Nynorsk
Encyclopedia
Nynorsk (ˈnyːnɔʂk) or New Norwegian is one of two official written standards for the Norwegian language
, the other being Bokmål
. The standard language was created by Ivar Aasen
during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian alternative to the Danish language
which was commonly written in Norway at the time.
27% of the Norwegian municipalities have declared Nynorsk as their official language form, and these comprise about 12% of the Norwegian population. Nynorsk is the majority form of the four counties Rogaland
, Hordaland
, Sogn og Fjordane
and Møre og Romsdal
, which together comprise the region of Western Norway.
The Norwegian Language Council
recommends the name Norwegian Nynorsk when referring to this language in English.
, Swedish
and Danish
form a continuum
of mutually intelligible
dialect
s and sociolect
s. Nynorsk is the smallest of the four major standard languages within this broad speech community alongside Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish and Danish.
Nynorsk standard language is nevertheless used in broadcasting, on stage, and by a few individuals. Bokmål has a much larger basis in the middle-class urban speech, especially that found in the eastern part of Southern Norway. However, most Norwegians do not speak this so-called Standard Østnorsk, but Norwegian dialects. The western and other traditional Norwegian dialects are the spoken basis for Nynorsk, and many Nynorsk supporters regard them as the standard way to speak Nynorsk, even if the majority of dialect speakers use Bokmål in writing. As such, Nynorsk is not a minority language
, though it shares many of the problems that minority languages face.
Each municipality
can declare one of the two languages as its official language, or it can remain "language neutral". 27% of the municipalities making up 12% of the population have declared Nynorsk as their official language while 40% have chosen Bokmål. The main language used in primary schools normally follows the official language of its municipality, and is decided by referendum within the local school district. The number of school districts and pupils using primarily Nynorsk has decreased since the top in the 1940s, even in Nynorsk municipalities. , 13.0% of pupils in primary school are taught in Nynorsk.
The prevailing regions for Nynorsk are the western counties of Rogaland
, Hordaland
, Sogn og Fjordane
and Møre og Romsdal
, in addition to the western/northern parts of Oppland
, Buskerud
, Telemark
, Aust-
and Vest-Agder
, where an estimated 50% of the population writes Nynorsk. The usage in the rest of Norway, including the major cities and urban areas in the above stated areas, is scarce.
In Sogn og Fjordane county and the Sunnmøre area of Møre og Romsdal, all municipalities have stated Nynorsk as the official language (except Ålesund, which remains neutral). In Hordaland, all municipalities except three have declared Nynorsk as the official language. There is a vast majority of municipalities that has chosen a Neutral or Nynorsk stance over the Bokmål language form (It should be noted, however, that many of these are major urban areas where pupils are taught in Bokmål).
in the mid 19th century. In the 1840s he traveled the country and studied the dialects. In 1848 and 1850 he published the first Norwegian grammar and dictionary, respectively, which described a standard Aasen called Landsmål
. New versions detailing the written standard were published in 1864 and 1873.
Aasen's work is based on the idea that the 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 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 Norse
. 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 Norse. Therefore he did not include grammatical categories which were extinct from the 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.
From the outset, Nynorsk has been met with resistance. With the advent and growth of the mass media, the exposure to the standard languages has increased, and Bokmål's dominant position has come to define what is commonly regarded as "normal". This may explain why negative attitudes toward Nynorsk are common, as is seen with many minority language
s. This is especially prominent in school, which is the place most Bokmål-using Norwegians first and most extensively need to relate to the language.
Some critics of Nynorsk have been quite outspoken about their views. For instance, during the 2005 election, the Norwegian Young Conservatives
made an advertisement that included a scene where a copy of the Nynorsk dictionary was burned. After strong reactions to this book burning
, they chose not to show it.
s; masculine, feminine and neuter. In contrast, there are effectively two genders in Bokmål; common and neuter, and the few remaining feminine nouns are barely distinct.
Genders are inherent categories of noun
s, and each gender has its own forms of inflection.
In Nynorsk these are important distinctions, in contrast to Bokmål, in which all feminine words may also become masculine and inflect using its forms, and indeed a feminine word may be seen in both forms, for example boka or boken (the book).
In Nynorsk (unlike Bokmål), masculine and feminine nouns are differentiated in the singular definitive form (in which the noun takes a suffix to indicate "the") and also in the plural forms (which they would not be in Bokmål), for example:
This differentiation is expressed in distinctive ways in the dialects, for example reva/revan(e) and løve/løven(e), revær/revane and løver/løvene or rever/reva and løver/løvene.
inflection, for each gender can have more inflectional forms. The gender determines the inflection of other words which conjugate or inflect with the noun. This concerns determiners and adjective
s. For example:
Usage changes too from dialect to dialect, for example en liten rev, min egen rev men e lita løve, mi ega løve eller ein liten rev, min eigen rev men ei liti løve, mi eigi løve.
