samtidighet

Samtidighet is a Norwegian noun meaning simultaneity or contemporaneity—the property of two or more events sharing the same time frame. The term is formed from sam- “together” and tid “time,” with the abstract noun suffix -ighet. In everyday language, samtidighet describes events that occur at the same time, for example two activities starting simultaneously.

In philosophy and physics, samtidighet concerns the temporal relation between events. A central question is whether two distant events can be said to occur at the same time from a given observer’s perspective. In classical physics, simultaneity was treated as absolute, but in Einstein’s theory of special relativity it becomes relative: different observers may assign different time labels to the same pair of events depending on their motion and the synchronization of clocks.

In linguistics and cognitive science, samtidighet may appear in discussions about how languages encode simultaneity in verb forms or aspect, and how listeners infer temporal relationships from discourse. In historiography or cultural studies, the term can be used to discuss the contemporaneity of different societies or cultural movements.

Samtidighet is related to concepts such as co-temporality and synchrony of clocks, as well as to temporal ordering in various theoretical frameworks. While the discussions can be technical, the everyday sense remains practical: events that share the same time reference are described as simultaneous.

See also: relativity of simultaneity, synchrony, temporality.