Norwegian Verbs

The Norwegian Reference Grammar and thus current school grammar classify Norwegian finite tenses in two systems: The present tense system and the simple past system, which you will meet if you go a bit into Norwegian grammar. We've shown both systems at the end of this section, and they make it easier to understand how the different Norwegian tenses are constructed. However, to learn the most important classes of verbs, it is equally useful to look at the traditional a verbo conjugation. Most people will find it simpler to memorise. But before that, we'll look at the infinite forms.

Infinite Forms

Regular Norwegian verbs have -a or -e infinitive endings, according to dialect:

The verb stems, eg. kvil and kast, are used to make the other tenses. These two verbs form the pattern for the biggest classes of regular verbs, ie. kaste and kvile classes, respectively. You will see that the verb stems take suffixes and sometimes auxiliary verbs to create tenses.

The other frequently used infinite form is the imperative (Norwegian: bydeform / imperativ), used for requests, orders and the like. In almost all cases, it equals the verb stem:

Verb Conjugations

Most people will recognise this way of conjugating a verb from their school days, so let's go back to school for a few minutes:

As you can see, the stem in this class takes the suffixes -er, -te and -t.

In this class, the stem takes the suffixes -ar, -a and -a.

The Present and Past System

The verb tenses shown above are mostly simple tenses, that require few auxiliary verbs. However, Norwegian has several compound tenses, with forms built from one or more auxiliary verbs in addition to the main verb. The tenses are in the present or past system according to the first verb of each tense.

I hope the content of this page was useful to you, and that you learned some Norwegian Verbs, consonants and vowels. Try to memorize them to be able to use them in your daily conversation. Make sure to check our Learn Norwegian page, which contains several lessons that might help you in your learning process.