Seeking Norwegian Dictionary with IPA (phonetic transcription)

[PeterMollenburg]

Hi

In short, I'm looking for a Norwegian dictionary online, an iTunes app or a hardcopy with IPA (API in French) transcriptions for each entry, as I'm trying to tie down my understanding of Norwegian pronunciation to the spelling of Norwegian words.

Order of preference as follows:

1. Norwegian-French dictionary
2. Norwegian-English dictionary
3. Norwegian-Dutch dictionary
4. Norwegian-Norwegian dictionary

[Speakeasy]

... I'm looking for a Norwegian dictionary online ... Norwegian-French dictionary ...

Salut, mon gars! I typed "Dictionnaire norvégien-français into the Google search engine and the following online version popped up as the first choice. Now then, while it might not meet all of your criteria, it is functional. Furthermore, it is possible that "pushing the Google envelope" just might yield something more to your liking.

Lexilogos: Dictionnaire norvégien
https://www.lexilogos.com/norvegien_dictionnaire.htm

[PeterMollenburg]

... I'm looking for a Norwegian dictionary online ... Norwegian-French dictionary ...

Salut, mon gars! I typed "Dictionnaire norvégien-français into the Google search engine and the following online version popped up as the first choice. Now then, while it might not meet all of your criteria, it is functional. Furthermore, it is possible that "pushing the Google envelope" just might yield something more to your liking.

Lexilogos: Dictionnaire norvégien
https://www.lexilogos.com/norvegien_dictionnaire.htm

Salut, camarade ! Oui, celui-là je l'ai déjà trouvé, moi aussi (Yep, that one, I already found, myself as well). I sincerely thank you for your prompt and informative reply, nonetheless, but I was onto that one and went as far as to click on the various offerings via that site to verify if there were any phonetics on offer. Malheureusement pas (Unfortunately not). Let's see if this thread yields any further replies while I do some digging myself in the meantime.

[tungemål]

This is the best Norwegian-Norwegian dictionary (Bokmål). It's got 225.000 entries and seems to provide IPA:
https://www.naob.no/

Here is the dictionary for Nynorsk and dialect words. It has only got entries from I to Å because the first volumes don't exist in digital form. Work on the dictionary started in 1930 and it was finished 2014.
http://no2014.uib.no/perl/ordbok/no2014.cgi

[Iversen]

The naob.no indicates pronunciation, but its system ain't no IPA. Still better than nothing, though. Sometimes it even offers pronunciation alternatives, which must be a necessity with the Norwegian cornucopia of dialects. And it has a feature which may be practical: it indicates similar words while you tap in a search word.

The extant part of the New Norwegian dictionary hasn't got pronunciation directives, and while it has a similar-words feature for searches this feature works less smoothly than the one from the other dictionary.

By the way, I have been searching for a good something ---> New Norwegian dictionary, both on paper and on the internet (even Bokmål -> Nonorsk would be OK), but it has been difficult to find one. I'm less interested in monolingual dictionaries.

[tractor]

I don't think I've ever seen a dictionary with IPA for the Norwegian headwords. Maybe for a few words, but not for the entire dictionary.

Your best option is probably the NAOB, as already mentioned above, although it doesn't use IPA.

[tractor]

By the way, I have been searching for a good something ---> New Norwegian dictionary, both on paper and on the internet (even Bokmål -> Nonorsk would be OK), but it has been difficult to find one. I'm less interested in monolingual dictionaries.

There are a few smaller Bokmål–Nynorsk dictionaries. Usually, there's also a small fornorskningstillegg or bokmål–nynorsk ordliste in the Nynorsk ordliste that pupils use at school. The purpose of these dictionaries and wordlists is to help Norwegians write better Nynorsk.

There's also a dictionary called Med andre ord. Den store synonymordboka med omsetjingar til nynorsk.

I know that Samlaget has published some bilingual dictionaries, but I don't know if they are still in print.

[PeterMollenburg]

The responses here have been helpful. Thank you. I have bookmarked the links and made note of the suggestions. And of course I've had a dig around and gratefully received another forum member's help. So I have come across a couple of EN-NO-EN (Bokmål) dictionaries, which although don't contain a full IPA transcription system throughout their pages/entries, what is provided is useful.

The first EN-NO-EN dictionary, the author being Einar Haugen, has some detailed pages on pronunciation and then within the dictionary itself seems to present tonal accents (or maybe it's stress or both?) as well as those words (likely foreign) presented with IPA transcription that have some kind of unusual pronunciation and don't follow what you'd expect from Norwegian patterns of pronunciation. Far from extensive, but still will help.

