#16 Inversion: what it is, when to do it and how [grammatikk]

The logic behind Norwegian inversion is actually quite straightforward once you understand it: the verb always wants to occupy the second position in any main clause. This doesn't mean it's literally the second word, but rather the second functional element. When you place something optional at the beginning of a sentence (like "tomorrow" or "in Norway"), the subject and verb must swap places to maintain this verb-second pattern.

Many learners either avoid inversion altogether or overuse it incorrectly. The key is recognizing what triggers inversion and what doesn't. 

For those who already speak German, you'll find numerous structural similarities that can help fast-track your understanding. Norwegian and German share many word order patterns that differ significantly from English, making it worthwhile to look for these parallels rather than always comparing to English.

Practice putting different elements at the beginning of sentences and watch how the rest of the words must rearrange themselves—soon, this "strange" word order will become second nature!

Chapters

• 0:14 What is inversion in Norwegian?
• 1:31 Keeping the verb in second position
• 4:22 Starting sentences with time expressions
• 7:34 How direct questions work
• 9:21 Connectors and subordinate clauses
• 12:45 Norwegian vs. German similarities

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Inversion, inversion, inversion what is that? If you have started learning Norwegian, you've probably met this. Maybe you don't know what it's called, but it's weird. Sometimes well, not sometimes, in basically every other sentence Norwegians will put the subject and the verb in a very weird order. And when I say subject and verb, I mean, for instance, instead of saying I eat subject verb. I mean, for instance, instead of saying I eat subject verb, I would say eat I verb subject, so easily explained. The subject is the person or the thing or the animal doing something, and then the verb is what they're doing. That is too simply explained, but in most sentences it's the only explanation you need to know about that. Why do we do this? Well, you don't really need to know why, and I don't know why we do that because, well, most languages do not do that and it works out fine. But the good thing with inversion is that you know that you are still in the same sentence when you invert. Now what I've noticed is that a lot of students, when they get introduced to inversion, they either never invert they don't really get it and they don't invert or they over invert, so they invert when they should not invert. So I wanted to explain to you how can you know if you should invert or not.

Speaker 1: 1:53

So the thing is normally a sentence would start with subject verb I eat, for instance Jag spiser. Okay, we're going to make like super simple, very, very short sentences, just to show you the real essence here. So I eat, jæ spiser, or I am eating would be the same Jæ spiser. We do not differentiate Super easy. And in this sentence here your verb eat is second place, and that's the thing we want the verb to be in the second place in the sentence. And when I say second place, that doesn't mean necessarily the word number two, but place number two.

Speaker 1: 2:40

So when you analyze a sentence, what you have to see is functions and not necessarily number of words, because the subject doesn't have to be one word. It could be the neighbor, right, that's two words in English. It's one word in Norwegian. So that was a bad example. Let's give you something new my neighbor, that's good. My neighbor Naap. When min, that's two words Nabo and min species. Now the verb is the third place, right, if you count number of words, but function number two. So my neighbor nabo and min would be function number one. That's subject, okay, and you want the verb to come after that. So and this is important, because this doesn't only count for the subject, but also whatever you put first in your sentence, it doesn't have to be only one word, it can be more than that. So look at functions, right.

Speaker 1: 3:43

So one word alone, or many words together, can give you one information. So when I say my neighbor, that's one information. Who? Okay, my, is just adding more specificity, more specificity, okay, you get what I mean. More specificity, ah, more specificity, okay, you get what I mean. More specificity than just neighbor, but same information.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Who is doing something? Okay, but sometimes, even in English, we want to put some other information first, because we like that Especially. Imagine somebody's asking you what are you having for dinner tomorrow? Right, maybe you want to start your sentence with tomorrow instead of I. You don't want to say I will eat pizza for dinner tomorrow. You might want to say tomorrow I will eat pizza for dinner.

Speaker 1: 4:43

So that happens also in Norwegian, that you start your sentence with the last information that was in the question that somebody asked you, or just information that you want to put first because you find it important. It's an important detail. You put it first because you want to. You don't have to, but you want to. So tomorrow, that's not the subject, right, it's not the person doing something, it's time. So it is something we call adverbial Not sure if it's adverbial in English, but anyways. So tomorrow is e-morn In Norwegian. That's two words, but it's one function, one information, when Right.

