Nynorsk
Nynorsk is one of the two official written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. From 12 May 1885, it became the state-sanctioned version of Ivar Aasen's standard Norwegian language, parallel to the Dano-Norwegian written standard known as Riksmål. The name Nynorsk was introduced in 1929. After a series of reforms, it is still the written standard closer to Landsmål, whereas Bokmål is closer to Riksmål and Danish.
Between 10 and 15 percent of Norwegians have Nynorsk as their official language form, estimated by the number of students attending secondary schools. Nynorsk is also taught as a mandatory subject in both high school and middle school for all Norwegians who do not have it as their own language form.
History
Norway had its own written and oral language—Norwegian. After the Kalmar Union, Norway became a less important part of Denmark. At that time, Danish was declared the written language of Norway until 1814, and Danish with Norwegian intonation and pronunciation was on occasion spoken in the cities. With the independence of Norway from Denmark, Danish became a foreign language and thus lost much of its prestige, and a conservative, written form of Norwegian, Landsmål, had been developed by 1850. By this time, however, the Danish language had been gradually reformed into the written language Riksmål, and no agreement was reached on which of the two forms to use. In 1885, the parliament declared the two forms official and equal.Efforts were made to fuse the two written forms into one language. As a result, Landsmål and Riksmål lost their official status in 1929, and were replaced by the written forms Nynorsk and Bokmål, which were intended to be temporary intermediary stages before their final fusion into one hypothesised official Norwegian language known at the time as Samnorsk. This project was later abandoned and Nynorsk and Bokmål remain the two officially sanctioned standards of what is today called the Norwegian language.
Both written languages are in reality fusions between the Norwegian and Danish languages as they were spoken and written around 1850, with Nynorsk closer to Norwegian and Bokmål closer to Danish. The official standard of Nynorsk has been significantly altered during the process to create the common language form Samnorsk. A minor purist fraction of the Nynorsk population has stayed firm with the historical Aasen norm where these alterations of Nynorsk were rejected, which is known as Høgnorsk. Ivar Aasen-sambandet is an umbrella organization of associations and individuals promoting the use of Høgnorsk, whereas Noregs Mållag and Norsk Målungdom advocate the use of Nynorsk in general.
The Landsmål language standard was constructed by the Norwegian linguist Ivar Aasen during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian-based alternative to Danish, which was commonly written, and to some extent spoken, in Norway at the time.
The word Nynorsk also has another meaning. In addition to being the name of the present, official written language standard, Nynorsk can also refer to the Norwegian language in use after Old Norwegian, 11th to 14th centuries, and Middle Norwegian, 1350 to about 1550. The written Norwegian that was used until the period of Danish rule, closely resembles Nynorsk. A major source of old written material is Diplomatarium Norvegicum in 22 printed volumes.
In 2023 Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first person awarded this prize to write in Nynorsk.
Early Nynorsk studies and dictionaries
After the transition from Middle Norwegian to New Norwegian/Nynorsk, several studies of the language were assembled. The oldest of these is a language overview and collection of proverbs from the early 1600s Vest-Agder. Later in the century, a dictionary from Robyggjelaget was written. Neither of these works were printed until more recently. In 1646, however, Christen Jensøn, born in Askvoll, Norway, released a dictionary which documented the Nynorsk language in Sunnfjord.In 1749, Erik Pontoppidan released a dictionary of Norwegian words that were incomprehensible to Danish people, Glossarium Norvagicum Eller Forsøg paa en Samling Af saadanne rare Norske Ord Som gemeenlig ikke forstaaes af Danske Folk, Tilligemed en Fortegnelse paa Norske Mænds og Qvinders Navne. Pontoppidan's dictionary was criticised by Torleiv Hannaas for being a somewhat haphazard collection of rarities, and for being written by someone who was not proficient in Nynorsk, in contrast with Jensøn's dictionary. It is agreed, and also admitted by Pontoppidan himself, that the scope of Pontoppidan's work was not to provide a complete or rigid study of Nynorsk, but to make an attempt to further the understanding of the language.