Perhaps I will find that once it's all a little less puzzling, I won't need IPA so much, and it'll just be those irregular words (likely foreign) that will be the sticking point. Thus the above dictionary may prove very useful. Time will tell. I mean, take Spanish for example, once I worked out the very regular phonetic system, a dictionary with IPA turns out to be overkill. With French, I preferred it anyway as a nice backup if I was in doubt or wanted to be certain. With Dutch IPA was useful in the beginning, but later on not a necessity. So perhaps (hopefully) Norwegian proves to be that predictable, once I find I've put in enough time for the patterns to be obvious.

The second dictionary is one by Berlitz with a yellow cover EN-NO-EN (as with the first book mentioned above), first published in 1974 and seemingly updated or reprinted in 1981 with the version I have seen. It doesn't have IPA, but somewhat reminiscent of the good old selection of European language phrase books Berlitz published in the 80s and 90s, it has some kind of a imitated pronunciation system for most if not all Norwegian entries on the NO-EN side of the dictionary. Ironically the EN-NO side has IPA, so perhaps the other way around they felt IPA wasn't the best way to represent the pronunciation of Norwegian (for English speakers?). Perhaps those phrase books are still being published, and in the same vein, but I've no idea.

The imitated pronunciation also reminds me of the Hugo (insert language here) in 3 Months courses. I never relied on such systems despite being a keen user of this series in a few languages, as I found I preferred IPA where I could access it, and the imitated pronunciation seemed somewhat ridiculous from my perspective. It seemed better to use a standard system that I could use again with other resources and/or with other languages than to use a system limited to one publisher or book that just seemed odd at times. It goes without saying that for Norwegian, resources are harder to come by than for the big languages and the moderately sized Dutch.

In summary, IPA is standardized and predictable in my experience, whereas imitated pronunciation guides are only good once you 'break the code' and are limited in their application outside the resource in use.

Another problem is, who is imitating the pronunciation? It's not only subjective but also depends on where the one who is imitating the pronunciation comes from. Should I assume and imagine I am originally from London or from New York when I'm trying to pronounce foreign words represented with such a system? Of course, with time, I'm sure the 'code', like that of IPA, would be broken and it would start to make sense, so I think this dictionary by Berlitz looks even more promising than the first.

On another note, there are standard course books with their pronunciation guides. I began with Hugo Norwegian in Three Months and tried (tried because it was all very new and different, not necessarily because the course is poor) to make sense of the pronunciation, then shifted to Sverre Klouman's 'Learn Norwegian', which has more detail with regards to pronunciation and has been highly regarded around these parts. I don't necessarily think that the Hugo course isn't any good, I just switched as it seemed the latter had more detail and I could perhaps learn better pronunciation habits from a resource that continues to use IPA in the earlier chapters of the text. The fact IPA is dropped except for unusual words in the later chapters, suggests what I mentioned above is likely valid - that once you get a good grounding in the workings and patterns of Norwegian pronunciation, one no longer necessarily needs IPA, while exceptions will remain.

[tungemål]

The Norwegian phonetic system is predictable, but not as logical as for instance Spanish, so phonetic transcription would be useful.

As for tones (pitch accent), I haven't seen any dictionary indicating this. Probably because they are not regarded as necessary for conveying meaning. But the two tones can be predicted according to certain rules most of the time.

Actually, naob.no does indicate tones. I just haven`t looked for it before.

[tractor]

I thought about Einar Haguen's dictionary, but didn't mention it since it doesn't provide IPA for every word. It is a very good dictionary though. It also contains variant spellings and headwords in Nynorsk and Riksmål as well as Bokmål. I guess that can be very useful for foreigners, especially if you want to understand Nynorsk and dialects or read older literature in Bokmål/Riksmål.

Traditionally, most bilingual Norwegian dictionaries have been made for Norwegians learning the foreign language, not for foreigners learning Norwegian. That's probably the reason why they usually don't have phonetic spelling for Norwegian words. I don't know if that has changed in recent years with increased immigration.

It's a pity that they didn't go for IPA in NAOB. Most Norwegians have at least some familiarity with IPA. It has been used in English classes at school and in all English–Norwegian dictionaries for generations. Most Norwegians won't know what you're talking about if you say IPA, but they will if you say lydskrift.