How do you say “I” in Norwegian dialects?
Jeg på norske dialekter: Oslo til Molde
A1 Norwegian listening practice · Western Norwegian · Curated for beginners
Norwegian has two written standards and no single spoken one, and the word for “I” shows it. Bokmål writes jeg, Nynorsk writes eg, and out loud you’ll also hear æ, e, ei or i, depending on where the speaker grew up. All of them are correct Norwegian. People keep their dialect at school, at work and on TV, so a learner meets several of these from the start.
This clip runs through them town by town: Jeg kommer fra Oslo, Æ kommer fra Kristiansand, Ek kommer fra Stavanger, Eg kommer fra Haugesund, E kommer fra Ålesund, Ei kommer fra Ørsta, I kommer fra Molde. The last speaker, from Brekstad, says Æg kjæm fra Brekstad: the verb changes too, kommer becomes kjæm. A good order to learn them: jeg (Oslo and the east, and the Bokmål spelling), eg (much of the west, and the Nynorsk spelling) and æ (Trøndelag and the north). Once those three sound familiar, the other forms are easy to place.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.