Main languages: Norwegian (two official forms: Bokmaal and Nynorsk), Sami
Main religions: Evangelical Lutheran Christianity (86%); other Christian denominations including the Evangelical Lutheran Free Church, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal and Methodist (combined total about 4.5%); Islam (between 55,000 and 65,000 adherents), Buddhists 6000 (Vietnamese descent), Judaism roughly 1,000.
Minority groups include Sami, the Kvens, the Roma, as well as various immigrant groups from, among others, Bosnia Herzegovina, Pakistan, Somalia and Türkiye. Norway has two standard forms of the same language: Bokmaal (‘Book language’, or Dano-Norwegian) and Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’); they have equal official and educational status.
Sami are the indigenous inhabitants of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the far north of Russia. The official estimate of the Sami population in Norway is around 40,000 (data: Statistics Norway, 2006). They are concentrated mainly in Finnmark County.
The Kvens are a historic ethnic group in northern Norway, descended from Finnish-speaking fishing communities. Their history is closely interlinked with the history of the Sami, through intermarriage. In some early documents, the Kvens were believed to be a part of the Sami people, but today Kvens consider themselves a distinct community. An estimate from a 2001 parliamentary inquiry put the number of Kven people figure at 10,000-15,000 – but exact figures are difficult to estimate as there is no official definition of the Kvens.
After the Second World War, Norway began to experience the immigration of foreign workers, a trend that accelerated with the development of North Sea oil in the late 1960s. In the 2005 Census, the highest number of immigrants was from Asian countries, including Türkiye (149,000) and Eastern European nations (65,000), as well as refugees from former Yugoslavia and a sizeable Somali community. (Statistics Norway).