Speaker 1: 5:36

If I put this first and as we just saw, I don't have to, I just chose to because I wanted to then I need to invert. So that's the rule. It's quite simple. It's simple in theory, but in practice it's. Of course it takes time to really get this become automatic, but that's it.

Speaker 1: 6:02

When you put something first that doesn't have to be there, you invert. It doesn't have to be there, and you could put it I say I morgon skall jag spisa Tomorrow will I eat and you might have noticed that in my sentence I had two verbs. I had skall will, and I have spisa eat. I only invert the first one. If I have more than one, you don't have to worry about the other ones, just let them be wherever they are. You only want to focus on the first one and then it changes place with the subject. Okay, so if my sentence was a little bit more complicated. Instead of I being the subject, I put my neighbor. That's two words, but I have to move both of them. So if it was tomorrow, morgen skal Nabuan min spise Tomorrow will my neighbor eat.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Whenever you ask a direct question with a question word, the verb comes after. Now this is a special case because normally you wouldn't place the question word any other place than in the beginning. But that's how it is. So you would say, for instance, vad heter du? What Call yourself you? Or vem är du? Who are you? In English it's the same. So that's too easy. And when you don't have a question word, I guess that's the only exception where you happy Snakker du? Are you speaking or speak you? So in that case you start with the verb. But apart from questions, you will put the verb second. But what we need to talk about? Well, two things we need to talk about. First thing is that I mentioned that whenever you put something first that does not have to be there, you invert. But sometimes you put something first that does have to be there Connectors.

Speaker 1: 8:57

We have two kinds of connectors. It doesn't matter which one it is. If you put that first in your sentence, they are considered as zero because they are like, they're in between sentences, they're not really part of the sentences. They connect sentences together, so there is zero and that is why they do not impact the order of the sentence, the words in the sentence. So, for instance, I could start, I could start my sentence with but men, sometimes with a comma first, or sometimes even with a full stop first, right. So I could say jeg skal spise full stop, men jeg må lage mat først, but I must cook first, but I must make food first. So you see here, men jeg må, but I must. I didn't say but must I, so men, the word men is a sort of connector, same thing with å eller för, and or for or all of these subjunctions like fordi, at, om, vis. They're also connectors. When you put them first, you don't invert afterwards.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Now, if you've studied subordinate clauses, or ledsetning, delsetning, ledsetning, delssetning, ledsetning, delsetning, it's the same thing subordinate clause, whenever you put that first in your sentence, that's even a full sentence actually, and that's the thing. If you put a subordinate clause first in your sentence, you don't have to do that, right, the natural order would be to put it last. But if you choose to put it first because you want to, then you have to invert in the clause afterwards. So, for instance, instead of saying I am happy because there is sun or it's sunny, I can choose to put the subordinate clause first Fordi det er sol Komma, er jeg glad. So if you've studied this, if you haven't forget about what I'm saying you'll come to this later but if you have studied that, know that it follows the same logic as what I said before. If you put something first in your sentence that doesn't have to be there, then you have to invert the subject and verb after that. Okay.

Speaker 1: 12:03

And the thing with subordinate clauses is that, in addition to inverting, you also have to put a comma, and that's the difference between Norwegian and English. In English they put commas all the way. They would put a comma after tomorrow or on Fridays, every they would put comma. We don't. We only put comma after a subordinate clause. If you have that in the beginning of your sentence. So there are much fewer commas in a Norwegian sentence than in an English sentence.

Speaker 1: 12:39

Okay, and yeah, and if you have, if you already speak german, the germans have the same logic in many ways. So I I highly suggest that, because I've noticed many, many german students of mine. They're not aware of this inversion thing going on, so they copy from english to norwegian instead of actually looking at the similarities between Norwegian and German. So I highly recommend you to do that. When it comes to word order, see if you see any pattern that is similar to German, because it will make your life so much easier if you're able to base the structure of Norwegian on the structure of German. Tack for idag, vi hörs Thank you.