AboutRoy Helge Rasmussen Expertise I live in the southern part of norway and can find my way around most of the country. I will answer questions about social life, culture, language and politics to the best of my knowledge. I am not so good at travel tips outside the south-eastern parts, although I will try to answer.
Experience I live here and have been guiding members of my family around when they visit from abroad for years.
I'm hoping to find a Norwegian first name to match my (as yet unborn) babies Norwegian surname! My questions are:
1. Is the "official government list" of acceptable baby names available anywhere online?
2. can you reccomend any good resources either online or in print relating to traditional and/or modern Norwegian names?
Tusen Takk!
Answer 1) Not anymore. The law regarding names for persons changed a few years back from being very restrictive to becoming very liberal. The only restriction now is that the name must not be a disadvantage to the child. A very subjective law giving power to the clerks in the registry, but the law also states that if you can explain it, it should be allowed. I.E. "Syphilia" probably would not fly unless you could show a LONG list of ancestors with that same name. (Yes, syphilia was in actual use for a time being about 150 years ago.)
2) Name resources
First of all, you can have a look at the official name statistics. It gives you the historical trends for almost every name given to more than 200 people over the last 100 years and more. Also you can look up the number of people living with a specific name, and trend graphs for every single first name.
Interesting tidbit: The vietnamese surname Nguyen is the 62. most common surname in norway today because most of the vietnamese refugees that came here during the 70's and 80's had that surname.
