there are two Norwegian languages? Why, and which one is the main one?
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There are two *written* forms, which don’t correspond to any of the spoken dialects. It’s a bit complicated… so here’s a short version.
We were stuck under Danish rule for a few hundred years, and Danish was the written language of the land. After we got out of that mess, we ended up under Swedish rule from 1814 to 1905, during which the Danish written language was formally simplified and adapted to something closer to the spoken language.
At the same time, Ivar Aasen spent several years traveling the countryside, mainly along the west coast, and concocted a written form of Norwegian based on the dialects there.
I was raised in the eighties and nineties, and I don’t even recognize the present-day Nynorsk form as what I grew up with, so there’s been some rather extensive changes to the written language in mere decades – but then, neither written form is even 200 years old yet, so… we might end up with a unified writing system in my lifetime. 😛
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