The only country where Norwegian is an official language is, of course, Norway. However, there are many other countries in the world where there is a large Norwegian-speaking part of the population, including, among others, Spain, the USA, Canada, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark.
Spain, reportedly, has over 50,000 Norwegians who moved there after retirement. The USA has large Norwegian expat communities, with around 40,000 Norwegian expats living there.
As of 2019, the population of Norway - and the number of native speakers of Norwegian - is 5,3 million people.
It is estimated that there are also around 1 million native speakers of Norwegian scattered all over the world: there are large Norwegian-speaking communities, in Europe, primarily Scandinavia and Spain, where Norwegians like to retire, as well as the USA and Canada.
As with less popular foreign languages (compared to, say, English or Spanish), not much data is available on how many people speak Norwegian as a foreign language. However, it can be said that it is fairly popular: on Duolingo (a language learning app) alone, there are over 800 thousand learners of Norwegian.
The difficulty of learning a language partly depends on the learner’s native language. For instance, for speakers of other Scandinavian languages, Norwegian may be fairly easy to learn, compared to, say, native speakers of Russian, Arabic or Japanese.
Things that make Norwegian hard to learn include: a complex system of prepositions, tonation - one word can have different meanings depending on the tone it is pronounced with - and pronunciation in general as well as the numerous dialects.
Norwegian and Swedish have some similarities as they are both Scandinavian languages, which are part of the Germanic language family. There are shared vocabulary and similarities in pronunciation, but written forms of the two languages differ significantly.
To some extent, speakers of the two languages can understand each other. Some say that it is easier for Norwegians to understand the Swedes than vice versa, but this may be a subjective impression.
Norwegian and Swedish have some similarities as they are both Scandinavian languages, which are part of the Germanic language family. There is some shared vocabulary between the two languages. Written Norwegian and written Danish are similar, but the pronunciation is very different.
Danish used to be applied in Norway because it was part of the same kingdom ruled from Copenhagen for around five centuries. And it can be said that Norwegians in some sense almost write Danish but pronounce words very differently.
Speakers of Norwegian and Danish can understand each other fairly well in simple speaking situations if they speak slowly and clearly.
