There's plenty to see and do, and of course you can see for yourself why it's so often referred to as the happiest place to live in the world. Recently, the city's administration announced ambitious plans for Copenhagen to become the world's first carbon neutral capital as soon as The city already has excellent transport including a substantial network of cycling infrastructure.
Norway's capital city although it never used to be is growing fast. More than , people live in the city proper, with many hundreds of thousands more in the surrounding urban area.
The city is a curious mix of old and new, with public art and green spaces everywhere. The city's waterfront region is undergoing a long-term transformation and now includes shopping districts, museums, the opera house, and a waterside path and cycleway.
Top sights for visitors include the Vigeland sculpture park and the Holmenkollen ski jump and arena. Set on numerous islands linked by bridges and boats, Sweden's capital city is best known for Gamla Stan, its atmospheric old town. But there's so much more to see on the other urban islands, and in the nearby archipelago. Stockholm is perhaps the most modern and international of the Scandinavian capitals, but still retains an authentic Scandinavian flavour.
There's original architecture, idyllic islands and hiking opportunities all within easy reach of its walkable centre. Gothenburg is Sweden's second biggest city but is much more laid-back than the capital, Stockholm. But laid-back doesn't mean boring! With pop-up breweries, boutiques and music festivals galore, there are plenty of things to do. So much so, that I'd suggest Gothenburg as a great candidate for a Scandinavian weekend break, especially if you're keen to avoid crowds.
Liseberg is of the city's best attractions that not widely known outside of Scandinavia. This centrally-located theme park has traditional rollercoasters, rides and attractions that all the family will love.
Norway's second biggest city is also known as the gateway to the fjords. Its coastal location means it's one of Europe's rainiest cities , but that shouldn't stop you from visiting. History buffs will be particularly busy. If you do want to visit Norway's fjords, consider basing yourself in Bergen first. After spending a day or two in the city, you can get to the Aurlandsfjord by car, train or ferry. Read more : Scandinavian cities. In popular culture, Scandinavian design is synonymous with simple, functional flat-pack furniture thanks to the incredible worldwide success of IKEA.
But there is much more to it than that! Let's take a look at some of the most common elements of Scandinavian design:. Light colours : Northern Europeans are not afraid to make white space a feature, but colour isn't completely absent. When colour is used, neutral, earthy, and pastel shades dominate.
Icy blues and pale pinks are popular choices. Wood : Carpets are rarely seen inside a northern European home. When white or light colours are used, wooden floors and walls help to make a room seem open, airy, and clean. Furniture : There is a focus on simplicity and clean lines among the furniture used inside a Nordic home. The use natural materials, especially wood, is often emphasised too. Wegner's Y Chair. Read more : An Introduction to Scandinavian Design. The region's three countries along with Finland and Iceland are some of the world's most equal on many measures.
As such, it makes sense to look to them for lessons on how to build a more equal society elsewhere. When it comes to the economy they are in fact, capitalist, or at the very least can be described as a mixed economy. They are social-democratic countries and are to varying degrees driven by financial markets more than central planning. That said, the state does play a bigger strategic role in the economy than many other countries.
All the Nordic countries show that major egalitarian reforms and substantial welfare states are possible within prosperous capitalist countries while being highly engaged in global markets. All the Scandinavian countries score highly in terms of major welfare and development indicators, while Denmark, Norway and Sweden have long been among the least corrupt countries in the world. However, this all results from high levels of social solidarity and high taxation.
Such policies cannot easily be adopted by other countries. Lessons can be learned, however. Read more : Equality and the Nordic model. One thing I haven't touched on yet is the constant belief that Scandinavians are the happiest people on the planet. The three countries consistently rank high in standards of living surveys and the UN's World Happiness Report.
So it's easy to conclude that the people must be happy, right? I'm not so sure. In a story I wrote for Forbes , two American women living in Norway and Denmark both independently described the feeling not as happiness, but one of contentment:.
Most international perspectives of people from Denmark, Norway and Sweden paint them with the same brush. Scandinavians are wealthy and rational, but cold and perhaps a little boring.
Of course, it's really difficult to boil down the characteristics and personalities of around 20 million people in just a few sentences! But I'd say the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And is everyone is blonde-haired and blue-eyed? You can read my article on Scandinavian stereotypes for my verdict on that one! But as always with language, things are a little more complicated than that.
Read more : The languages of Norway. Then there's the Sami language spoken by the indigenous Sami people of northern Norway and Sweden. The diversity within the Sami language is surprising and there are many dialects. Then hidden away in the forests of Sweden comes Elfdalian. Beyond all of this, English is an incredibly important language in the region. Although the local languages are closely related, meetings among Scandinavians are often held in English.
As a native English speaker this fascinates me. The reason is simple. For the last few decades, every Scandinavian has learnt English from a very young age at school.