Examples may compare the Bokmål forms skrevet ('written', past participle) and hoppet ('jumped', both past tense and past participle), which in written Nynorsk are skrive or skrivi (Landsmål skrivet) and hoppa (Landsmål hoppat). The form hoppa is also permitted in Bokmål.
Other examples from other classes of words include the neuter singular form anna of annan ('different', with more meanings) which was spelled annat in Landsmål, and the neuter singular form ope of open ('open') which originally was spelled opet. Bokmål, in comparison, still retains these t's through the equivalent forms annet and åpent.
The distinction between Bokmål and Nynorsk are that while Bokmål have for the most part derived their forms from the written Danish language or the common Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk has its orthographical standards from Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect" and are intended to represent the distinctive dialectical forms.
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, the other being Bokmål
Bokmål
Bokmål is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90% of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language....
. The standard language was created by Ivar Aasen
Ivar Aasen
Ivar Andreas Aasen was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright and poet.-Background:...
during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian alternative to the Danish language
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
which was commonly written in Norway at the time.
27% of the Norwegian municipalities have declared Nynorsk as their official language form, and these comprise about 12% of the Norwegian population. Nynorsk is the majority form of the four counties Rogaland
Rogaland
is a county in Western Norway, bordering Hordaland, Telemark, Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder. It is the center of the Norwegian petroleum industry, and as a result of this, Rogaland has the lowest unemployment rate of any county in Norway, 1.1%...
, Hordaland
Hordaland
is a county in Norway, bordering Sogn og Fjordane, Buskerud, Telemark and Rogaland. Hordaland is the third largest county after Akershus and Oslo by population. The county administration is located in Bergen...
, Sogn og Fjordane
Sogn og Fjordane
is a county in Norway, bordering Møre og Romsdal, Oppland, Buskerud, and Hordaland. The county administration is in the town of Hermansverk in Leikanger municipality while the largest town is Førde....
and Møre og Romsdal
Møre og Romsdal
is a county in the northernmost part of Western Norway. It borders the counties of Sør-Trøndelag, Oppland and Sogn og Fjordane. The county administration is located in Molde, while Ålesund is the largest city.-The name:...
, which together comprise the region of Western Norway.
The Norwegian Language Council
Norwegian Language Council
The Norwegian Language Council was the regulation authority for the Norwegian language. It has been superseded by The Language Council of Norway .The council had 38 members, and created lists of acceptable word forms...
recommends the name Norwegian Nynorsk when referring to this language in English.
Writing and speech
Spoken NorwegianNorwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
form a continuum
Dialect continuum
A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the...
of mutually intelligible
Mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...
dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s and sociolect
Sociolect
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc....
s. Nynorsk is the smallest of the four major standard languages within this broad speech community alongside Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish and Danish.
Nynorsk standard language is nevertheless used in broadcasting, on stage, and by a few individuals. Bokmål has a much larger basis in the middle-class urban speech, especially that found in the eastern part of Southern Norway. However, most Norwegians do not speak this so-called Standard Østnorsk, but Norwegian dialects. The western and other traditional Norwegian dialects are the spoken basis for Nynorsk, and many Nynorsk supporters regard them as the standard way to speak Nynorsk, even if the majority of dialect speakers use Bokmål in writing. As such, Nynorsk is not a minority language
Minority language
A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities.-International politics:...
, though it shares many of the problems that minority languages face.
Each municipality
Municipalities of Norway
Norway is divided into 19 administrative regions, called counties , and 430 municipalities...
can declare one of the two languages as its official language, or it can remain "language neutral". 27% of the municipalities making up 12% of the population have declared Nynorsk as their official language while 40% have chosen Bokmål. The main language used in primary schools normally follows the official language of its municipality, and is decided by referendum within the local school district. The number of school districts and pupils using primarily Nynorsk has decreased since the top in the 1940s, even in Nynorsk municipalities. , 13.0% of pupils in primary school are taught in Nynorsk.
The prevailing regions for Nynorsk are the western counties of Rogaland
Rogaland
is a county in Western Norway, bordering Hordaland, Telemark, Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder. It is the center of the Norwegian petroleum industry, and as a result of this, Rogaland has the lowest unemployment rate of any county in Norway, 1.1%...
, Hordaland
Hordaland
is a county in Norway, bordering Sogn og Fjordane, Buskerud, Telemark and Rogaland. Hordaland is the third largest county after Akershus and Oslo by population. The county administration is located in Bergen...
