Norweigan Nynorsk

## Overview

**Nynorsk** (translates to **New Norwegian**) is one of the two written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. Nynorsk was established in 1929 as one of two state sanctioned fusions of Ivar Aasen's standard Norwegian language (*Landsmål*) with the Dano-Norwegian written language (*Riksmål*), the other such fusion being called *Bokmål*. Nynorsk is a variation which is closer to *Landsmål*, whereas Bokmål is closer to *Riksmål*.

In local communities, one quarter of Norwegian municipalities have declared Nynorsk as their official language form, and these municipalities account for about 12% of the Norwegian population. Nynorsk is also being taught as a mandatory subject in both high school and elementary school for all Norwegians who don't have it as their own language form. Of the remaining municipalities that don't have Nynorsk as their official language form, half are neutral and half have adopted Bokmål as their official language form.

Four of Norway's eighteen counties, Rogaland, Hordaland, Sogn og Fjordane and Møre og Romsdal, have Nynorsk as their official language form. These four together comprise the region of Western Norway.

## History

Danish had been the written language of Norway until 1814, and Danish with Norwegian intonation and pronunciation was on occasion spoken in the cities (see Dano-Norwegian). 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. A result was that 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 (English: High Norwegian, analogous to High German). 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 (1536-1814), closely resembles Nynorsk (New Norwegian). A major source of old written material is Diplomatarium Norvegicum in 22 printed volumes.

### Ivar Aasen's Work

In 1749, Erik Pontoppidan released a comprehensive 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*. Nevertheless, it is generally acknowledged that the first 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. 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.[10] Ultimately, however, Faroese was established 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, one could arrive at a uniting expression for all Norwegian dialects, what Aasen called *the fundamental dialect*, and Einar Haugen has called *Proto-Norwegian*.

The idea that the study should end up in a new written language marked his work from the beginning. A fundamental idea for Aasen 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.

### Opposition

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.

Some critics of obligatory Nynorsk and Bokmål as school subjects have been very outspoken about their views. 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.

## Norweigan Nynorsk excerpt from Wikipedia article "Nynorsk"

Heilt frå byrjinga var det forskjellige syn blant målfolk på korleis skriftnormalen skulle vere. Ivar Aasen var naturlegvis ein autoritet, men tidlege målfolk som Aasmund Olavson Vinje, Arne Garborg og Olaus Fjørtoft utvikla alle kvar sin variant. Lengst frå Aasen stod Fjørtoft, som argumenterte for direkte samsvar mellom skrift og daglegtale, sjølv skreiv han på sin sunnmørsdialekt. Den fyrste offisielle landsmålsrettskrivinga frå 1901 var likevel stort sett i samsvar med Aasens landsmål.

Det var fyrst med samnorskpolitikken at normeringa av landsmålet tok ei anna lei. Tanken var ved gradvise endringar i dei to skriftspråka å samle seg om éin samnorsk normal. Den fyrste reforma i denne retninga var rettskrivinga av 1907 for riksmål. Dette var rett nok hovudsakleg ei reform av dansk skriftspråk i retning av det dansk-norske talemålet, men hovudarkitekten bak denne reforma, Moltke Moe, såg sjølv dette som det fyrste steget på vegen mot samnorsk. Deretter følgde 1910-rettskrivinga i landsmålet og 1917-rettskrivingane i både landsmål og riksmål. Alle desse reformene var relativt varsame i høve til det som skulle kome, ikkje minst fordi dei mest radikale endringane var valfrie.

Den moderne forma av nynorsk vart til gjennom rettskrivingsendringane av 1938 og 1959. Den mest markante endringa var at skrivemåten av ei rad ord er endra. Mest merksemd har nok likevel det at det såkalla i-målet vart fjerna frå læreboknormalen fått. Dei aller fleste endringane av skrivemåtar og bøyingsmønster vart gjort for å kome i samsvar med anten tradisjonelt bokmål eller nye samnorskformer i bokmål.

Som ein konsekvens av desse reformene har nynorsknormalen no alternative skrivemåtar og bøyingsmønster for mange ord. I utgangspunktet vart dette gjort for å kunne få til ein gradvis overgang til dei nye formene, men etter kvart har mange sett på valfridomen i seg sjølv som eit gode, fordi det gjev høve til å velje former som ligg nærare sitt eige talemål, ikkje ulikt Fjørtofts syn. Mot dette har andre vidareført Aasens syn på einskap, kontinuitet og indre struktur.

Fram til Rettskrivinga av 2012 hadde den nynorske skriftnormalen to nivå: hovudformer som skulle brukast i lærebøker og av det offentlege (læreboknormalen), og sideformer som var tillatne i elevarbeid og offisielt blei rekna som korrekte. Ved denne siste rettskrivingsreformen blei ein del sideformer tekne ut medan andre blei likestilte med hovudformer.