Ivar Aasen's work
A systematic study of the Norwegian language was made by Ivar Aasen in the mid 19th century. After the dissolution of Denmark–Norway and the establishment of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1814, Norwegians considered that neither Danish, by now a foreign language, nor by any means Swedish, were suitable written norms for Norwegian affairs. The linguist Knud Knudsen proposed a gradual Norwegianisation of Danish. Ivar Aasen, however, favoured a more radical approach, based on the principle that the spoken language of people living in the Norwegian countryside, who made up the vast majority of the population, should be regarded as more Norwegian than that of upper-middle class city-dwellers, who for centuries had been substantially influenced by the Danish language and culture. This idea was not unique to Aasen, and can be seen in the wider context of Norwegian romantic nationalism. In the 1840s, Aasen traveled across rural Norway and studied its dialects. He preferred the rural dialects of Vestlandet and inland Østlandet, whilst avoiding the city dialects and focusing less on the dialects of southern Østlandet and southern coast of Skagerrak, which he considered to be too much corrupted by Danish. In 1848 and 1850, he published the first Norwegian grammar and dictionary, respectively, which described a standard that Aasen called Landsmål. New versions detailing the written standard were published in 1864 and 1873, and in the 20th century by Olav Beito in 1970.During the same period, Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb standardised the orthography of the Faroese language. Spoken Faroese is closely related to Landsmål and dialects in Norway proper, and Lucas Debes and Peder Hansen Resen classified the Faroese tongue as Norwegian in the late 17th century. Faroese is now regarded as a separate language.
Aasen's work is based on the idea that Norwegian dialects had a common structure that made them a separate language alongside Danish and Swedish. The central point for Aasen therefore became to find and show the structural dependencies between the dialects. In order to abstract this structure from the variety of dialects, he developed some basic criteria, which he called the most perfect form. He defined this form as the one that best showed the connection to related words, with similar words, and with the forms in Old Norwegian. No single dialect had all the "perfect forms"; each dialect had preserved different aspects and parts of the language. Through such a systematic approach, Aasen believed one could arrive at a uniting expression for all Norwegian dialects, what he called the fundamental dialect; Einar Haugen called it Proto-Norwegian.
The idea that the study should end up in a new written language marked Aasen's work from the beginning. A fundamental idea for him was that the fundamental dialect should be Modern Norwegian, not Old Norwegian or Old Norse. Therefore, he did not include grammatical categories which were extinct in all dialects. At the same time, the categories that were inherited from the old language and were still present in some dialects should be represented in the written standard. Haugen has used the word reconstruction rather than construction about this work.
Conflict
From the outset, Nynorsk was met with resistance among those who believed that the Dano-Norwegian then in use was sufficient. With the advent and growth of mass media, exposure to the standard languages increased, and Bokmål's position is dominant in many situations. This may explain why negative attitudes toward Nynorsk persist, as is seen with many minority languages. This is especially prominent among students, who are required to learn both of the official written languages. There are however many individual reasons for both positive and negative attitudes towards Nynorsk. Many claim that obligatory learning of both language forms is unnecessary, and that students would be better off spending their time on learning a foreign language, or simply focusing on one of the language forms.Some critics of obligatory Nynorsk and Bokmål as school subjects have been very outspoken about their opposition. For instance, during the 2005 election, the Norwegian Young Conservatives made an advertisement where a candidate for parliament threw a copy of the Nynorsk dictionary into a barrel of flames. After strong reactions to this book burning, they apologized and chose not to use the video.
Geographical distribution
Bokmål has a much larger basis in the cities and generally outside of the western part of the country. Most Norwegians do not speak either Nynorsk or Bokmål as written, but a Norwegian dialect that identifies their origins. Nynorsk shares many of the problems that minority languages face.In Norway, each municipality and county can choose to declare either of the two language standards as the official language or remain "standard-neutral". As of 2020, 90 municipalities had declared Nynorsk the official standard, while 118 had chosen Bokmål; another 148 were "neutral" between the two, numbers that have been stable since the 1970s. As for counties, three have declared Nynorsk as their official standard: Møre og Romsdal, Telemark and Vestland. Most municipalities in Rogaland and few in the "standard-neutral" counties have declared Nynorsk as their official standard. Ålesund Municipality was the largest municipality with Nynorsk as its official language form, until the area of the old Haram Municipality was separated from the rest of the municipality from 1 January 2024, and the remaining Ålesund Municipality opted for "standard-neutrality".
The main standard used in primary schools is decided by referendum within the local school district. The number of school districts and pupils using primarily Nynorsk has decreased from its height in the 1940s, even in Nynorsk municipalities. Nynorsk is also part of the school curriculum in high school and elementary school for all students in Norway, where students are taught to write it.
The prevailing regions for Nynorsk are the rural areas of the western counties of Rogaland, Vestland and Møre og Romsdal, where an estimated 90% of the population writes Nynorsk. Some of the rural parts of Innlandet, Buskerud, Telemark and Agder also write primarily in Nynorsk. In the Sunnmøre region of Møre og Romsdal, all municipalities have stated Nynorsk as the official standard. In Vestland, almost all municipalities have declared Nynorsk as the official standard – Bergen Municipality and Askøy Municipality being the only two exceptions.