, Sogn og Fjordane
Sogn og Fjordane
is a county in Norway, bordering Møre og Romsdal, Oppland, Buskerud, and Hordaland. The county administration is in the town of Hermansverk in Leikanger municipality while the largest town is Førde....
and Møre og Romsdal
Møre og Romsdal
is a county in the northernmost part of Western Norway. It borders the counties of Sør-Trøndelag, Oppland and Sogn og Fjordane. The county administration is located in Molde, while Ålesund is the largest city.-The name:...
, in addition to the western/northern parts of Oppland
Oppland
is a county in Norway, bordering Sør-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal, Sogn og Fjordane, Buskerud, Akershus, Oslo and Hedmark. The county administration is in Lillehammer. Oppland is, together with Hedmark, one of the only two landlocked counties of Norway....
, Buskerud
Buskerud
is a county in Norway, bordering Akershus, Oslo, Oppland, Sogn og Fjordane, Hordaland, Telemark, and Vestfold. The county administration is located in Drammen.-Geography:...
, Telemark
Telemark
is a county in Norway, bordering Vestfold, Buskerud, Hordaland, Rogaland and Aust-Agder. The county administration is in Skien. Until 1919 the county was known as Bratsberg amt.-Location:...
, Aust-
Aust-Agder
is a county in Norway, bordering Telemark, Rogaland, and Vest-Agder. In 2002, there were 102,945 inhabitants, which is 2.2% of the total population in Norway. Its area is . The administrative center of the county is in Arendal....
and Vest-Agder
Vest-Agder
In the 16th century, Dutch merchant vessels began to visit ports in southern Norway to purchase salmon and other goods. Soon thereafter the export of timber began, as oak from southern Norway was exceptionally well suited for shipbuilding...
, where an estimated 50% of the population writes Nynorsk. The usage in the rest of Norway, including the major cities and urban areas in the above stated areas, is scarce.
In Sogn og Fjordane county and the Sunnmøre area of Møre og Romsdal, all municipalities have stated Nynorsk as the official language (except Ålesund, which remains neutral). In Hordaland, all municipalities except three have declared Nynorsk as the official language. There is a vast majority of municipalities that has chosen a Neutral or Nynorsk stance over the Bokmål language form (It should be noted, however, that many of these are major urban areas where pupils are taught in Bokmål).
Ivar Aasen's work
The first systematic study of the Norwegian language was done by Ivar AasenIvar Aasen
Ivar Andreas Aasen was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright and poet.-Background:...
in the mid 19th century. In the 1840s he traveled the country and studied the dialects. In 1848 and 1850 he published the first Norwegian grammar and dictionary, respectively, which described a standard Aasen called Landsmål
Landsmål
Landsmål, meaning "language of the land/country", was the name Ivar Aasen gave the Norwegian orthography he created in the 19th century. In 1885 it was adopted as an official language in Norway alongside Danish. In 1929, Landsmål was renamed Nynorsk...
. New versions detailing the written standard were published in 1864 and 1873.
Aasen's work is based on the idea that the 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 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 Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
. 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
Einar Haugen
Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, author and Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University.-Biography:Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa to Norwegians from the town of Oppdal in Norway. When he was a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years,...
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
Modern Norwegian
Modern Norwegian is the Norwegian language that emerged after the Middle Norwegian transition period . The transition to Modern Norwegian is usually dated to 1525, or 1536, the year of the Protestant Reformation and the beginning of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway .The Norwegian linguistic term for...
, not Old Norse. Therefore he did not include grammatical categories which were extinct from the 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.
Conflict
Minority language
A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities.-International politics:...
s. This is especially prominent in school, which is the place most Bokmål-using Norwegians first and most extensively need to relate to the language.
Some critics of Nynorsk have been quite outspoken about their views. For instance, during the 2005 election, the Norwegian Young Conservatives
Norwegian Young Conservatives
Norwegian Young Conservatives is a Norwegian youth party. Its ideology is liberal conservatism, and the party is in many ways more liberal than its mother party, Conservative Party of Norway. Henrik Asheim succeeded Torbjørn Røe Isaksen as leader in 2008.- Leaders :...
made an advertisement that included a scene where a copy of the Nynorsk dictionary was burned. After strong reactions to this book burning
Book burning
Book burning, biblioclasm or libricide is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media. In modern times, other forms of media, such as phonograph records, video tapes, and CDs have also been ceremoniously burned, torched, or shredded...
, they chose not to show it.
