Lars S.

Vikr:

Norwegian: Bokml vs. Nynorsk

Basic information
Norwegian is spoken by a majority close to 100 % in the kingdom of Norway (which at
present contains around 5 million inhabitants), although a few tens of thousands have other
languages as their first language. In the first place the national minorities: Smi (spoken in
three varieties which function as separate languages: North Smi, Lule Smi and South Smi)
and Kven (a variety of Finnish which is now acknowledged as a separate language), all of
these mainly spoken in Northern Norway, and the so-called Rom languages, which are used
by a few hundreds. The groups using these languages are acknowledged by law as national
minorities (the Smi have a special status as aboriginal people (urfolk)). In addition, there
are many immigrated languages which have entered the country since the 1960s, and there
is the sign language of the deaf (about 3000 users). These languages will not concern us here.
The majority language, Norwegian, has two distinct written varieties: Bokml (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, not least 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 speech, there is much blending between dialects, Bokml and Nynorsk, but in
writing, the varieties are kept more clearly apart. Nynorsk is mostly used in Western Norwayi
as a written language (by roughly 10 % of the people, amounting to about half a million),
Bokml is dominant in the rest of the country, and is used in writing by close to 90 %.
This article will focus on the relationship between Bokml and Nynorsk; it starts with a
historical and a socio-linguistic survey.
Historical and social background
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, towards the end of this
period also comprising several emigrant societies in the North Atlantic (the Faroe islands, the
Orkney islands, Shetland, Iceland, and Greenland). 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 because
of the Great Plague of about 1350. The country was, although nominally still independent,
integrated into a Scandinavian union with its power centre 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 (although the Orkney islands
and Shetland were ceded to Scotland in 1469, but the Norn 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, Lbeck 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.
Very significant in this respect was the abolition of the Catholic Church in Scandinavia.
This church, with its dependence on Latin as its ecclesiastical language, had been dominant
throughout the Middle Ages, but it was replaced by state-run churches based on Martin
Luthers version of protestantism in the 1530s in Denmark (with Norway) (somewhat earlier
in Sweden). The most tangible result of this as far as language is concerned, was the
translation of the Bible (first the New, then the Old Testament) into the vernacular languages,
a key element in the Lutheran reformation. But, whereas Swedes and Icelanders received
these holy texts in their own languages, Norwegians (and Faroese) had to be content with the
Danish version. This raised the prestige of Danish in Norway even more, now also being the
language of the holy texts.
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 metropole.
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 Bokml (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 crofters 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 the capital (then Christiania,
now Osloii). 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 Aasens creation, in a direction they saw as more urban and modern.
I shall go deeper into this presently, but here, I give a very general sketch of
developments after 1900. I use some crucial years as a skeleton to build the description
around, departing from 1905, the year when Norway terminated the union with Sweden and
established itself as an independent kingdom.

