The Norwegian language conflict (, ) is an ongoing controversy in Norwegian culture and politics about the different varieties of written Norwegian. From 1536/1537 until 1814, Danish was the standard written language of Norway due to the union of crowns with Denmark. As a result, the proximity of modern written Norwegian to Danish underpins controversies in nationalism, rural versus urban cultures, literary history, diglossia (colloquial and formal dialects, standard language), spelling reform, and orthography.
In the United Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the official languages were Danish and German. The urban Norwegian upper class spoke Dano-Norwegian () (Danish, with Norwegian pronunciation and other minor local differences), while most people spoke their local and regional dialect. After the Treaty of Kiel transferred Norway from Denmark–Norway to Sweden–Norway in 1814, Dano-Norwegian (or "det almidelige bogmaal") was the sole official language until 1885 when Ivar Aasen's Landsmaal gained recognition.
In the early 1840s, young linguist Ivar Aasen traveled the countryside gathering up the words and grammar used there. He assembled a Norwegian language based on dialects little affected by Danish and published his first grammar and dictionary of the Norwegian people's language (), in 1848 and 1850 respectively. He and many other authors wrote texts in their own dialects from around this time.
Norwegian is a North Germanic language. Dano-Norwegian, which began as a tongue readily accessible to (and essentially written as) Danish, took in increasing amounts of Norwegian. Meanwhile, Aasen's "people's language" became established. Parliament decided in 1885 that the two forms of written Norwegian were to be equally official. Both went through some name changes until 1929, when parliament decided that the one originally based on Danish should be called Bokmål (literally "book language") and the one based on Norwegian dialects should be called Nynorsk ("new Norwegian").
In the early 20th century, a more activist approach to written Norwegian was adopted. The government attempted over several decades to bring the two language forms closer to each other with the goal of merging them but failed due to widespread resistance from both sides. The now-abandoned official policy to merge Bokmål and Nynorsk into one written standard called Samnorsk through a series of reforms has created a wide spectrum of varieties of the two. An unofficial form called Riksmål is considered more conservative than Bokmål. Similarly, the unofficial Høgnorsk is much closer to Aasen's mid-1800s language than to today's Nynorsk. Norwegians are educated in whichever form is more widespread where they live (/) and the resultant secondary language form (, "side language").
There is no officially sanctioned spoken standard of Norwegian, but according to some linguists, like Kjell Venås, one de facto spoken standard is akin to Bokmål, Urban East Norwegian ().
Sample Danish text Norwegian (Bokmål) Norwegian (Nynorsk) English translation In 1877 Brandes left Copenhagen and took up residence in Berlin. However, his political views made Prussia an uncomfortable place in which to live and in 1883 he returned to Copenhagen. There he was met by a completely new group of writers and thinkers who were eager to accept him as their leader. The most important of Brandes' later works is his writing on Shakespeare which, translated to English by William Archer, received recognition immediately.
Excerpts from the articles about Danish critic Georg Brandes from the Danish Wikipedia, version from 19 May 2006, 09:36 and Norwegian (bokmål) Wikipedia, version from 4 April 2006, 01:38.
History Background The earliest examples of non-Danish Norwegian writing are from the 12th century, with Konungs skuggsjá being the prime example. The language in use at this time is known as Old Norse, and was widely used in writing in Norway and Iceland. The languages of Sweden and Denmark at this time were not very different from that of Norway, and are often also called Old Norse. Although some regional variations are apparent in written documents from this time, it is hard to know precisely the divisions between spoken dialects. This interim Norwegian is known as middle Norwegian ().
With the Black Death in 1349, Norway's economy and political independence collapsed, and the country came under Danish rule. The Norwegian language also underwent rather significant changes, shedding complex grammatical forms and adopting a new vocabulary.
The Norwegian written language at this time gradually fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned altogether in favor of written Danish, the culminating event being the translation in 1604 of Magnus the Lawmender's code into Danish. The last example found of an original Middle Norwegian document is from 1583.
Norwegian dialects, however, lived on and evolved within the general population as vernacular speech, even as the educated classes gradually adopted a Dano-Norwegian koiné in speech. The Norwegian-born writer Ludvig Holberg became one of the leading exponents of standard written Danish, even as he retained a few distinctly Norwegian forms in his own writing.
In fact, Norwegian writers—even those who were purists of the Danish language—never fully relinquished their native vocabulary and usage in their writing. Examples include Petter Dass, Johan Nordahl Brun, Jens Zetlitz, and Christian Braunmann Tullin. Although Danish was the official language of the realm, Norwegian writers experienced a disparity between the languages they spoke and wrote.
In the late 18th century, educator Christian Kølle's writings—such as —utilized many of his at-the-time controversial linguistic ideas, which included phonemic orthography, using the feminine grammatical gender in writing, and the letter ⱥ (a with a slash through it, based on ø) to replace aa.