Throw in the amount of American and British TV and films, plus increased globalisation, and you suddenly have a lingua franca that everyone can use and understand. It's that understanding aspect that's crucial.
That's not always the case with the three Scandinavian languages, especially when dialects are involved. I've been involved with many meetings where a Norwegian and Dane have actively chosen to use English. As described, Saevo and Scatinavia can also be the same place. Pliny mentions Scandinavia one more time: in Book VIII he says that the animal called achlis given in the accusative, achlin , which is not Latin , was born on the island of Scandinavia.
The name " Scandia ", later used as a synonym for Scandinavia, also appears in Pliny's Naturalis Historia, but is used for a group of Northern European islands which he locates north of Britannia. The idea that " Scadinavia " may have been one of the " Scandiae " islands was instead introduced by Ptolemy c.
He used the name " Skandia " for the biggest, most easterly of the three " Scandiai " islands, which according to him were all located east of Jutland. Some early Swedish scholars of the Swedish Hyperborean school [ 29 ] and of the 19th-century romantic nationalism period proceeded to synthesize the different versions by inserting references to the Suiones, arguing that they must have been referred to in the original texts and obscured over time by spelling mistakes or various alterations.
The Latin names in Pliny's text gave rise to different forms in medieval Germanic texts. In Jordanes' history of the Goths AD the form Scandza is used for their original home, separated by sea from the land of Europe chapter 1, 4. In recent substrate studies, Sami linguists have examined the initial cluster sk- in words used in Sami and concluded that sk- is a phonotactic structure of non-native origin. Scadin- can be segmented various ways to obtain various Indo-European meanings: scand- or scad-in-, scan- or sca-din, scandin or scadin-.
Another possibility is that all or part of the segments of the name came from the indigenous Mesolithic people inhabiting the region. According to some of these intellectuals, the Scandinavians share some genetic markers with the Basque people.
The name of the Scandinavian mountain range, Skanderna in Swedish, was artificially derived from Skandinavien in the 19th century, in analogy with Alperna for the Alps.
The geography of Scandinavia is extremely varied. Notable are the Norwegian fjords , the Scandinavian Mountains , the flat, low areas in Denmark, and the archipelagos of Sweden and Norway. Sweden, and to an even greater extent Finland, has many lakes and moraines, legacies of the ice age. The central part - from Oslo to Stockholm - has a humid continental climate Dfb , which gradually gives way to subarctic climate Dfc further north and cool marine west coast climate Cfc along the northwestern coast.
A small area along the northern coast east of the North Cape has tundra climate Et due to lack of summer warmth. The Scandinavian Mountains block the mild and moist air coming from the southwest, thus northern Sweden and Finnmarksvidda plateau in Norway receive little precipitation and have cold winters. Large areas in the Scandinavian mountains have alpine tundra climate.
The warmest temperature ever recorded in Scandinavia is Southwesterly winds further warmed by foehn wind can give warm temperatures in narrow Norwegian fjords in winter; Tafjord has recorded There are two language groups that have coexisted on the Scandinavian peninsula since prehistory - the North Germanic languages Scandinavian languages and the Sami languages.
Apart from Sami and the languages of minority groups speaking a variant of the majority language of a neighboring state, the following minority languages in Scandinavia are protected under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages : Yiddish , Romani Chib, Romanes and Romani. The dialects of Denmark , Norway and Sweden form a dialect continuum and are mutually intelligible.
The populations of the Scandinavian countries, with a Scandinavian mother tongue, can — at least with some training — understand each other's standard languages as they appear in print and are heard on radio and television. They are related to, but not mutually intelligible with, the other North Germanic languages, Icelandic and Faroese , which are descended from Old West Norse. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian have, since medieval times, been influenced to varying degrees by Middle Low German and standard German.
A substantial amount of that influence was a by-product of the economic activity generated by the Hanseatic League. Norwegians are accustomed to variation, and may perceive Danish and Swedish only as slightly more distant dialects. This is because they have two official written standards, in addition to the habit of strongly holding on to local dialects.
The people of Stockholm , Sweden and Copenhagen , Denmark, have the greatest difficulty in understanding other Scandinavian languages. This causes Faroese people to become bilingual in two very distinct North Germanic languages, making it relatively easy for them to understand the other two Mainland Scandinavian languages. The Scandinavian languages are as a language family entirely unrelated to Finnish , Estonian and Sami languages which as Finno-Ugric languages are distantly related to Hungarian.
Due to the close proximity, there is still a great deal of borrowing from the Swedish and Norwegian languages in the Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages.
Finnish-speakers had to learn Swedish in order to advance to higher positions. The Sami languages are indigenous minority languages in Scandinavia. According to the Sami Information Centre of the Sami Parliament in Sweden , southern Sami originated in an earlier migration from the south into the Scandinavian peninsula.