1907: A spelling reform of Dano-Norwegian, encompassing both morphological and

orthographical features, established this variety as a separate language from Danish, allowing
for its subsequent development to take place in a solely Norwegian context. The same year, it
was made mandatory for all to pass their high school exam to master both varieties (DanoNorwegian and pure Norwegian) to a satisfactory degree. (But only a minority of the people
passed high school; this minority, however, provided the officials necessary for the civil
service at the national and the local level.)
1917: A new reform encompassing both written varieties endeavoured to bring them
closer together with an amalgamation of them as the ultimate future goal. A high degree of
optionality between traditional and new forms in both varieties was introduced. In practice,
the more moderate changes in Dano-Norwegian, which brought the language closer to the
daily speech of the urban elite, were soon accepted in usage, but the more radical ones,
consisting of forms similar to Nynorsk and popular (both rural and urban) non-elite dialect
speech, were, however, rejected and thus rarely or never occurred in written texts.
1929: By parliamentary decree Dano-Norwegian was officially renamed Bokml (Book
Language) while the purely Norwegian variety was called Nynorsk (New Norwegian).
1930: A regulation for the national official civil service made it a duty for all
governmental offices to use both varieties in their contacts with the public. At this time,
Nynorsk had won rural Western Norway and the mountaineous inner areas of Southern
Norway, partly also other rural areas in the far south and the north, while Bokml still
dominated the rest of the country.
1938: A new spelling reform occurred, also this one encompassing both varieties,
introducing many Nynorsk-resembling and dialectal forms in Bokml, and Eastern Norwegian
and Bokml-sounding forms in Nynorsk. The optionality was reduced, but still present to a
high degree. The new spelling was more controversial than its predecessor, but the German
WW2 occupation from 1940 till 1945 froze the language struggle for the time being.
1952: The parliament established an official language commission (Norsk sprknemnd),
which wais given the responsibility for the future language codification and cultivation at
different levels. It would have to follow the amalgamation policy.
1959: The 1950s saw a heavy struggle against the amalgamation policy, particularly in
urban Norway, and particularly from the political right (who for twenty years after WW2
remained in the opposition against the continuously ruling Labour Party). In 1959, a new
spelling reform encompassing Bokml and Nynorsk was promulgated, still based on the
amalgamation principle, but modifying it, consolidating the 1938 reform rather than taking
new steps.
1964-66: The government appoints a committee to evaluate the language policy. The
committee advises a partial retreat from the amalgamation policy, accepting traditional
Bokml forms which had been excluded from the official norm in earlier reforms, and
keeping a high degree of optionality. The language struggle gradually diminishes.
1972: The language commission was replaced by a language council (Norsk sprkrd),
with similar, but quite expanded, tasks, such as checking and improving the usage in school
textbooks. This council was entrusted with the task of reassessing the Bokml standard on
new grounds. It was to base itself on a modified version of the amalgamation policy, viz. to
support tendencies in general usage which reduced the differences between the language
varieties, but not to take new steps towards amalgamation ahead of spontaneous
developments. The strengthening of the minority variety, Nynorsk, also remained an
important part of its tasks.
1981: A new reform of Bokml was promulgated by Parliament, reintroducing many
traditional forms into the standard again, continuing a high degree of optionality between
conservative and radical forms.

2005: The language council was replaced with a new institution, also called The
Language Council (Sprkrdet). Its task should now to a lesser degree involve codification
and to a larger degree language cultivation and defence against pressure from outside, above
all English. A new spelling of Bokml was promulgated, basing itself on quantitative
investigation of general written usage (among other by examining large text corpora), and the
optionality was now reduced as many rare forms in usage were abolished, while a number of
additional traditional forms were now admitted.
2012: A similar reform was introduced for Nynorsk, based on extensive analyses of
extant and evolving electronic text corpora and widespread discussions among Nynorsk users
ahead of the decisions. The result was a reduction of the differences between modern usage
and a standard which had included many optional, but rarely used, heritage forms from
earlier stages of the languages development.
Linguistic relationships
Danish and Norwegian are closely related languages within the Scandinavian language group
(together with Swedish). They used to be mutually intelligible, which they still are to a large
extent, at least in writing. The oral intelligibility is, however, reduced, because Danish
phonology has developed in a very separate direction which we cannot explore further here.
Danish pronunciation sounds extremely blurred in Norwegian (and Swedish) ears. The
Danish written language, however, is conservative, based upon conventions that were
developed from the sixteenth century on. In fact, Danish orthography today reflects a
phonological system which resembles Norwegian Bokml speech more than modern Danish
proper (especially if pronounced with a Norwegian south coast accent, because this part of
Norway had some early phonetic developments in common with the then contemporary
Danish, probably because of language contacts between both sides of the Skagerrak during
late medieval times). This means that when Norwegians read a Danish written text aloud, they
can read it with their own Norwegian pronunciation, as if it were a traditional Bokml text
with a few deviations which are reflected in the spelling. To Norwegians, this feels almost
like reading a (Dano-)Norwegian text from the nineteenth century.
But as we have seen, Norwegian itself consists of a number of markedly different
varieties, often without clear boundaries between them. They have different Norwegian names
which are not only neutral designations, but also carry ideological and psychological
connotations, and therefore become the objects of struggle and strife themselves. I shall
analyse the most important ones of these, on the background of the picture painted above.
As we have already seen, the two official written standards of Norwegian are called
Bokml Book Llanguage and Nynorsk New Norwegian. Both of them have had different
names during the time they have existed, partly designated for different varieties of the
languages. Besides, the amalgamation policy needed a separate name for its intended goal:
Samnorsk Common Norwegian. I concentrate on the two existing varieties one by one first,
and continue with Common Norwegian afterwards.
Bokml has, as has already been shown, evolved from the Danish written language,
pronounced in Norwegian mouths. Already around 1830, shortly after Norways separation
from Denmark, there grew an uncertainty as to what to call the language. Some preferred
Danish, just as most American nationals called their language English. Others insisted on
Norwegian, just as some Americans preferred American; this usage, however, caused sharp
reactions from some Danish circles. A third position was to avoid the problem altogether,
using Modersmaalet the mother tongue which of course did not work. These discussions
were the start of the process leading towards the Norwegianization of the Norwegian
linguistic scene, which we have already sketched. But the naming problem remained: When a

