Norwegian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Norwegian carries two official written forms at once, a situation found in almost no other country. Bokmål, meaning 'book tongue,' and Nynorsk, meaning 'new Norwegian,' both hold legal status today, each regulated by the Language Council of Norway, known as Språkrådet. A student whose home form is Bokmål must study Nynorsk as a mandatory subject from elementary school through high school, and vice versa. How did a single country end up with two competing written standards? The answer runs through Viking runes, Hanseatic traders, Danish kings, a self-taught botanist, and a fierce 20th-century political battle over whether the two forms should be merged into one. Norwegian is a language whose identity is inseparable from Norway's political history.

• 2. Roots in the Runic Age

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  Proto-Norse is thought to have emerged as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic during the first centuries AD, in what is today southern Sweden. It is the language behind the Elder Futhark inscriptions, which are the oldest form of the runic alphabets and the oldest written record of any Germanic language. Some of those inscriptions are memorials to the dead; others carry magical content. The oldest are carved on loose portable objects, while later ones were chiseled into runestones. Around 800 AD, the script simplified into the Younger Futhark, and inscriptions became more abundant. That same moment marked the start of the Viking Age, which carried Old Norse to Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, parts of the British Isles, Normandy in France, North America, and Kievan Rus. Outside Iceland and the Faroes, those Viking-speaking communities eventually went extinct or merged into surrounding populations, making the survival of Icelandic and Faroese a historical anomaly. Christianity arrived in Scandinavia around 1030, bringing the Latin alphabet and a flood of Latin loanwords tied to church practices, alongside broader cultural borrowings.

• 3. Danish Dominance and Decline

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  Between 1250 and 1450, the Hanseatic League held economic and political dominance in the main Scandinavian cities, flooding Norway with Middle Low German speakers. The influence on the Scandinavian languages has been compared by scholars to the impact French had on English after the Norman conquest. Norway then entered a formal union with Denmark in 1397. Danish gradually replaced Middle Norwegian as the language of the elite, the church, literature, and the law. When that union ended in 1814, the Dano-Norwegian blend that had developed had become the mother tongue of around only 1% of the population. For the other 99%, it was an acquired written register, not a spoken vernacular. When the Reformation spread through the region from Germany, Martin Luther's High German Bible translation was rendered into Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic, but not into Norwegian, because Norwegian as a distinct written standard no longer functioned. That gap shaped the entire debate of the following century.

• 4. Ivar Aasen's New Language

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  Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, began building a new written Norwegian at the age of 22. He traveled the country collecting words and grammatical examples from regional dialects, comparing varieties from different areas. He also studied Icelandic, which had largely escaped the Danish influence that had reshaped Norwegian. His work was published across several books from 1848 to 1873, and he called it Landsmål, meaning 'national language.' The name is sometimes read as 'rural language' or 'country language,' but that was not Aasen's intended meaning. Running in parallel, Knud Knudsen was pursuing a different strategy: gradual reform of the Danish written norm to reflect what he called 'cultivated everyday speech,' the Dano-Norwegian spoken by the Norwegian-raised educated class. A first official spelling reform in 1862 moved slightly in Knudsen's direction, followed by larger reforms in 1907 and 1917. In 1899, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson proposed the neutral name Riksmål, meaning 'national language' just as Landsmål did, and that name was officially adopted with the 1907 reform. The two traditions now had names and institutional backing, setting the stage for a century of confrontation.

• 5. The Samnorsk Battle

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  After the personal union with Sweden dissolved in 1905, both written forms were developed further and reached what is now considered their classic shapes following a 1917 reform. Riksmål was officially renamed Bokmål in 1929 and Landsmål became Nynorsk that same year. A proposal to substitute the compound term 'dansk-norsk' for Bokmål lost in parliament by a single vote. The state then pursued an explicit policy of merging the two forms into a unified language called Samnorsk. A 1946 poll found that 79% of Norwegians supported that goal. A reform in 1938 had already brought the two forms closer together. Yet opponents of the merger managed to build a massive protest movement during the 1950s, fighting especially the use of 'radical' Nynorsk-influenced forms in Bokmål school textbooks. The 1959 reform partially reversed the 1938 changes in Bokmål, while pushing Nynorsk further toward Bokmål. The Samnorsk policy lost its momentum after 1960 and was officially abandoned in 2002. Today a small minority of Nynorsk enthusiasts follow the more conservative Høgnorsk standard, which rejects the post-1917 reforms and stays close to Aasen's original Landsmål.

• 6. How Norwegian Actually Sounds

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  Norwegian is a pitch-accent language with two distinct tonal patterns, a feature it shares with Swedish. Tone 1 and tone 2 can distinguish words that look identical in spelling. In many East Norwegian dialects, the word bønder, meaning 'farmers,' uses the simpler tone 1, while bønner, meaning 'beans' or 'prayers,' uses the more complex tone 2. Accent 1 generally appears in words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse; accent 2 tends to appear in words that were polysyllabic. These pitch patterns give Norwegian what speakers of other languages frequently describe as a 'singing' quality that makes it easy to pick out from neighboring tongues. Regional variation in the tonal system is considerable: in most of western and northern Norway, accent 1 is falling while accent 2 rises then falls, which is roughly the reverse of the eastern pattern. The realization of the rhotic consonant is equally varied: a flap in eastern, central, and northern dialects; a uvular sound in western and southern areas; and in the dialects of northwestern Norway, something closer to the trilled sound familiar from Spanish. No official spoken standard exists for Norwegian as a whole, and using any dialect in any context is accepted as correct. Only in the area where East Norwegian dialects are spoken does an informal spoken norm, called Urban East Norwegian, function as a de facto regional standard.

• 7. Two Standards in Daily Life

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  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 2010-86.5% of primary and lower-secondary school pupils were educated in Bokmål and 13.0% in Nynorsk. Of 431 municipalities at that time, 161 declared they wished to communicate with central authorities in Bokmål, 116, representing 12% of the population, in Nynorsk, and 156 remained neutral. Nynorsk writing is concentrated in western Norway, excluding major urban centers, and in mountain valley communities in the south and east, including Setesdal, the western part of Telemark county, and several municipalities in Hallingdal, Valdres, and Gudbrandsdalen. Thirty to forty years before the source was written, Nynorsk also had strongholds in many rural parts of Trøndelag and the southern portion of Nordland county, strongholds that have since weakened. The large national newspapers Aftenposten, Dagbladet, and VG publish in Bokmål or Riksmål. Some major regional papers, including Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad, use both forms. NRK, the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, broadcasts in both, and all government agencies are required to support both written languages. Since December 2017, the gender-neutral pronoun hen has been listed in the Norwegian Academy's dictionary, and in June 2022 the Language Council added it to both Bokmål and Nynorsk standards.