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The Sami people are indigenous to Northern Scandinavia, [2] [3] and though they have largely adopted Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, or Russian—due in no small part to official assimilation policies [4] —some still speak their indigenous Sami languages. Sami languages, like Kven and Finnish, belong to the Uralic language family.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [4] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Norway comprises the western and northernmost part of Scandinavia in Northern Europe, [89] between latitudes 57° and 81° N, and longitudes 4° and 32° E. Norway is the northernmost of the Nordic countries and if Svalbard is included also the easternmost. [90] Norway includes the northernmost point on the European mainland. [91]
The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [70] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [71] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
Norwegian (endonym: norsk ⓘ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language.Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties; some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close.
For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. [2] Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian, and ...
Norwegian or Norse Vikings [30] raided and settled in Shetland, Orkney, Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. In the United Kingdom, many names for places ending in -kirk, -ness, -thorpe, -toft and -by are likely Norse in origin. [31] In 947, a new wave of Norwegian Vikings appeared in England when Erik Bloodaxe captured York.
According to the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, the Sámi population of Norway is 40,000. If all people who speak Sámi or have a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent who speaks or spoke Sámi are included, the number reaches 70,000. As of 2021, 20,545 people were registered to vote in the election for the Sámi Parliament in Norway. [172]