partly Norwegianized version of the written language had come into existence towards the
end of the nineteenth century, what should they call it?
There were different proposals, but no official regulation. Skriftsproget the written
language was enough for many, or Bogsproget the book language. The parliamentary
decison implying equalization of the two standards (from 1885), used the wording det
almindelige Bogsprog the general book language. Some of the most distinguished experts in
the field who were in favour of continued Norwegianization used dansk-norsk DanoNorwegian, among them Knud Knudsen. On the other hand, the enemies of this language,
the Nynorsk adherents, preferred norsk-dansk Norwegio-Danish. The difference was that the
latter saw the language as (more or less) norwegianized Danish, while Knudsen and his
adherents saw it as Norwegian derived from Danish (the latter part of such a compound in
Scandinavian carries the main meaning of the word, while the first component is a modifier;
therefore, dansk-norsk was interpreted as a kind of Norwegian, norsk-dansk as a kind of
Danish).
The (preliminary) winner of this somewhat disorganized competition, however, was a
new alternative, Riksml, meaning language of the state. The first component riks- was
developed from rike, actually inspired by German Reich (thus, Riksml by German
Reichssprache). Both in German and in Scandinavian the meaning of Reich / rike was and is
somewhat hazy; it may imply both state (in the institutional European sense of the word, not
the American sense), country and nation. Words with the prefix riks- in Norwegian often
imply nationwide as opposed to regional, the latter encompassing only parts of the
country, such as province or municipality. Riks- thus represents the highest in a hierarchy of
units. Even some Nynorsk adherents wanted to call their variety Riksml because of the
formal and social position this word implies. One of their more militant slogans was: Nynorsk
som einaste riksml i landet! Nynorsk as the only Riksml in the country! But in reality,
Riksml in the early twentieth century was established as the usual name of the language we
now call Bokml.
The change from Riksml to Bokml took place in 1929, when it was effectuated by
Parliament. This was the first time a formal decision concerning the names of the language
varieties was taken by an authoritative body. In informal speech, however, Riksml had been
firmly established, and it remained in use. After WW2, when the struggle about the
amalgamation policy hardened, a struggle about the naming also developed. The resistance
movement defending the traditional (thus Danish-like) forms of the language now codified a
separate version of the standard, based on the traditional variety of the 1917 reform (see
above), but accepting some (minor) features of the 1938 spelling (which had already been
accepted in general usage). The movement itself was called the Riksml movement, and the
word Riksml therefore marked an ideology, not only a linguistic variety. The term Bokml,
on the other hand, was now used to designate the officially standardized variety of the
language, which was marked by much optionality, so that Bokml encompassed a variety
which included many Nynorsk-derived and dialect-inspired forms as well as a variety of a
more traditional kind, but less traditional than the pure Riksml. This pattern remained until
the 1980s, when the official language policy had become more accommodating towards the
Riksml movement. This meant that the border lines between the oppositional Riksml and
the state-run Bokml became increasingly diffuse. Bokml itself had been polarized into two
varieties with numerous transition forms, marked by the adjectives moderate and radical.
Moderate Bokml was the most Riksml-marked, radical Bokml was stretching towards
Nynorsk and popular speech. The problem was that official moderate Bokml resembled
Riksml more and more, while radical Bokml was pertinently non-Riksml. From the other
side, the Riksml movement opened its language codification towards moderate Bokml,
accepting a (limited) number of non-Riksml forms where the Riksml equivalents had clearly

