Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee).
The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokmål. School textbooks would be rewritten with only the new grammar. Sometimes with comical results, as rhyming words in children’s would no lenger rhyme («Mons er pen./ Han er ren -> rein.»)
The attempt ultimately failed, and in 1972 Språknemda became Språkrådet (The language council), who maintain the official rules for written Norwegian and who published this article. Merging the two written languages was part of the council’s long term goals until 2002, when it was removed from its mandate.
What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism: When the phone number length increased from 5 to 6 digits, the number of wrongly dialed numbers increased along with it. Internal research at the bureau showed that people would make fewer errors when digits were consistently read from right to left.
Further reading (in Norwegian): - https://snl.no/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten
I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today.
But this reminds me of the fact that in Czech we have both counting systems as well. The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used informally as well (it also has a certain poetic quality).
Learning German was for me a revelation of how much influence German had on the Czech language. There are of course loanwords (mostly in the dying dialects), but there's also a less obvious structural influence.
My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen" - it has several meanings (physically put sth. forward, introduce, present, imagine). It turns out Czech has a fully native word (not a loanword) "představit" with an identical set of meanings and identical structure - "vor" is "před", "stellen" is "stavit". There are many words like that, and the counting system is likely another such "structural" influence.
I'm fully convinced that German is easier to learn for Czech speakers as opposed to English speakers, even though it's across language families. It's a language continuum after all ...
In Sweden we had the "du"-reform where we stopped referring to people either by their title or surname and the plural-you ("ni"). Instead we started using singular you ("du") and first name. This was started at a government agency and spread quickly through society.
There was actually a gender neutral pronoun introduced recently that is getting used more often. In addition to "han" and "hon" (he and she) we now have "hen". Depending on language situation it is actually very handy, and you can actually see it used in large newspapers or semi-official documents.
English also had the backward numbers, but they are only used poetically nowadays. [1] is a nursery rhyme. [2] says English switched in the 16th century. (Except 13-19, which are still backwards.)
English also used to count in twenties ("three score and five" = 65), like modern Danish ("femogtres") which is clearer if written in slightly old Danish "femogtresindstyve", "fem og tre-sinds-tyve" → "five and three-times-twenty".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
[2] https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/5009/what-is-the-...
What makes you think this is an example of an infuence of German over Czech, rather than a common verb construction mechanism across indo-european languages?
Russian (and probably other slavic languages) has представить, which is virtually the same but in cyrillic, French/English has introduire/introduce (from latin intro [into] and ducere [drive, lead]), etc.
"Present" also shares a similar etymology; from latin: prae (before) + esse (be), with a similar palette of meanings as the Germanic and Slavic forms
> I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today.
The thought is terrifying.
You will get a chuckle out of the film The President's Analyst.
(If anyone here wonders if this is the same "Samnorsk" as in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep": It is. For people who know Norwegian, Vinge's books have several Norwegian-inspired terms. E.g. "Nyjora" is "new earth".)
50 years is hardly "slow" on a scale of language reform.
The number-systems stem from at least proto-germanic languages, millenia of small changes.
Around high school I figured out that because of it, a shocking amount of Nynorsk grammar was secretly optional and the Bokmål version was very often valid Nynorsk.
So I started just writing my essays in Bokmål and then fixing the errors in post, so to speak. Initially my teacher tried to fail me for this, but she lost that battle.
I vehemently hate Nynorsk, or at least the fact that it's supposed to be "equal" to bokmål. It was a neat idea and all, but I honestly think it should only be seen as an archaic language used for poetry and literature. And only taught to students who want to delve deeper into that, not forced onto you starting in 8th grade.
Danish still use a somewhat complex infix system for reading numbers (five and half fours is 75), and I find that very confusing as a Swede who didn’t grow up with it.
75 femoghalvfjerds used to be spoken as femoghalffjerdsindstyve, fem og half-fjerd-sinds-tyve¹, five and half-fourth-times-twenty.
The longer form is still used for ordinal numbers. 75th is femoghalffjerdsindstyvende.
French speakers will also recognise this system for numbers 80-99. 85 is quatre-vingt-cinq, four-twenties-five.
¹ People not used to compound words, like English speakers, will appreciate me writing it like this.
It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs "<special word> and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a special word.
We should change 10, 20, 30, 40 to "etti, tvåti, treti, fyrti". It would be so much better!
Anecdotally, Japanese children learn to do arithmetic quicker than children from (e.g.) Sweden. But I've been unable to find real scientific confirmation of this.
Some languages have it much worse... I think Hindi is pretty irregular up to 100 .
Yet almost every single person I speak with every day here outside of people from the Oslo region say it the "two and forty" way.
Though, that probably still means most people say it the "forty two" way.
