Nynorsk
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Nynorsk (literally New Norwegian) is one of the two officially sanctioned written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. It is used as the primary written language by 10-15% of Norwegian speakers in Norway.Nynorsk is also the Norwegian linguistic term for Modern Norwegian, which is the language spoken in Norway since the mid 1500s. In this sense Nynorsk covers all modern Norwegian dialects and all modern Norwegian orthographies, including Nynorsk, Høgnorsk, Bokmål and Riksmål. This sense of the word is described further in the article Modern Norwegian and is not used below.
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Written or spoken languages
Neither Nynorsk nor Bokmål are Norwegian dialects in themselves; they are merely written standards of the same language – the Norwegian language. Few people speak either form literally, but some dialects are closer to Nynorsk than to Bokmål or vice versa. For dialects that are equally close to both written standards or differ significantly from both, the choice of orthography may be a political decision by the municipalities or self-determined by parents in primary to secondary schools, and self-determined by students in tertiary school, colleges and universities.Names of the written languages
Before 1929, Nynorsk and its counterpart Bokmål were known as Landsmål and Riksmål, meaning country language and state language respectively, or both meaning national language. In 1929 the names Nynorsk (literally New Norwegian) and Bokmål (literally book language) were chosen to obtain a better contrast between the two written standards.
As both Nynorsk and Bokmål are widely regarded to be Norwegian languages, the simple term Norwegian (in Norwegian: Norsk) does not refer to either of them exclusively.
Socio-political issues
The situation between Bokmål and Nynorsk remains to this day very much a socio-political one, alongside being a socio-linguistic and one of regional culture. Aside from Bokmål and Nynorsk, there is a more conservative variant of Nynorsk called Høgnorsk, which is claimed to be even more valid and exact in terms of spelling and grammar than Nynorsk as a Norwegian language without Danish influence. For example, høgnorsk rejects all low-german prefixes such as an-, be- and suffixes such as -else and -heit. Nynorsk was originally intended to draw on all the dialects of Norway and counter the influence by Danish and Low German and thus a hypothetical form of how the language would have evolved without these continental influences.
History
Ivar Aasen is considered the founding father of Nynorsk. The son of a farmer from the northern part of western Norway, Aasen desired a written standard of Norwegian that better reflected the genuine dialects of the country, as a different language from the Danish that was the only written language at the time. He travelled throughout Norway during the 1840s-50s, gathering information to build a truly Norwegian written language closer to these spoken dialects. He chose to build the new language mainly on the dialects of the western and inner parts of the country, because he thought the dialects in these areas had not been influenced by Danish as much as the dialects in eastern Norway.
Language samples
To illustrate some differences and similarities between the variants of written Norwegian and other North Germanic languages, compare the following phrases in Nynorsk (N), Høgnorsk (H), Bokmål (B), Riksmål (R), Danish (D), Icelandic (I), and Swedish (S):
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N/H: Eg kjem frå Noreg N/H: Kva heiter han? |
N/H: Dette er ein hest N: Regnbogen har mange fargar |
Some Nynorsk sentences bear resemblance with Icelandic, but Nynorsk is otherwise more similar to Bokmål or Danish or Swedish than to Icelandic or Faroese. The most similarities are found in Nynorsk/Høgnorsk and in Bokmål/Riksmål/Danish, which would be expected since Nynorsk and Høgnorsk are based on Landsmål, whereas Bokmål and Riksmål are based on Danish.
See also
External link
- Forskrift om målvedtak i kommunar og fylkeskommunar - Legal document in Norwegian listing which counties and municipalities have declared their official written standard to be specifically Bokmål, Nynorsk or undeclared. (Note that six municipalities have declared Northern Sami co-official in addition with Norwegian).
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