Install and use a Norwegian keyboard on Windows

Once you've been learning for a while you are probably going to want to type the language at some point. This is always complicated by the fact that English is probably the ONLY language to use the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and nothing else. Every other language has at least one accent or diacritic to account for. Norwegian has three whole letters that don't appear on a standard keyboard. Luckily, in this day and age, it's actually pretty easy to install a keyboard layout and use it. The only tricky part is remembering the new layout. So here we go. For this article, I was using Windows 8, but the instructions are pretty standard throughout all Windows operating systems; I've been changing keyboards since XP and it's been the same throughout. However, for specific Windows 7 instructions, you can check out my guide for Czech I posted on an older blog a few years back.

Step 1: Locate the Control Panel

In Windows 8 you get there by dragging your mouse to the right edge of the screen and pull up the "charms". Settings is the bottom one and offers the option of the Control Panel. In all others the Control Panel is found through "My Computer" (and indeed is still there in Windows 8 as well). 

Step 2: Select the "Clock, Language, Region" Settings and go into "Language".

Select the option "Add Language".

Step 3: Select "Add a Language"(again)

Step 4: Scroll down the alphabetical list of languages and choose "norsk (bokmal)"...

... or nynorsk if you fancy. Then click on "Add".

Step 5: You're ready to go! To change keyboards, go down to the task bar and click on the "ENG". This is telling you your current language is English.

Step 6: Change your language by clicking on the (unfortunately labelled) "NOB" option. If you picked nynorsk earlier then I guess this will be "NON" for you.

Start typing!

A few points to remember

The Norwegian layout is similar to the English one with regards to letter placement, but punctuation is all over the place, as well as there now being three extra letters where we have the "[", ";" and "'" keys. See the diagram:

Take a minute to look at that, the punctuation throws me all the time. This is especially important when you're typing passwords! Remember to change back to your native language when typing these as it can just end up getting really frustrating the fifth time you carefully type it in only to realise the "@" sign is now typed with the "2" key. 

I hope this is helpful, I plan to do the same for iOS as well soon!