily as a result of the influx of migrants seeking to escape turmoil in Africa and the Middle East (especially the Syrian Civil War). In the late 20th century, more than half of foreign nationals in Norway had come from other European countries—primarily Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—and people from those countries, especially Sweden, continued to immigrate to Norway in the 21st century. The strict policy concerning immigrants and refugees that Norway had practiced since the 1960s became even more stringent in the 2010s, in response to the spike in arrivals of those seeking refugee status. Emigration—of such great importance in Norway in the 19th and early 20th centuries—ceased to be of any significance, although in most years there is a small net out-migration of Norwegian nationals.
Economy
The Norwegian economy is dependent largely on the fortunes of its important petroleum industry. Thus, it experienced a decline in the late 1980s as oil prices fell, but by the late 1990s it had rebounded strongly, benefiting from increased production and higher prices. In an effort to reduce economic downturns caused by drops in oil prices, the government in 1990 established the Government Petroleum Fund (renamed the Government Pension Fund Global in 2006), into which budget surpluses were deposited for investment overseas. Norway reversed its negative balance of payments, and the growth of its gross national product (GNP)—which had slowed during the 1980s—accelerated. By the late 1990s Norway’s per capita GNP was the highest in Scandinavia and among the highest in the world. The Norwegian economy remained robust into the early 21st century, and Norway fared much better than many other industrialized countries during the international financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. Nevertheless, foreign demand for non-petroleum-related Norwegian products weakened during that period, and, though not a participant in the single European currency, Norway was not immune to the pressures of the euro-zone debt crisis.
About one-fourth of Norway’s commodity imports are food and consumer goods (including motor vehicles); the rest consists of raw materials, fuels, and capital goods. The rate of reinvestment has been high in Norway for a number of years. This is reflected in the relatively steady employment in the building and construction industry. Rapid growth, however, has been registered in commercial and service occupations, as is the case in most countries with a high standard of living.
Fewer than 1 percent of the private businesses and industrial companies in Norway have more than 100 employees. Nonetheless, they account for more than two-fifths of the private industrial labour force. The smaller companies are usually family-owned, whereas most of the larger ones are joint-stock companies. Only a few larger concerns are state-owned, most notably Statoil, the state-owned petroleum industry, as well as the railways and the postal service. The state also has large ownership stakes in hydropower stations and electricity plants.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
By the beginning of the 21st century, the number of farms of at least 1.25 acres (0.5 hectare) had decreased by more than half of the 1950 total of more than 200,000. Much of the abandoned acreage was absorbed into the remaining farms. Nevertheless, many farms remain small; more than half have more than 25 acres (10 hectares) of farmland, while less than one-tenth have more than 125 acres (50 hectares). Labour for hire is scarce, and most of the work must be done by farmer-owners themselves. Extensive mechanization and fertilization, however, have kept total farm output on the increase. Livestock is the major agricultural product, and, although the country is more than self-sufficient in animal products, it remains dependent on imports for cereal crops.
The agricultural core of the Østlandet region lies in the lowlands extending eastward and southward to the Swedish border. With suitable precipitation during the growing season, the highest July temperatures in Norway, a soil consisting of relatively rich marine deposits, and large nearby markets, the land is intensively cultivated. There are even a number of large, heavily mechanized farms producing cereal grains, which generally do not grow well in such latitudes. Most of the farms, however, are small. To supplement their income from domestic animals, vegetables, and fruits, a number of farmers pursue forestry as a secondary occupation; most of the forests are part of farm acreages.
In western Norway, Karm Island comprises a notably rich agricultural area. The inland fjord areas of Hardanger are more sheltered, with rich fruit districts specializing in apples and cherries. Trøndelag is Norway’s most typical agricultural region, with flat, fertile land around the wide Trondheim Fjord (Trondheimsfjorden) and the city of Trondheim.
Although less than one-twentieth of Norway’s total area is agricultural land, productive forests constitute more than one-third of the total area. Forestry forms the basis for the wood-processing industry, which accounts for a small but important part of Norway’s total commodity exports, and it is of major importance for the roughly half of all Norwegian farms that are so small that a second major source of income must be found.
Along the coast, fishing plays the same role that forestry does elsewhere. At the same time, it forms the basis of a large fish-processing industry and offers seasonal employment for many farmers. Of all fishermen, only half fish as their sole occupation. Most vessels are owned by the fishermen themselves, the necessary crew members being paid by shares of gross income in a continuation of a centuries-old tradition of the sea. A critical problem is how to avoid depleting the fish resources while maintaining the volume. Norway’s principal seafood products include fresh fish, dried and salted fish, smoked fish, frozen fish fillets, and other processed forms such as marinated and tinned fish. Fish offal is used as feed at mink farms. In the northwest the city of Ålesund thrives on fishing.
By the mid-1990s fish farming had developed over a period of 25 years into the cornerstone of the coastal economy. Norwegian fish farms are especially renowned for the production of Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, and spotted wolffish. The total number of fishermen decreased by about three-fourths from 1950 to the end of the 20th century, and the number of vessels decreased by more than three-fifths over the same period. At the beginning of the 21st century, there were some 10,000 registered fishing vessels in Norway, though only about one-tenth of them were engaged year-round. Most of the remaining boats are small, but large vessels account for much of the catch.
Once a world leader in Antarctic whaling, Norway has since 1968 hunted only smaller species of toothed whales. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Norway complied with the International Whaling Commission’s total ban on commercial whaling. By the mid-1990s, however, the Norwegian government gradually was allowing limited catches of some species, arguing that they were not endangered any longer and that they posed a serious threat to fish populations. The latter argument is also used in defense of sealing. However, both whaling and sealing have declined sharply as a result of low profitability and international criticism.
Resources and power
With an area of more than 386,000 square miles (1,000,000 square km), Norway’s continental shelf is about three times as large as the country’s land area. The rich resources found there were largely responsible for a boundary dispute between Norway and Russia. Negotiations between the two countries began in the mid-1970s and involved competing approaches to the line separating their claims in the Barents Sea. In 2010 the two countries agreed to a boundary that divided the contested area (67,600 square miles [175,000 square km]) into approximately equal sections.
Oil and gas
By the mid-1990s Norway had become the world’s second largest oil exporter (behind Saudi Arabia), and it remained among the world’s most important oil exporters in the early 21st century. The first commercially important discovery of petroleum on Norway’s continental shelf was made at the Ekofisk field in the North Sea late in 1969, just as foreign oil companies were about to give up after four years of exploratory drilling. Intensified exploration increased reserves faster than production. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s about half of export earnings and about one-tenth of government revenues came from offshore oil and gas. Export earnings from oil and gas continued to climb into the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, when they tapered off somewhat. By the first decade of the 21st century, oil and gas revenue accounted for about one-fifth of overall government revenue. Oil production peaked in 2001 but remained steady into the second decade of the 21st century, while that of natural gas has continued to increase significantly since 1993.
More than one-fourth of the huge investment made in Norwegian offshore operations by the mid-1990s went toward the development of the Troll field just west of Bergen, one of the largest offshore gas fields ever found. Its development ranked as one of the world’s largest energy projects. With a water displacement of one million tons and a height of nearly 1,550 feet (475 metres), the Troll A production platform was the tallest concrete structure ever moved when it was towed into place in 1995. Gas deliveries from the Troll field made Norway a leading supplier of natural gas to continental Europe.