been marginalized in general usage, thus blurring the borderline towards moderate Bokml
even more. This policy took effect during the eighties and nineties.
This is the situation today. Riksml and Moderate Bokml and more and more blend
into each other, not only linguistically, but also within the ideological rhetorics. Radical
forms within Bokml is excluded from this unity, but they still exist within Bokml and are
used mostly by people ideologically committed to a policy of opening the Bokml standard to
common and popular speech of both rural and urban areas, above all in the populous
southeastern part of the country.
Then we pass on to the Nynorsk side.
Ivar Aasen called the book where he launched his new language standard Prver af
Landsmaalet i Norge Samples of the Landsml in Norway (1853). Landsml meant the
language of the country. But land in Norwegian is used both in the general sense of country
and the more special sense of countryside. The word was not taken into use at once. Its
adherents preferred simply norsk Norwegian, considering this word to be the only objective
and correct term (implying that the alternative and dominant standard was un-Norwegian,
of course). In the 1885 parliamentary decision, the term det norske Folkesprog the
Norwegian peoples language or the Norwegian popular language was used as the
counterpart of the general book language. But it was discussed what Folkesprog really was
supposed to mean: standardized Nynorsk (in Aasens codification or some alternative form)
or the spoken dialects in themselves? The latter meaning was the most common. Landsml
generally established itself as the most used term, but mostly in official discourse or among
those who did not use the language themselves. Its adherents disfavoured Landsml because
of its rural connotation, since one of the main problems of the movement promoting the
language, was that it proved difficult or nearly impossible to have it accepted in the urban
communities throughout the country, even though it spread quite efficiently throughout parts
of rural Norway.
Nynorsk New Norwegian was rarely used at first in its modern sense, but it was taken
into use as a term of periodization in descriptions of the history of the language, denoting the
(dialectal) Norwegian spoken language after the sixteenth century, as a successor of
gamalnorsk Old Norwegian (the language which in English is called Old Norse and
encompasses both Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic). Norwegian language histories also
operate with a Middle Norwegian (mellomnorsk) stage, marked by a process towards a
simplified morphology and a more international vocabulary (particularly influenced by Low
German) during the fifteenth century and the immediately preceding and succeeding decades.
Nynorsk New Norwegian was a natural term for the more recent period, and it was generally
accepted that the structural features of popular Norwegian speech around 1600 had already
reached the new Norwegian stage. This new Norwegian speech was of course the basis
which Aasen built his codification on. But only after 1900 did Nynorsk begin to be used as the
designation of the language variety which had evolved from Aasens works and subsequent
reforms, the variety, thus, which at the time was officially called Landsml. The
parliamentary decision of the names of the varieties in 1929, however, also formally
introduced Nynorsk as the name of Landsml, and unlike Bokml for the other variety,
Nynorsk soon came into use, both among friends and foes. Landsml was after the war simply
seen as the old name of Nynorsk, and discarded as a living term (except for use in historical
contexts).
Hgnorsk High Norwegian is a quite recent term designating Nynorsk with its most
traditional forms, approaching the shape it had in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Some circles within the Nynorsk movement have reacted to the amalgamation policy and
advocated a turn towards these older forms, which would bring the variety closer to Aasens

original codification. This traditionalist Nynorsk movement has always been there, often very
active, but the designation Hgnorsk is relatively recent. It has never had an official status.
Finally, we take a look at Samnorsk Common Norwegian. This term was designated
around the former turn of the century, around 1900. It denoted the planned or imagined aim of
the amalgamation policy, i.e,, a future language which nobody knew exactly what would be
like. The word received no official status, but after 1945, it was taken into use on a broad
scale, especially by the Riksml movement, who used it in their propaganda as a hate word.
This movement dominated much of the discourse of the 1950s, and they changed the contents
of the Samnorsk concept to mean radical Bokml, thus a known extant language variety, not
only a future aim. They campaigned heavily against the forms which they called Samnorsk,
often popular dialect forms of the Oslo area, and they succeeded in compromising the whole
idea of gradually amalgamating Bokml and Nynorsk. Samnorsk is not very much discussed
at present; it is mostly used in historical contexts, although it may still be used as a catchword
for linguistic forms within Bokml which are so radical, containing Nynorsk-like or urban
dialectal forms, that many Bokml users would regard them as utterly strange or perhaps
revolting.
The Samnorsk project
As I have already stated, the idea of amalgamating Bokml and Nynorsk (I use these names
irrespective of which period I treat, for the sake of simplicity) into a future Samnorsk
originated at the turn of the century (around 1900). This was supposed to be attained through
a gradual process of mutual linguistic rapprochement (tilnrming) between the two varieties.
I shall now show how this was planned to be done, and assess the results.
The basic condition for such a policy to take effect, was the relatively great similarity
between the two written varieties and the dialect patterns of different parts of the country.
Bokml was, as we have seen, based on a phonetically Norwegian spoken variety of the
Danish written standard. Its users lived in close contact with locally spoken dialects in
different areas, but the most important area here was the south-east, where the capital is
placed. This southeastern popular speech was closer to neighboring Swedish and Danish
varieties than the speech of Western and Northern Norway. Ivar Aasen, however, based his
Nynorsk standard on the dialect forms most closely resembling Old Norse, and they were best
preserved in Western Norway and some inland mountain areas in Southern Norway. Thereby,
maximum distance was sought between the two written varieties, although they were still
mutually intelligible.
The Nynorsk movement, on the other hand, had the ambition to unite all Nynorsk
dialects and their speakers in a common Norwegian standard language. The archaizing
tendency in the codification sprang from the view that the most common features were those
that reigned at the stage when the dialects split from each other; Old Norse was conceived of
as a unified language without or almost without dialectal variation (a conception which later
research in the medieval Norwegian manuscript literature has considerably modified). Ivar
Aasens Nynorsk standard was in many ways an impressive creation by its systematicity and
its aesthetic qualities, which made it well suited to poetic and artistic purposes, and some of
its users reached a high literary quality in their works. But in its original form, Aasens
standard was too good to be realized by a whole language community in practice, and against
his warnings, an increasing degree of variability and adjustments towards different dialect
groups became a characteristic of much Nynorsk usage. In other words, it proved to be more
flexible than Aasen would have liked, since flexibility often goes at the cost of systematicity.
The same happened in Bokml, as southeastern dialect features crept into the language,
particularly in literary and informal functions. This tendency was strengthened by the