Reminds me of other countries: Austrians (I think) have settled on calling their language "German" (which it is, of course). In Moldova, the question of whether to call the language "Romanian" (supported by those who want closer ties to Romania) or "Moldavian" (supported by those who favor independence or closer ties to Russia) has become a pretty divisive issue.
I think that I'm still at the A level (A1/A2). My auditory processing disorder adds an extra variable that I'm still learning how to work with as an adult. If anyone (in Norway) knows of someone who has or is interested in APD (https://www.statped.no/horsel/andre-utfordringer/auditive-pr...), please reach out to me.
Anyways, always happy to see Norwegian related news in HN.
It won't be such a mystery forever - at least not for reading. I struggle with many of the dialects down there (but then again... I'm listening to folks around Trondheim and I know others think that dialect is weird, too)
It absolutely felt as a political box ticking exercise, and a complete waste of time - I readily observed that people were struggling enough with bokmål as it was.
Never had a single use for it after leaving school.
As for the dialects, 100% agree - they are very very different indeed.
Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know they have to keep it strong.
What makes it more interesting is that the non-phonetic, semi-ideographic nature of the writing system means no direct unambiguous translation between sound and written symbols—so that you may actually struggle to write down certain turns of spoken Cantonese, even if you are a native speaker!
Another difference is that, unlike Nynorsk (which began as “New Norwegian”), Cantonese is old—at least on par with or arguably older compared to languages used for writing in the same area.
I think what goes for "German" has even more internal differences.
I recommend "Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular" by Don Snow.
That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…
A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used.
People write Cantonese in private of course, but that usage is not uniform at all since there is a lot of slang (especially swearing words) for which more than one popular way to write it down exists. Quite often the characters chosen for that purpose had different meanings originally. Some particularly novel or distinctive words and idioms are even partly written in Latin letters, like 快-D.
Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.
> People write Cantonese in private of course
It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas!
> that usage is not uniform
Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn’t know offhand how they would even do it about a purely spoken turn of phrase.
Neither nynorsk or bokmål are spoken languages.
My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spoken language.
Nynorsk, or "New Norwegian", is really just used by a people on the south-western part of Norway. Other than that, it is merely a formality.
You'll have to take the obligatory classes in Jr. HS and HS, but that's it for most people.
A certain percentage of texts published by state agencies have to be in Nynorsk. The vast majority of Norwegians will never use it.
We also have two other languages used here - Sámi, which is the language of the Sámi people - the indigenous people in Norway, and Kven, which is used by Kven people. A Finnish dialect/language use by a small number of people in Northern Norway. That is why you can sometimes see three different signs when traveling up North (example: https://gfx.nrk.no/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0Sc... )
EDIT: And if you travel far enough north-east, to Kirkenes, you will also find some Russian/Cyrillic signs
I think it's a bit of a double standard to praise the Sami language and lament the fact that most Sami stopped speaking it to their children a couple of generations ago, and yet cheer on the death of Nynorsk.
As for Nynorsk - it was more common in the past. My mother had Nynorsk as main writing language, and she's from Senja (in the north). That wasn't really a bad choice. It's not entirely similar to how she spoke (but parts of it was), but then again Bokmål is also vastly different from how she spoke. It's compromises and problems whatever you do. For myself, when I write (I write bokmål) it's just a different language. I write completely differently from how I speak, both for vocabulary and to a certain extent grammar.
Nynorsk is a perfectly fine written language. After I came over my hatred for it (which was 100% caused by my teacher in middle school) I've learned to appreciate it for what it is. Whatever you say about Bokmål it isn't exactly poetic.
What happened to you is probably that your friends, for your sake, tried to "speak" Bokmål to you (Bokmål is a written, not normally spoken language), as in practice that's how you have to teach Norwegian to foreigners. You have to come up with something where the writing and the speech actually matches. Where my wife was taught they did it that way - a teacher explained to me that it was their only choice, even if it's awkward. And (as told to me by foreign co-workers who did that program) followed by a shock when they've learned "Norwegian" and find out that the people around them speak totally differently, with different grammar even!
So yes, I also spoke a kind of "bokmål"-rinsed Norwegian to my wife when we were just switching to speaking Norwegian. But now I don't. It was a bit weird (had to remember to change the word order now and then, in addition to vocabulary), but I got used to it. It's also a trap though, if you keep up "sanitizing" the language for too long the other party (the one who's learning Norwegian) will not learn enough real vocabulary and may way too long be unable to understand random old people from the district visiting town. Which is something you need to do if you're working in a shop, say.
Not entirely sure why they switch. Was it to "be cool" with friends? Or to suck it a bit up to authority figures?
https://www.ntnu.edu/now/1/ken
I think it's a better way to pick up some Norwegian (compared with existed Apps) if you are interested.
These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.
Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.
If I remember correctly from Norwegian classes growing up, Bokmål is heavily influenced by written Danish. Nynorsk was based on dialects people spoke outside of the bigger cities. Nynorsk however is more of an amalgamation of dialects, and can not be said to be spoken by anyone. Your estimation is in the neighborhood of native writers of Nynorsk I believe.
