James Baquet

Norway is one of the three main Scandinavian countries, along with Denmark and Sweden. Finland and Iceland are sometimes included in the term “Scandinavia,” though the five together are more properly called the “Nordic countries.”

The Scandinavian Peninsula itself has two roughly north-south running countries: Norway on the west, bounded north, west and south by the sea; and Sweden on the east, with the Baltic Sea on its east. Norway consequently shares a long land border with Sweden, a shorter one with the northwestern portion of Finland, and a tiny one with Russia in the far north.

Though sometimes termed “Scandinavian,” Finnish culture is distinct. Norway and Sweden have closer cultural ties to Denmark, although it’s situated on its own peninsula (Jutland) and islands to Norway’s south.

Another commonality between Norway, Sweden and Denmark is language. The people of Norway speak Norwegian (though a number of other languages are accepted) which — like Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese (the language of the Faroe Islands) — is a Scandinavian language. Finnish is in a different language family called, appropriately, the Finnic languages. It has more in common with Estonian than with the Scandinavian tongues.

I mentioned that Norway is surrounded by sea on three sides. Its northern portion verges on the Barents Sea, and its southern on the North Sea and the Skagerrak, a strait running toward the Baltic Sea; the Norwegian Sea occupies the western side. The Norwegian and North Seas are marginal seas of the Atlantic Ocean.

These all give Norway a tremendously long coastline, some 2,500 kilometers or so when measured in a more-or-less straight line. However, this coast is lacerated by water features called fjords, steep-sided inlets created by glaciers. Add these in, and the coastline is more like 29,000 kilometers. With the perimeters of thousands of islands along the coast added in for good measure, the coast is over 100,000 kilometers long.

Norway is a constitutional monarchy. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway was until recently the state church, and is still prevalent.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. borders, comes close to

2. cut up, torn

3. as a result

4. boundaries, coasts

5. indentations in a shoreline

6. limited, having a boundary

7. of the north

8. thing held in common, similarity

9. widespread, dominant

10. narrow waterway connecting two larger bodies of water