Grammar
Nynorsk is a North-Germanic language, close in form to the other form of written Norwegian (namely, Bokmål), and Icelandic. It thus has North-Germanic grammatical forms, and Nynorsk grammar may be compared to Bokmål Norwegian, but one can note that it is closer in grammar to Old West Norse than Bokmål, which was influenced by Danish much more heavily than Nynorsk.Three genders
With the exception of the Bergen dialect, standard Nynorsk and dialects have three grammatical genderGrammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
s; masculine, feminine and neuter. In contrast, there are effectively two genders in Bokmål; common and neuter, and the few remaining feminine nouns are barely distinct.
Genders are inherent categories of noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s, and each gender has its own forms of inflection.
In Nynorsk these are important distinctions, in contrast to Bokmål, in which all feminine words may also become masculine and inflect using its forms, and indeed a feminine word may be seen in both forms, for example boka or boken (the book).
In Nynorsk (unlike Bokmål), masculine and feminine nouns are differentiated in the singular definitive form (in which the noun takes a suffix to indicate "the") and also in the plural forms (which they would not be in Bokmål), for example:
| Singular | Definitive singular | Plural | Definitive plural |
|---|---|---|---|
| masculine: | |||
| rev | reven | revar | revane |
| fox | the fox | foxes | the foxes |
| feminine: | |||
| løve | løva | løver | løvene |
| lion | the lion | lions | the lions |
| neutrum: | |||
| hus | huset | hus | husa |
| house | the house | houses | the houses |
This differentiation is expressed in distinctive ways in the dialects, for example reva/revan(e) and løve/løven(e), revær/revane and løver/løvene or rever/reva and løver/løvene.
Conjugation: adjectives and demonstrative pronouns
That which characterises a grammatical gender is though not nounNoun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
inflection, for each gender can have more inflectional forms. The gender determines the inflection of other words which conjugate or inflect with the noun. This concerns determiners and adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s. For example:
| Masculine example: | ein liten rev | min eigen rev | a small fox | my own fox |
| Feminine example: | ei lita løve | mi eiga løve | a small lion | my own lion |
Usage changes too from dialect to dialect, for example en liten rev, min egen rev men e lita løve, mi ega løve eller ein liten rev, min eigen rev men ei liti løve, mi eigi løve.
T as final sound
One of the past participle and the preterite verb ending in Bokmål is -et. Aasen originally included these t's in his Landsmål norms, but since these often are silent in the dialects, it was struck out in the first officially issued specification of Nynorsk of 1901.Examples may compare the Bokmål forms skrevet ('written', past participle) and hoppet ('jumped', both past tense and past participle), which in written Nynorsk are skrive or skrivi (Landsmål skrivet) and hoppa (Landsmål hoppat). The form hoppa is also permitted in Bokmål.
Other examples from other classes of words include the neuter singular form anna of annan ('different', with more meanings) which was spelled annat in Landsmål, and the neuter singular form ope of open ('open') which originally was spelled opet. Bokmål, in comparison, still retains these t's through the equivalent forms annet and åpent.
Word forms compared with Bokmål Norwegian
Many words in Nynorsk are similar to their equivalents in Bokmål, with differing form, for example:| Nynorsk | Bokmål | other dialectical forms | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| eg | jeg | e(g) , æ(g), æ(i) , (e)i , je(i) , jæ(i) | I |
| ikkje | ikke | ikkje , inte , ente, itt(e) | not |
The distinction between Bokmål and Nynorsk are that while Bokmål have for the most part derived their forms from the written Danish language or the common Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk has its orthographical standards from Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect" and are intended to represent the distinctive dialectical forms.
See also
- BokmålBokmålBokmål is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90% of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language....
- Norwegian language struggleNorwegian language struggleThe Norwegian language struggle is an ongoing controversy within Norwegian culture and politics related to spoken and written Norwegian. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Danish was the standard written language of Norway due to Danish rule...
External links
- Noregs Mållag Noregs MållagNoregs MållagNoregs Mållag is the main organisation for Norwegian Nynorsk , one of the two official written standards of the Norwegian language. In the Norwegian language struggle, it advocates the use of Nynorsk...
is the major organization promoting Nynorsk. - Norsk Målungdom Norsk MålungdomNorsk MålungdomNorsk Målungdom is an organization of youth working for the written language of neo-Norwegian and the Norwegian dialects...
is Noregs Mållag's youth organization. - Ivar Aasen-tunet The Ivar Aasen Centre is a national centre for documenting and experiencing the Nynorsk written culture, and the only museum in the country devoted to Ivar Aasen's life and work.
- Norsk programvareblogg computer programmes in Nynorsk.
- Sidemålsrapport – report (in BokmålBokmålBokmål is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90% of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language....
) on the state of Nynorsk and Bokmål in Norwegian secondary schools.