Probably they had that one Norwegian employee who struggled with it in school and came to hate it as a result (you'll find plenty of them in this thread).
But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then.
So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing.
What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.)
Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.
It does to Dutch ears too. Just a few weeks ago, I passed through some tourist-infested area in Amsterdam. "Are these Swedish tourists drunk at this hour in morning already? Oh, wait, they are sober Danes."
Edit to add: see also the "postcode file" post about Windows 11 from a few months back.
"The King has been baptised so all the citizens are now Christian" happened many times. Along with Christianity came fancy verb forms and leather bound books. It is not a complete story the way it is told in this article, which implies that one Kingdom turned into another one.. not tribal raiding groups merging for military protection, and bringing Christianity in for international political purposes.
"even today the spoken language in Norway can vary quite a lot" - well, "duh".. it is local groups maintaining their local identity..
The article here restates history from the modern view - everyone is in a Country, and that Country has such a language and writing. I stopped reading and wrote this when the discussion of the "dominant Latins" said some clumsy and misrepresentative thing. Latin (and French)_knowledge was not widespread at all.. so how is it "dominant" ? It is because of the international military trade and treaties that came with it.. local people may or may not have a lot to do with that.
source: Conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity , Masters thesis by some lowly grad student; various Wikipedia.. never got further North than Copenhagen..
Of the very little Norwegian that I speak, I do so in the Vestlandet dialect, meaning I would pronounce "I am going to church" (Nynorsk: "Eg skal i kyrkja", bokmal: "Jeg skal i kirken") as "eg", "skaw" "e" "kerken", whereas in Oslo they would say "yai" "skaw" "e" "shirken". And this doesn't cover Bergensk, whatever is going on in Stavanger, Haugesund, et al!
FWIW, my mother is from Austevoll, my American sister married someone from Austevoll and moved to Bergen and technically Norwegian was my first language, at least before the age of three.
I can barely understand anyone from Eastern Norway! It sounds like sing-songy Swedish to me. I can follow most of a conversation in the Vestlandet dialect. A few ($15 at the grocers) beers in and I'll even try to speak it myself!
There's an entire coastal dialect that runs up and down parts of the country where those people's dialect is closer to each other's than it is to their neighbors just a few miles inland.
At school we had an exchange student from Germany one year who quickly learnt to speak the local dialect, not too far from your rendition of Oslo dialect, but more -a endings, e.g. "kirka" rather than "kirken", but she struggled to understand me, because of those differences.
Those dialects are a 15 minute train ride apart.
People who grow up in Norway will understand multiple of these variants without necessarily being entirely aware of how different they can seem to foreigners, exacerbated by the fact we tone down the differences a lot in writing - in particular spoken Norwegian merges a lot of words. E.g. you can find people saying "skarru bli med?" ("are you coming?") while writing "skal du bli med?". But even those speaking forms of Norwegian close to conservative Bokmål like me will have pauses that are surprisingly short between some words - e.g. I have a gap between "bli" and "med" in my example sentence, but it's short enough that it's not a given it's clear for non-native speakers that I'm saying two words.
And despite the destigmatisation of dialect use in recent decades, a lot of the spoken Norwegian dialects that today deviate from both Nynorsk and Bokmål are rarely written down except in dialogue in novels, and even then it's politics - it's more common for more radical Norwegian writers to write dialogue in dialects (ironically, several of the most radical older Norwegian writers promoted Riksmål / conservative Bokmål - e.g. Arnulf Øverland was both a member of the communist Mot Dag - "Towards Dawn - and a president of the Riksmåls-association), making it even harder for foreign learners to get exposure to them during study.
To your issue of understanding people from Eastern Norway, in a reversal I still recall an embarrassing moment on holiday in Denmark as a child. I mostly understood spoken Danish (the article is polite and say they sound "blurred", while the old common joke is that Danish sounds like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth), but at one point some kid was trying to talk to me at the beach, and I apologised to him, telling him I didn't understand his Danish very well.
That afternoon I learned my mum had talked to his parents, and the family was Norwegian, from Bergen, and most certainly not speaking Danish. I wouldn't mistake those two today, but he spoke differently enough to me that as a child guessing he spoke Danish was not a big leap.
For the most part your comment is largely tangential to the article, where the rough sketch of older Norwegian history just sets the scene for why there was a growing conflict between spoken Norwegian and the imposed Danish written language, and the written language used by the church and the state were a large part of that - hence e.g the still extant but increasingly meaningless term "Riksmål" ("state/national language") used for conservative Bokmål.
I think you have that backwards. Old norse had more complex grammar. The grammar have simplified over time.
Icelandic still have more complex grammar than other Scandinavian languages because it have changed less.
