I spent four months at the beginning of 2025 in Trondheim, Norway, doing a research internship at NTNU (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet). There’s a lot I could write about the country, the people, and my time there, and even more about what a good time I had studying my very first North Germanic language, but that would take far too long. So instead, here is a small collection of the most enjoyable linguistic and cultural tidbits that I picked up on along the way. These were the moments that made me feel like I was really living the language instead of just learning it from a textbook or an online resource.
Kebabnorsk
Spending time in a foreign country is an unparalleled opportunity for immersion and conversing with natives, so I did my best to speak in Norwegian whenever I could. With strangers, most conversations were successful. If I didn’t falter too much or let any English slip, I could get through the whole interaction without revealing that I wasn’t Norwegian at all. (Native speakers have a funny habit of switching back to English the moment they realize that you’re a foreigner.)
My Norwegian friends, however, would laugh at my pronunciation of certain words and explained that I was inadvertently speaking in kebabnorsk: literally “kebab Norwegian.” Kebabnorsk is a sociolect that emerged in East Oslo, incorporating the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a melting pot of immigrant languages, such as Turkish, Urdu, and Arabic. It’s spoken not only by immigrants and their children, but also by ethnic Norwegians who grew up around those communities. I had studied Norwegian exclusively from standard Bokmål materials and had barely interacted with any speakers of that sociolect, yet my friends insisted that I was using it, pointing out the way I placed stress on certain syllables that they did not. Notably, they all came from different parts of Norway with their own dialects, and rarely agreed among themselves on exactly how a given word or sentence should be expressed.
Urdu happens to be one of my first languages, alongside English, so it’s possible that certain prosodic or pragmatic habits carried over without my noticing. Still, it seemed more likely that how my Norwegian was perceived had as much to do with who was speaking as with how I sounded. Language is never just about sounds in isolation, and kebabnorsk is a reminder of that fact even in its name: a label drawn from a food stereotype that points less to phonetics than to the kinds of bodies and backgrounds the variety is associated with. In that sense, being told I was speaking it wasn’t really a comment on my language habits at all, but on how speakers themselves are socially read in contemporary Norway. Regardless, it’s intriguing to see how multilingual urban varieties – no matter how unprofessional, broken, or “incorrect” they may be deemed – have carved out a recognizable place in everyday Norwegian life.
Godfoten
“Godfoten” is a term I didn’t actually hear in conversation in Trondheim, but noticed written outside Lerkendal Stadion, which in addition to being a football stadium is an event hall where I attended a day-long workshop about mitigating AI bias in the labour market. It was written next to a statue of Nils Arne Eggen, a well-known football coach. The word itself is very literal: god means “good,” and foten is “the foot.” But the meaning isn’t what you might immediately assume, because it’s not exactly like “putting your best foot forward” in English.
Eggen used godfoten to talk about football in a pretty simple way, in his book of the same name. The idea is that every player has something they’re especially good at, and instead of forcing everyone to play the same way, you organize the team so that each player can operate through their strengths. If you “play to your godfot,” you’re playing to the thing you do best, often instinctively.
What I like about the word, beyond the fact that the concept is easily transferable to any other domain or skill, is the way it contrasts with its closest English equivalents. In English, “put your best foot forward” focuses on giving it your all, on driving towards a goal with as much willpower and determination as possible. Godfoten emphasizes preexisting strength: you succeed by leaning into what naturally works for you. It’s a small difference, but reflects a slightly different way of thinking about ability that feels more pragmatic and collaborative. Godfoten is a Trøndelag-born term, so if you use it, you’ll sound like you know your way around.
Advertisements (Annonser)
Advertisements always offer an interesting view on how language can be used to deliver messages in creative ways, with limited space and only a brief window in which to maximize impact. Sometimes, a shift as small as a single word, or as large as the language being used, can dramatically change meaning.
Ruter, Oslo Public Transport
On a bus in Oslo, I saw an ad promoting Ruter services that read:
Fra: der bor hun dama
Til: der bor dama
In English:
From: there lives that woman
To: there lives my woman
Even without speaking Norwegian, it’s clear that the contrast between the two phrases hinges on the presence of a single pronoun: hun (“she”). In Norwegian (and, in fact, most Scandinavian languages), third-person pronouns (han, hun) can function as demonstrative determiners, especially in spoken language, when modifying definite noun phrases referring to people. In “hun dama” (“that woman”), the pronoun encodes deixis and stance, signalling psychological distance and a lack of assumed intimacy between speaker and referent.
“Dama” on its own simply means “the woman,” but in colloquial Norwegian, a bare definite human noun often invites a relational or possessive reading. As a result, “dama” is naturally interpreted as an intimate shorthand for one’s own partner – a girlfriend, a wife – the same way someone might say “my girl” in English. With a single omission, the noun phrase shifts from pointing someone out at a distance to signaling personal closeness: distance versus proximity, unfamiliarity versus intimacy. The ad relies on readers’ tacit knowledge of syntax, allowing the grammar itself to deliver the punchline. For a non-native speaker such as myself, it requires a bit more thought.
Extra, Trondheim Torg
At the mall, I encountered an ad for Extra, a supermarket chain, promoting a 20% discount on fish:
Fisk er for brannkonstabler og fotballspillere, ikke for barn
(parents, relax, it’s reverse psychology)
The first line in English:
Fish are for firefighters and football players, not for children
The joke is obvious on the first read. But from a linguistic perspective, the way the joke is presented is an example of differential bilingualism in practice. The main line, in Norwegian, is accessible to children, the literal “target” of the message, while the full message is only available to bilingual readers, expected to be adults. The ad relies on the fact that language competence is not uniform across age or social groups. Children acquire Norwegian at a younger age, while English proficiency is higher among older and more educated groups.
From a sociolinguistic point of view, this is a form of audience design. The message is structured to reach different societal groups simultaneously and uses language choice to decide who can access which layer of meaning. In this way, it illustrates how English-Norwegian bilingualism isn’t just a state, but a spectrum influenced by factors like age of acquisition, and takes advantage of this to guide behaviour.
ALI-yrkene
Any child of immigrants is familiar with the trifecta of jobs that are pushed as the ideal career paths which will lead to financial security and familial pride: engineer, doctor, or lawyer. Norwegians also recognize this paradigm, but unlike English speakers, have a snappy abbreviation for it: ALI, standing for advokat, lege, and ingeniør. It also happens to be a common name for immigrants in the country, which is part of what makes the term memorable in the first place.
What I find interesting is less the reality behind it (which isn’t exactly unique to Norway) and more the fact that it’s been lexicalized at all. English speakers clearly recognize the same pattern, but we don’t really have a compact way of naming it. ALI-yrkene are just a funny example of how some languages can pack shared cultural knowledge into a neat label, making them easier to recognize and joke about. Maybe we should come up with one for English. DEL? LED? Not as good.