In Finland, native Swedish speakers constitute a small, but rather influential, minority. All children are given a course of their second official language at school; for Swedish-speakers, this is Finnish, and for Finnish-speakers, Swedish.
The ethnic nationalist Fennoman movement in Finland began to fight for equal language rights for Finnish-speakers from the Swedish-speaking elite in the s.
The movement's goal was to promote the equal legal status of the Finnish language in a country where the official language of government was Swedish or Russian, despite the large majority of the population being Finnish-speakers.
The Fennomans protested against Finnish participation in the Scandinavian exhibition in Stockholm , arguing that it would "enforce the impression that Finland belonged culturally to the Scandinavian realm" and imply that Finland did not have its own history before but was "first and foremost a periphery of western civilisation".
The peasant parliamentarian referred to the often-mentioned claim that Finland was in debt to Sweden for its western civilization and he asked if anyone could show him the original promissory note of this debt. According to Dr. Henrik Meinander, Professor, Department of History, University of Helsinki , Finland, the rhetorical question was meant to emphasize that "Finns already stood on their own two feet and had bowed enough to the domestic Swedish-speaking elite. The Russian Emperor Alexander II , Grand Duke of Finland, had issued a decree already in that would secure equal status for Finnish in public affairs within the following two decades, but only in did Finnish language finally receive an equal official status with Swedish and Russian.
In most areas of Finland, Finnish is the "lingua franca", which means that Finnish is often necessary where Finnish is the majority language, also in officially bilingual regions or contexts. Finnish speakers constitute a language minority in Sweden and Norway.
During a period of Christianization and state formation in the 10thth centuries, three consolidated kingdoms emerged in Scandinavia:. Sweden left the union in under King Gustav Vasa. In the aftermath of Sweden 's secession from the Kalmar Union, civil war broke out in Denmark and Norway. The Protestant Reformation followed. When things had settled down, the Norwegian Privy Council was abolished—it assembled for the last time in A personal union , entered into by the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway in , lasted until Three sovereign successor states have subsequently emerged from this unequal union: Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
Denmark-Norway is the historiographical name for the former political union consisting of the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway , including the Norwegian dependencies of Iceland , Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The corresponding adjective and demonym is Dano-Norwegian. During Danish rule, Norway kept its separate laws, coinage and army, as well as some institutions such as a royal chancellor.
Norway's old royal line had died out with the death of Olav IV , [ 67 ] but Norway's remaining a hereditary kingdom was an important factor to the Oldenburg dynasty of Denmark-Norway in its struggles to win elections as kings of Denmark. The Dano-Norwegian union was formally dissolved at the Treaty of Kiel. The territory of Norway proper was ceded to the King of Sweden , but Norway's overseas possessions were kept by Denmark. However, widespread Norwegian resistance to the prospect of a union with Sweden induced the governor of Norway, crown prince Christian Frederick later Christian VIII of Denmark , to call a constituent assembly at Eidsvoll in April The assembly drew up a liberal constitution and elected him to the throne of Norway.
Following a Swedish invasion during the summer, the peace conditions specified that king Christian Frederik had to resign, but Norway was to keep its independence and its constitution within a personal union with Sweden. Christian Frederik formally abdicated on August 10 and returned to Denmark. This is explored in humorous detail over on the awesome webcomic Scandinavia against the World. Not to be confused with…. A purely geographical term, this refers to the slab of land sticking out of Russia like a crooked witch's finger.
Basically, the peninsula comprises Norway and Sweden, split by a 1, mile long land border. Every weekend, those living just to the west of this imaginary line cross to the east to buy beer at substantially cheaper prices. Funny thing, geography….
But the Nordic countries are not just a historical memory, there is an active political relationship through the Nordic Council. Let's not forget the rather loose term of Northern Europe , broadly equivalent to the Nordic countries. But as I only realised last year, the rest of the world considers the UK to be part of Northern Europe too! Makes sense really, as we seem to have more in common with Norway and Sweden than we do France and Spain.
Shetland and Orkney used to be Norwegian territory and the influence is still there today. If you doubt the heritage of these islands then take a look at their flags, both proudly fly variants of the Nordic cross. Although the islands' traditional Norse language of Norn is now extinct, it still heavily influences today's dialects. Almost every place name has Viking roots. Although known as a Baltic state, Estonia shares more in common with Finland than with Lithuania or Latvia.
An alternative flag has even been proposed, incorporating the current colours of pale blue, black and white into a Nordic cross. If Alex Salmond gets his wish of independence, he could push for Scotland to have closer ties with the Nordic Union. There is little appetite within Norway to join the current EU setup, but I've spoken to many who would support closer cooperation with their immediate neighbours.
What do you think? He now works as a professional writer on all things Scandinavia.
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