Norwegian
The use of contractions is not allowed in any form of standard Norwegian spelling; however, it is fairly common to shorten or contract words in spoken language. Yet, the commonness varies from dialect to dialect and from sociolect to sociolect—it depends on the formality etc. of the setting. Some common, and quite drastic, contractions found in Norwegian speech are "jakke" (approximate pronunciation in English: "yakkeh") for "jeg har ikke" ("I have not", normally pronounced approximately like "yay har ikkeh") and "dække" (approximate pronunciation in English: "dakkeh") for "det er ikke" ("it is not", normally pronounced approximately like "deh ar ikkeh"). The most frequently used of these contractions—usually consisting of two or three words condensed into one word by skipping certain letters (like the examples just shown)—contain short and common words like "jeg" ("I"), "du" or "deg" ("you"), "det" ("it" or "that"), "har" ("have" or "has") or "ikke" ("not").
In extreme cases, long, entire sentences may be condensed into one word by removing consonants, vowels and spaces alike. One example of this is a sentence like (approximate English translation) "It will sort itself out.": "Det ordner seg av seg selv.", "correctly" pronounced approximately like "Deh vill ordneh say ahv say sell", in standard written Bokmål could become (note that this is essentially a combination of contraction, fast speech and dialect) "dånesæsæsjæl" (note the "å (Å)" and "æ (Æ)" letters and the "sjæl" ("sj" is one of many Norwegian digraphs used to represent "sh") at the end, as a replacement for "selv", which is pronounced with a "thick l" ("tjukk l" or "tykk l" in Norwegian)). R-dropping (which is present in the above example) is especially common in speech in many areas of Norway, but plays out in different ways, as does skipping of word-final letters, generally, like that of "e" in certain verbs.
Because of the many dialects of Norwegian and their widespread use it is often difficult to distinguish between non-standard writing of standard Norwegian and eye dialect (or writing in one's own dialect as opposed to adhering to the well-defined rules of the written language). It is almost universally true that these spellings try to convey the way each word is pronounced, but it is rare to see language written that does not adhere to at least some of the rules of the official writing spelling. There are probably four main reasons for this: 1. some words are not pronounced as they are spelled in the first place, 2. pronunciation that is impossible or only ambiguously possible to convey using solely combinations of the 29 letters of the Norwegian alphabet, 3. it is sometimes practical to utilise certain rules from standard spelling/pronunciation rules (for example digraphs and diphthongs (even though the latter is usually much more problematic than the former) to increase the number of phonemes at disposal) for ease of writing and interpreting said writing or 4. laziness, ignorance on the part of the writer of the fact that strictly speaking how they write a certain word is not the best representation of the desired pronunciation or accommodation of a perceived lack of understanding of the connection between spelling and pronunciation on part of the reader.
Misinterpreting someone else's writing may cause a slowing down of the reading pace, having a hard time understanding and use of incorrect pronunciations. It is of great importance to "play by the same rules" to avoid confusion. The "rules", however, are rarely stated by "non-standard-writers" and this is as a consequence another reason to stick with the official writing conventions. That many dialects lack certain letters in words that are used in others and the official spellings of Norwegian leads some to conclude that spelling of these dialects should not contain that letter and others to conclude that their way of speaking is non-standard, when, in fact, the truth might be that every dialect is just as standard as the next. This last assertion is based on a view of the origin of Norwegian spelling as being the average of all the dialects (which is not technically and completely true) or simply that while one dialect differs from "the norm" pertaining to certain aspects while others differ on certain other features instead.
The use of the apostrophe (') is much less common than in English, but is sometimes used in contractions to show where letters have been left out (like in English). It is also worth noting that Norwegian uses apostrophes less in other situations as well (it is not normally used to show the possessive, for instance). Norwegian also does not use accents to denote stress etc. excepts for in a few loan words (foreign words) etc. Things like these might be reasons for the hard time people have if they try to spell a word phonetically.
There is a common misconception among many Norwegians that Norwegian is a very phonetically accurate language. This is probably based both on the common knowledge that Norwegian has a more widespread use of letters like F, K and S; disfavouring letters like C, Q, X and digraphs like PH (compared to English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Swedish and Danish (which are (some of) the languages Norwegians are most familiar with)); and that most Norwegians are so familiar with the Norwegian language that they don't realise the great difference between the written and spoken language. What many native Norwegian speakers do not realise, though, is that Norwegian actually has a huge number of diphthongs, silent letters and more or less unpredictable both vowel and consonant sounds.
Read more about this topic: Contraction (grammar)