Short answers, pulled from the story.
The two legally recognized written forms of Norwegian are Bokmål (meaning 'book tongue') and Nynorsk (meaning 'new Norwegian'). Both are regulated by the Language Council of Norway, Språkrådet, and all Norwegian students are educated in both forms.
Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, created Nynorsk beginning at the age of 22. He developed it by collecting words and grammatical examples from Norwegian regional dialects across the country, aiming to establish a written standard grounded in spoken Norwegian rather than the Danish-derived norm that dominated after Norway's union with Denmark.
Norway entered a union with Denmark in 1397. Over time, Danish replaced Middle Norwegian as the language of the elite, the church, literature, and the law. By the time the union ended in 1814, the Dano-Norwegian blend had become the mother tongue of only around 1% of the Norwegian population.
Samnorsk was an official Norwegian state policy to merge Bokmål and Nynorsk into a single unified language. A 1946 poll showed 79% of Norwegians supported the policy, but a massive protest movement in the 1950s stalled progress. The policy had little influence after 1960 and was officially abandoned in 2002.
A 2005 poll found that 86.3% of Norwegians use primarily Bokmål as their daily written language, 7.5% use primarily Nynorsk, and 5.5% use both. In 2000, Bokmål appeared in 92% of all written publications and Nynorsk in 8%.
Norwegian uses two distinct pitch patterns, tone 1 and tone 2, to distinguish words that are otherwise identical in pronunciation. For example, in many East Norwegian dialects, bønder ('farmers') uses tone 1 while bønner ('beans' or 'prayers') uses tone 2. These tonal contrasts, combined with phrase-level pitch movements, give Norwegian the 'singing' quality that makes it recognizable to speakers of other languages.