While Norwegian and English certainly share many words in common, there are plenty of examples where their vocabulary diverges. Take for example, words such as ski, cat/katt and fjord, which need little translation. But there are a lot of instances where there is no overlap, as in the concept of “a business,” which in Norwegian is forretning; or elv, which means “river.”
There are other words that may appear to be equivalents, but language learners learn to tread with caution, such as full, which means “drunk” in English. Many an exchange student has fallen prey to this “false equivalent” term at the end of a meal, declaring that they are too full (drunk) to possibly enjoy dessert.
There is one word, however, which is not only common to Norwegian and English, but appears to have universal meaning. We are talking about the word “huh?” or “hæ?”
Linguists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics studied 31 languages and found that the use of “huh?” was universally used and understood as an interjection meant to fix misunderstandings. Researchers Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield of MPI’s Language and Cognition Department embarked on this study to examine conversational structure across languages.
The team theorized that the word could be universal due to its similarity to a grunt, and that “huh?” is something that a child would use even when pre-verbal. Of course replying with “Hæ?” is not always seen as polite, but you won’t need Google Translate to get your point across.