Norwegian
Language · official in 1 country
Norsk has two official written standards and no official spoken one. Bokmål grew out of the Danish that was Norway's written language from the 16th to the 19th centuries; Nynorsk was built from the rural dialects. Both descend, by different routes, from Old Norse. Norway gives Norwegian official status beside Sámi, and Norwegians use it with Nordic authorities without paying for translation.
The language on record
- Own name
- norsk
- ISO 639-1
- NO
- ISO 639-3
- NOR
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- North Germanic
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Norwegian is official
Norway is the one record, where Norwegian is official together with Sámi. Both written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, count as Norwegian and share this entry.
Official beside Norwegian
About Norwegian
Why Norway writes two standards
Norway entered a union with Denmark in 1397, and over time Danish replaced Middle Norwegian in the church, literature and the law. When the union ended in 1814, the Dano-Norwegian koiné was the mother tongue of about 1% of the population. Two answers followed. Knud Knudsen proposed bringing Danish spelling closer to the speech of the educated classes, and official reforms in 1862, 1907 and 1917 did so. Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, travelled the country collecting dialect words and grammar and published a new written language, Landsmål, between 1848 and 1873.
In 1929 the Danish-based standard, then called Riksmål, was renamed Bokmål, "book language", and Landsmål became Nynorsk, "new Norwegian". A proposal to call Bokmål Danish-Norwegian lost in parliament by a single vote.
What became of the plan to merge them
A reform in 1938 pulled the two standards closer, as a step towards a single language to be called Samnorsk. A 1946 poll found 79% of Norwegians in favour. A protest movement against the "radical" forms in Bokmål school books grew in the 1950s, and the 1959 reform partly reversed course for Bokmål while moving Nynorsk further towards it. The policy had little effect after 1960 and was officially dropped in 2002. Two unofficial forms remain at the edges: Riksmål, close to Danish and regulated by the Norwegian Academy, and Høgnorsk, close to Aasen's original.
How the two standards divide Norway
In a 2005 poll, 86.3% of Norwegians wrote mainly Bokmål, 7.5% mainly Nynorsk and 5.5% both. Nynorsk is strong in western Norway outside the cities and in the upper mountain valleys of the south and east. Of 431 municipalities, 116 have chosen Nynorsk for dealing with the central authorities, 161 Bokmål, and 156 are neutral. Every pupil learns both, and the second is called sidemål. The Language Council of Norway regulates both standards.
Speech follows no standard. Most Norwegians speak their own dialect in every setting, and any dialect counts as correct Norwegian. Two pitch accents separate words that are otherwise alike, such as bønder, "farmers", and bønner, "beans", and the spelling usually does not show the difference.
Common questions
Questions about Norwegian
What is the difference between Bokmål and Nynorsk?
Bokmål is a Norwegianised form of Danish, the written language of Norway until the 19th century. Nynorsk was built by Ivar Aasen from rural dialects, in opposition to Danish. Both are official, and a 2005 poll found 86.3% of Norwegians writing mainly Bokmål.
Is there a standard spoken Norwegian?
No. Bokmål and Nynorsk govern writing only, and any dialect is accepted as correct spoken Norwegian. In the east, Urban East Norwegian works as a de facto spoken standard for that region.
Can Norwegians understand Swedish and Danish?
Largely. The three form a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible varieties, and some Norwegian and Swedish dialects are very close. Icelandic and Faroese are not intelligible to Norwegians in speech.