there are two Norwegian languages? Why, and which one is the main one?
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While we have the two written versions, one challenge for people learning (apart from Norwegians easily conversing in English), is our spoken dialects. The easterners (the ones closest to speaking pure bokmål), have trouble understanding people from other places in Norway. And a lot of us write in our dialects as well, when speaking informally with people in writing. So if you have learned a bunch of bokmål, and then visit the west coast, you might struggle to understand what people are saying unless they speak bokmål back.
Examples can be how to say “I”. I, e, eg, jeg, æ, æi, from the top of my head. Or “how”, hvordan, kordan, kossn, åssn, etc.
Norwegian is a mess hehe. But I love our different dialects. It’s cool!
That’s more complicated than this. There are two official written standards. One of them mostly match the (older) main dialect, Bokmål, while the other one is an average of every other dialects, Nynorsk. Neither is the main one, the most used one depending on where you are in the country. I think Bokmål has more individual users than the other because Nynorsk was created for minor dialect speakers mainly, but it doesn’t affect anything from an administrative point of view.
That’s more complicated than this. There are two official written standards. One of them mostly match the (older) main dialect, Bokmål, while the other one is an average of every other dialects, Nynorsk. Neither is the main one, the most used one depending on where you are in the country. I think Bokmål has more individual users than the other because Nynorsk was created for minor dialect speakers mainly, but it doesn’t affect anything from an administrative point of view.
That’s more complicated than this. There are two official written standards. One of them mostly match the (older) main dialect, Bokmål, while the other one is an average of every other dialects, Nynorsk. Neither is the main one, the most used one depending on where you are in the country. I think Bokmål has more individual users than the other because Nynorsk was created for minor dialect speakers mainly, but it doesn’t affect anything from an administrative point of view.
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. 😛
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. 😛
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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