Bokmål or Nynorsk?

The majority language, Norwegian, has two distinct written varieties: Bokmål (‘Book Language’) and Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’). They are so close to each other linguistically that they may be regarded as «written dialects», mutually completely intelligible. Orally, local dialects are extensively used throughout the country. They are also mutually intelligible, although they can be very diverse, especially in intonation. In addition, both Swedish and Danish are closely related to Norwegian and thus intelligible to Norwegians, although with some initial difficulty in many cases.

In everyday speech, there is much blending between dialects, Bokmål and Nynorsk, but in writing, the varieties are kept more clearly apart. Nynorsk is mostly used in Western Norway as a written language (by roughly 10 % of the people, amounting to about half a million), Bokmål is dominant in the rest of the country, and is used in writing by close to 90 %.

Norwegian belongs to the North Germanic languages, besides Swedish, Danish, Faroese (the language of the Faroe islands, today an autonomous part of the kingdom of Denmark) and Icelandic. Its parent language was Old Norse, which during the Viking age (800-1050) and the Middle Ages (until about 1500) was spoken and written in Norway. Norway was an independent kingdom from the eleventh until the fourteenth century. Old Norse was a literary language with a large body of manuscripts on parchment, primarily from Iceland, but also from Norway.

From the fourteenth century on, the kingdom of Norway weakened, particularly due to the Great Plague about 1350. The country was, although nominally, still independent, integrated into a Scandinavian union with its power center in Denmark. Sweden belonged to this union, but broke out of it several times, making the break definite in 1523. From then on, the Danish kingdom comprised Norway and all its dependencies but the Nor language, deriving from Old Norse, survived there for some centuries more.

The Old Norse written language was now gradually superseded by Danish, although this did not happen in Iceland. One of the reasons for this was linguistic distance: Norwegian speech, above all in the towns, but later on also in the countryside, was profoundly influenced by Danish, but even more by Low German, which was the language of the Hanseatic League, a commercial empire based in the North German cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and others, dominating trade throughout Northern Europe. Both Norwegian, Danish and Swedish borrowed a lot of words and expressions from Low German. The languages also underwent a rapid morphological simplification, ending up with relatively simple declension and conjugation patterns, while Icelandic kept its Old Norse character (with a complex inflection system) in these respects, and Faroese did so to a lesser, but still significant, degree. The result was that these two insular languages were no more understood by Scandinavians, while the three Scandinavian languages developed along parallel lines and kept their mutual intelligibility. That, again, made it easy for Danish to pass into Norwegian society as the new and modern «state language» not only of Denmark, but also of Norway. «Norwegian» survived only in the form of various spoken dialects throughout the country.

The Old Norse written language thus became extinct in the sixteenth century. To Norwegians, Danish was the only «correct» written language, while the Norwegian dialects were used orally. Gradually, at least from the eighteenth century, the elite developed a separate spoken code based on the Danish writing system, but since the phonetic difference between Norwegian and Danish dialects was considerable, the pronunciation remained markedly Norwegian. Since Danish spelling remained more conservative than pronunciation, which developed more and more distinct Danish features, Norwegian pronunciation of the common written language often came closer to writing than Danish pronunciation. Some contemporary observers in the eighteenth century even thought Norwegian elite pronunciation of Danish to be better than what one could hear in Denmark proper, even though Norway was only a province and Copenhagen was the metropolis.

In 1814, everything suddenly changed. The Napoleonic wars had ended with the defeat of Napoleon, and while Denmark had chosen to back the loser, Sweden was on the winning side, along with the British. The result was that the Swedes could force the Danish king to cede Norway to Sweden (although the Faroe islands, Iceland and Greenland remained with Denmark). The Norwegian elite tried to prevent this by staging a national revolution, arranging elections for a national convent, which met in order to declare Norway an independent kingdom and draft its constitution. Sweden did not accept this, however, and after a brief war, a compromise was found. Norway was allowed to keep its new constitution, but an extraordinary parliament had to be elected and to convene in order to make adjustments in the constitution which allowed for the king of Sweden to be elected king also of Norway. By this, Norway acquired the status of separate state, although only semi-independent under the Swedish crown.

Danish was still the only written language used in Norway, and the Swedish authorities accepted this; Swedish was never promoted in this function. But the new (still only cultural) nationalism which was developing under the influence of similar currents in Europe generally, also had a linguistic aspect. An increasing group of Norwegians felt it as a problem that the standard language was Danish, although some wanted to call it Norwegian, or they preferred the neutral term «the mother tongue».

