Not remotely true in my estimation. I don't really speak Norwegian, but I do speak Swedish(which means I mostly understand Norwegian as they're very similar). Every model I've tried speaking Swedish to does it perfectly. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for Norwegian already
While Google does a good job with language support in their models, GPT-5.5 can't write proper Norwegian. It's even making up words that does not exist.
Does that include local distilled models? Because it didn't last time I checked for Norwegian.
Not really. For instance Facebook speech recognition models had Swedish support but no Norwegian.
different models have been very different in this way.. almost ten years ago the French made a very large effort to capture languages.. the release notes I read at the time IIR had quite a few languages from South Asia / India, and in Africa. The language that was prominently missing was German IIR. I cannot say for the 2025-2026 models since so much has happened.. but models are not equal.
Of course they speak swedish. But often, they do not reason in Swedish and do not search in swedish. Swedish makes up a tiny fraction of training data, while the vast majority is English, from the US. Which means the answers will always have a bias towards US culture, even if you ask in Swedish and the LLM answers in Swedish.