demographic development of Norway, since the population in and around Oslo expanded
more rapidly than elsewhere in the country (where urban centers like Bergen, Trondheim etc.
also grew at the cost of their rural surroundings). As the twentieth century wore on, the
linguistic features of southeastern popular speech were seen as markedly expansive. This was
the key which unlocked the language to the rapprochement policy with full amalgamation,
Samnorsk, as the future goal; the catchword which expressed this goal was linguistic
unification (sprklig samling). Through the introducing of popular southeastern dialect forms
in the two official standards, Bokml became more representative in a social sense, less
onesidedly attached to the speech of societal elite groups which many saw as an asset when
the labour movement also expanded and gradually transformed the society in the direction of
an increasingly elaborate welfare society. Nynorsk also gained in its representativity, but here
in a geographic sense, by accepting Southeastern forms on a par with the Western ones (also
northern dialect forms were accepted and taken more into use during these years). This was
the policy which reached in zenith in 1938.
After WW2, the Labor Party governed the country for twenty years, and the nonsocialist coalition which took over in 1965, in many respects continued the basic elements in
the social democratic policy, including the language policy. The resistance did however
succeed in securing a modification and a gradual change of this policy, which has been
described on p. 00. Here, I shall sketch the main forces behind the developments from the
1950s on.
The resistance phase was strongest in the 1950s. The language planners, viewed in
hindsight, had underestimated the forces of habit and tradition among language users. Large
groups of people, not least in the traditional social and cultural elite, felt that an authoritarian
government was in the process of taking their language from them by forcing them to use
forms they felt to be strange and vulgar. This provoked widespread resistance, especially in
the cities and towns, where the traditional Bokml had its strongest position.
A big additional problem is indicated by the use of the adjective vulgar since many
of the new forms were not necessarily brand-new and unknown, but had been in traditional
use in popular dialectal speech, associated with urban and rural working class. To the Labour
Party, this was a reason for promoting them, to reduce social prejudice also in language
matters, but even among those who used such forms in speech, they gave a connotation of
lacking dignity. People in particular resented that their children were taught in school that
such forms were standard, and the language of school textbooks was at the heart of the
struggle. The school was to a dominant degree state-run, and there were regulations as to
which kinds of books could be used as textbooks, also regarding linguistic usage. These
regulations were the first to be softened and modified in face of the resistance of hundred
thousands of parents already in the fifties.
However, an opposite development took place in a more discrete and less visible way,
namely a growing acceptance of many of those new forms which were already most
widespread in speech and thus less tainted with the vulgarity stamp. In usage, a difference
developed partly along political lines, for example in the press: The most conservative papers
followed the private Riksml (see above) norm, while more centrist and radical ones kept
inside the official standard, using the optionality to such a degree that they preferred
moderate forms to the more radical, but still keeping a distance to Riksml. The longterm result was that the most marked radical (dialectal or Nynorsk-marked) forms
disappeared in use, although remaining as optional standard forms in the dictionaries and
school spelling lists (until 2005), while more moderate rapprochement forms gradually
gained currency in use and were regarded as acceptable and neutral in the language
struggle. Riksml counterparts of these forms, through this development, were increasingly

