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You are here: Home i In Focus i In focus 2011 i Language - the key to working life i Language skills - the key that doesn't always fit

Language skills - the key that doesn't always fit

Few statements enjoy such broad political agreement in the Nordic countries as this: language skills are key to both integration and working life. All five countries offer immigrants several hundreds of hours of free language courses, but they have chosen different models and put different demands on students.
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200 languages spoken in the Nordic region

Languages portlet

There are no proper statistics for how many languages are being spoken in the Nordic region. One estimate puts the number at approximately 200 different languages.

Sweden has received the greatest number of immigrants, and 1.5 million of the country's 9 million citizens count Swedish as their second language.

The largest immigrant languages are Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish, but Eastern-European languages like Polish are increasing rapidly, especially in Norway.

The Nordic region often appears to be a linguistically homogenous region because Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can understand each other. But take minority languages like Greenlandic and Sami into consideration, and the linguistic spread is very large.

 

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