The idea of reforming the language itself was first formulated in the 1830s. Already then two different strategies were formulated: to introduce Norwegian elements (lexically and idiomatically) into the standard of Danish in Norway, leading to a separate version of Danish which in the long run might be called Dano-Norwegian. The other strategy was to start with an investigation of spoken dialects, particularly those that had preserved Old Norse features in lexicon, pronunciation and morphology, and then codify a common standard on the basis of these features. In this way, a separate Norwegian standard language would have been called into existence.

Both strategies were followed, and they resulted in two different varieties of Norwegian, called Bokmål (derived from Danish), and Nynorsk (derived from Norwegian dialects). I shall deal with them separately here, beginning with Nynorsk.

The founder of this variety, or this language (there is no full agreement on how to designate it), was Ivar Aasen (1813-1896), a crofter’s son from Western Norway who was given opportunity to study different languages and even drafted a grammar of his own dialect. He was given a scholarship to travel around in Norway and describe the spoken dialects, which had never been done that systematically before. His travels took place from 1842 till 1846, and he published a comparative dialect grammar of Norwegian in 1848 and a dictionary in 1850. After that, he continued his studies with an allowance from the parliament, and in 1853 he published an attempted codified version based on the common features of the dialects in comparison with Old Norse, which was seen as the common ancestor of all the dialects. Since Western Norwegian dialects had remained (relatively) closest to the Old Norse structure, his standard came to resemble these dialects the most. Even in these relatively conservative dialects, however, the Old Norse morphology had been largely simplified.

Aasen published examples of his standard in the form of poems, essays, folk tales, and a translated Icelandic saga. Others followed up publishing literary works, journalism and so on. Textbooks for schools in it were also compiled and published. In 1885, a parliamentary decree gave it official status, and from 1892, it might be taught in schools after a local decision process. About 1900, Norway had developed into a country with two language standards, the Dano-Norwegian one vastly dominant, the pure Norwegian one struggling to establish a base in the rural parts of southern Norway.

The Danish language in Norway was not formally reformed before 1900, but a movement for its norwegianization was developing in nationalist and radical circles, and above all among teachers, who pointed out difficulties in the teaching of the traditional code to pupils who spoke dialects in schools. The leading ideologist behind the movement was Knud Knudsen (1812-1895), a secondary school teacher living in capital called then Christiania and now Oslo. He worked for a reform where the spelling of Dano-Norwegian was brought closer to the daily pronunciation of the educated elite (in opposition to the formal and ceremonial speech of the same elite, which approached Danish writing to a significant degree). Knudsen and his followers used both nationalistic and pedagogical arguments for a norwegianization of the language, partly on the basis of educated daily speech of the elite, as we just mentioned, partly including some features from more popular dialects in the central and urban areas of the country. They envisaged a Norwegian standard language, but still different from Aasen’s creation, in a direction they saw as more urban and modern.

Norsk, bokmål eller nynorsk?

The official languages in Norway are Norwegian and Sami. Bokmål and nynorsk are two written standards of Norwegian. As many of you already know, most of the population write bokmål. Around 13% choose nynorsk in their writing. These two written standards are equal when it comes to public services. At school children learn one standard as main (hovedmål) and the other one as secondary language form (sidemål).  

There have been many discussions and many people have strong opinions about whether we should keep two written standards or not, not only at school but in general. At the university level you can often choose freely unless you study Norwegian language like me. Then you have to be able to write both standards well. I myself write nynorsk when I am free to choose. 

We can say that bokmål is a norwegianized Danish. Nynorsk is based on the dialects. One of the interviewees said that nynorsk is «a mix of all the dialects» and indeed we can say it is. We can also say that bokmål and nynorsk are similar. Many words are the same, some words are slightly different, while other look completely different. There are also some differences when it comes to grammar and sentence structure.

Compare the examples:

English:I— bokmål:jeg— nynorsk:eg

English:we— bokmål:vi nynorsk:vi or me

English:not— bokmål:ikke— nynorsk:ikkje

The written and oral standard that I teach is bokmål.

So what about spoken Norwegian?

I am sure you have noticed that there are a lot of dialects. And this fact itself is of course not unusual as compared to many other countries. But what is unique here, is that you can speak your dialect in practically every situation. Some dialects are similar to bokmål and some to nynorsk. Even though you can hear people saying: «She speaks bokmål.», they often mean an Eastern Norwegian dialect.  

The most important fact is that there is not a spoken standard like for example standard American English or standard British English. Of course there is spoken bokmål and spoken nynorsk, but mainly in contexts like news broadcasts when a news presenter reads the news.

Εxcerpts from https://www.sprakradet.no/Vi-og-vart/Om-oss/English-and-other-languages/English/norwegian-bokmal-vs.-nynorsk/