In 1814, Norway separated from Denmark as the Kingdom of Norway and adopted its own constitution. It was forced into a new, but weaker, union with Sweden, and the situation evolved into what follows:
The written language was Danish, although the ruling class regarded it as Norwegian, which was important in order to mark Norway's independence from Sweden. The ruling class spoke Dano-Norwegian. They regarded it as the cultivated Norwegian language, as opposed to the common language of workers, craftspeople, and farmers. The rest of the population spoke Norwegian dialects. These were generally considered vulgar speech, or perhaps a weak attempt at speaking "standard" Norwegian, by the upper class who ignored or did not recognise the fact that the dialects represented a separate evolution from a common ancestor, Old Norse.
Early 19th century beginnings The dissolution of Denmark–Norway occurred in the era of the emerging European nation states. In accordance with the principles of romantic nationalism, legitimacy was given to the young and still-forming nation of Norway by way of its history and culture, including the Norwegian language. Norwegian writers gradually adopted distinctly Norwegian vocabulary in their work. Henrik Wergeland may have been the first to do so; but it was the collected folk tales by Jørgen Moe and Peter Christen Asbjørnsen that created a distinct Norwegian written style. This created some opposition from the conservatives, most notably from the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven. The influential playwright Henrik Ibsen was inspired by the nationalistic movement, but in his later writings he wrote mostly in standard Danish, probably out of concern for his Danish audience.
By 1866, Danish clergyman Andreas Listov (1817–1889) found it necessary to publish a book of about 3,000 terms that needed translation from Norwegian to Danish. Though most of these terms were probably taken straight from Aasmund Olavsson Vinje's travel accounts, the publication reflected a widespread recognition that much written Norwegian no longer was pure Danish.
Initial reforms and advocacy
By the mid-19th century, two Norwegian linguistic pioneers had started the work that would influence the linguistic situation to this day. Ivar Aasen, autodidact, polyglot, and the founder of modern Norwegian linguistics, studied first the dialects of Sunnmøre, his home district, and then the structure of Norwegian dialects in general. He was one of the first to describe the evolution from Old Norse to Modern Norwegian. From this he moved to advocate and design a distinctly Norwegian written language he termed Landsmål, "language of the country". His work was based on two important principles, in morphology he chose forms which he regarded as common denominators from which contemporary varieties could be inferred, in lexicography he applied puristic principles and excluded words of Danish or Middle Low German descent when at least some dialects had preserved synonyms inherited from Old Norse. In 1885, Landsmål was adopted as an official written language alongside the Norwegian version of Danish.
Knud Knudsen, a teacher, worked instead to adapt the orthography more closely to the spoken Dano-Norwegian koiné known as "cultivated daily speech" (). He argued that the cultivated daily speech was the best basis for a distinct Norwegian written language, because the educated classes did not belong to any specific region, they were numerous, and possessed cultural influence. Knudsen was also influenced by and a proponent of the common Dano-Norwegian movement for phonemic orthography. The written form of Norwegian based on his work eventually became known as Riksmål, a term introduced by the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in 1899. The prefix is used in words denoting "belonging to a (or the) country"; Riksmål means "state language".
As a result of Knudsen's work, the Parliament of Norway passed the first orthographical reforms in 1862, most of which also had its proponents in Denmark. Though modest in comparison to subsequent reforms, it nevertheless marked a legislative step toward a distinct written standard for Norway. Silent e'''s were eliminated from written Norwegian ( rather than ), double vowels were no longer used to denote long vowels, k replaced the use of c, q, and ch in most words, and ph was eliminated in favor of f.
Around 1870, x was replaced by ks.
Such orthographic reforms continued in subsequent years, but in 1892 the Norwegian department of education approved the first set of optional forms in the publication of Nordahl Rolfsen's Reader for the Primary School (). Also, in 1892, national legislation gave each local school board the right to decide whether to teach its children Riksmål or Landsmål.
In 1907, linguistic reforms were extended to include not just orthography but also grammar. The characteristic Norwegian "hard" consonants (p, t, k) replaced Danish "soft" consonants (b, d, g) in writing; consonants were doubled to denote short vowels; words that in Norwegian were monosyllabic were spelled that way; and conjugations related to the neuter grammatical gender were adapted to common Norwegian usage in cultivated daily speech.
In 1913 Olaf Bull's crime novel (My name is Knoph) became the first piece of Norwegian literature to be translated from Riksmål into Danish for Danish readers, thereby emphasizing that Riksmål was by now a separate language.
Controversy erupts In 1906, prominent writers of Landsmål formed an association to promote their version of written Norwegian, calling themselves Noregs Mållag; a year later, the corresponding organization to promote Riksmål was founded, naming itself Riksmålsforbundet. The formation of these organizations coincided with the rule that all incoming university students—those who passed examen artium—had to demonstrate mastery of both for admission to university programs. They had to write a second additional essay in the Norwegian language that was not their primary language.