Working in Norway – without speaking Norwegian?

Starting a new career in a foreign country will invariably be a profound and life-altering decision.

On a personal level, leaving behind family and friends while building a new life is a dramatic change. Professionally, adapting to a new country's work culture and establishing yourself in an unfamiliar environment takes significant effort – especially when there’s a language barrier to overcome.

But what’s it really like being a non-Norwegian speaker at a Norwegian workplace? We turned to three of our members who have been through that exact experience.

Connection vs. exclusion

The pros are simple: there are none. It’s just a matter of how long you can afford to be content with your life while relying solely on English

When asked about the pros and cons of being a non-Norwegian speaker in a Norwegian workplace, Kate Kuzmina is crystal clear:

“The pros are simple: there are none. It’s just a matter of how long you can afford to be content with your life while relying solely on English”, she says.

Kate started her academic journey studying clinical neuropsychology at Moscow State University, and then went on to pursue a PhD in the same field at the University of Hong Kong.

After completing her doctorate, Kate moved to Norway for a research position at the University of Oslo, before leaving academia for industry and pursuing data science. Currently, she is a Senior Consultant on the Cloud & Data team at Experis, one of Norway’s leading IT consulting companies.

Even in academia, where English is the lingua franca, the very first advice Kate Kuzmina received from her senior Norwegian colleagues was to learn Norwegian.

Kate Kuzmina

“At the time, the advice felt unjustified — why, after just a week in Oslo, should I invest my time and effort into learning a language spoken by such a small fraction of the world's population instead of focusing on research, publishing papers, and building my skills?”

Nonetheless, if you decide to stay in Norway, learning Norwegian starts to feel like part of your due diligence, according to Kate.

“If you avoid it, the ‘technical debt’ builds up”, she says. “It can manifest in subtle yet significant ways at work: missing out on exciting jobs or clients because they require Norwegian, struggling to fully connect with colleagues, feeling indirectly excluded from water cooler chats, or being the one who constantly makes everyone switch to English. At some point, fixing this ‘debt’ becomes easier than continuing to fight against it”.

Thriving beyond surviving

Originally from Shanghai, Zhixian Bao is another Tekna member who has first-hand experience working in a Norwegian workplace without fully mastering the language spoken by the majority of her colleagues.

Zhixian Bao

At first, she didn’t feel the need to. After all, most Norwegians understand and speak English quite fluently.

“Earlier in my career, I was working in a Norwegian company with a presence in both Asia and the Nordics, making English the corporate language. More recently, I have been working in a customer-facing role, primarily with Norwegian companies. In such a position, knowing and speaking Norwegian is a plus.”

Generally speaking, knowing English is sufficient to communicate effectively at a Norwegian workplace, in Zhixian’s opinion. Particularly in the tech industry, much of the terminology originates from English. At Google, where she now works as a Data and AI Specialist, she usually uses English to present in meetings. Nonetheless, all the employers she has worked with have sponsored Norwegian language learning opportunities for employees.

"Inevitably, mastering the local language is beneficial for everybody that lives in another country. This applies everywhere, not only in Norway. It seems to take some effort for the local speakers to switch to English just for the minority's sake, but many companies encourage it. I haven't experienced being left out of any business decision or critical information because of language.”

Zhixian Bao

However, there are circumstances where she feels more frustrated.

“Not being a native speaker of Norwegian makes it difficult for me to understand some jokes that only exist in Norwegian culture. Different languages and countries have different histories and expressions. That might be the main reason I sometimes prefer not to speak Norwegian – I don't want to compromise my humor and vocabulary.”

A common language

Cameron Lowell Palmer has lived in Norway for more than 15 years. The American grew up in Dallas, Texas, spent a year studying in London and then went back to the US – specifically San Francisco – during the dotcom bubble.

Cameron Lowell Palmer

Eventually, as it tends to happen, love took him to Norway, where he studied at NTNU and has worked at companies such as Infront, Shortcut and currently Promon, where he works as a Security Software and Research Engineer.

Cameron regrets not having studied Norwegian more intensively when he first moved here, but he points out that there were specific reasons for that.

“One of the initial problems I encountered was that I couldn't afford Norwegian classes. I was going to Folkeuniversitetet, and it was just too expensive on my salary starting out as a brand new iOS developer in Norway. After finishing a few courses, I had to take a break, because it was killing me financially”, he says.

Cameron’s Norwegian language skills are “fine for children and grocery stores”, he explains. And he has yet to be in a job where the office language is Norwegian.

“Not only Norwegians, but Scandinavians in general, tend to default to whatever language everybody has in common. You can actually hear it in the office when you're walking into an area. Let’s say Jan Vidar and Morten are talking and they're speaking Norwegian. If I walk in, they just dynamically switch to English on their own.”

“On the other hand, you're always a little bit out of the loop when you don’t speak the language”, he says.

Breaking the pattern

Back to Kate Kuzmina, who has made the switch not only from academia to industry, but from English to Norwegian as well. Not because she had to, though.

“The number of tech companies in Oslo where English is the official working language is mostly limited to startups and scaleups. Since I worked in both science and startups, I never felt a pressing need to switch to Norwegian and probably could have just continued with English. But I decided to break that pattern, because I don’t want my choices to be restricted simply because of language.”

That means not having to worry about missing out on jobs, connecting with colleagues or being left out of informal settings.

“I’m confident that mastering Norwegian doesn’t just solve these issues, but also opens doors to new, unexpected opportunities. If you’re planning to stay in Norway long-term, I’d wholeheartedly recommend learning the language as soon as possible”, she says.

You might also be interested in: Things I wish I knew before I started working in Norway