seen as snobbish or old-fashioned. A kind of middle course between the radical

Bokml and Riksml thus developed and became increasingly dominant.
In the 1970s, a strong anti-authoritarian movement with leftist inclinations among the
youth challenged the Riksml movement, favouring Nynorsk and the use of dialects, but also
promoting the use of vulgar forms from urban (above all Oslo) working class speech. This
wave waned again after 1980, when the political right gained power within economic and
social policy, but continued dialect use and a freer attitude to the written forms strengthened
the middle course, where optionality between popular forms and more traditional forms
continued to exist and established itself more permanently. The new trends promoted, again,
in particular by the youth, led to a more relaxed view on language, leading to a more informal
style in writing which favoured many of the popular forms in Bokml, in so far as they had
already gained currency in use. Both on the Riksml side and on the opposite
rapprochement side, many forms simply gradually disappeared from use, being seen as oldfashioned. The new Bokml spelling of 2005 based itself on these new attitudes to the
language form and the usage that developed from it. The present trends in language
development are dominated by generations that were unborn during the intense language
struggle phases, and therefore relatively untainted by the feelings and attitudes of their
grandparents generation.
I end with a brief sketch of the present situation, based on three catch-words.
The first is stabilization, which is clearly the aim of the most recent spelling reforms.
Official policy is now to maintain Bokml and Nynorsk as separate standards, although
Bokml is vastly dominant and the Nynorsk community actively struggling to keep its
language strong. As a cultural elite language, Nynorsk asserts itself well, but among the
grassroot youth, active endeavours are still needed to maintain it. The official spellings of
the two varieties seem to stabilize on a course in between the most traditional styles of the
past and the most radical elements of the rapprochement policy, which now also is seen as
old-fashioned
The second catchword is fragmentation. In the social spheres outside the official (both
governmental and private) ones, many new stylistic levels are developed and explored, often
based on traditional dialect speech, but also exploiting resources taken from English and from
the urban registers based on non-Western immigrant languages. These oral styles are now
eagerly used even in writing, by young people and in the so-called social electronic media.
Here, creativity abounds, and new linguistic resources constantly prop up. How this all will
influence developments in the future, is impossible to indicate now.
The final catch-word is accommodation, and this applies to the informal spoken
language. While dialects have been widely used in Norway, also in official and national
contexts, at least since the seventies, they have not remained unchanged. They are constantly
influenced by neighbouring dialects, in particular the dialect of the nearest city, developing
into larger units, more regional than purely local, as before. They are also influenced by the
standard languages, mostly Bokml, but in Western Norway also by Nynorsk (in the regions
where people are accustomed to see Nynorsk in writing). A long-term oral amalgamation into
a kind of Samnorsk is possible (independently of any official policy), but so is a future stable
coexistence of several regiolects in the different parts of the country.

A brief note on geography: Norway is a long and rather narrow country, customarily divided into two main
parts: Northern Norway (Nord-Norge) and Southern Norway (Sr-Norge). Southern Norway is broad enough to
be divided between west and east, however. In Norwegian (Bokml) those parts are called Vestlandet resp.
stlandet, by me rendered Western Norway and Eastern Norway in English. Vestlandet is thus the western part
of Sr-Norge, while Nord-Norge does not have an east-west division at all. The center of Western Norway is
Bergen, while for Eastern Norway it is Oslo, which is also the national capital. The northern part of Southern
Norway, bordering on Northern Norway and having Trondheim as its urban center, is called Trndelag. In
Nynorsk, by the way, the country is called Noreg (Bokml: Norge) and stlandet is called Austlandet (because
this variety has preserved Old Norse diphthongs in many words where the diphthongs have been
monophthongized in Bokml (and Danish and Swedish).
ii
The capital was until 1924 named Christiania after the seventeenth-century Danish king Christian IV, but from
1925 it was renamed Oslo, an Old Norse name probably dating from the Viking age. I stick to Oslo throughout
here, for the sake of simplicity.