Re: Norwegian languages

Roberto Suarez Soto writes:
 > On Aug/27/2002, BP Jonsson wrote:
 >
 > > I know about the situation.  A little like Bohuslän, where I come from,
 > > which used to be part of Norway until the 17. century.  For some reason
 > > people there don't know/aren't interested in the fact tho.  My father used
 > > to say that standard Norwegian and standard Swedish suit our dialect
 > > equally bad, which is perhaps part of the explanation.
 >
 >         There's something that I've always wondered about: IIRC,
 > there're two norwegian official languages, bokmal and nyorsk (though I
 > don't know if they're spelled right like this O:-)). What are their
 > differences? I'm sure that spoken they are quite different, but swedish
 > and danish look very similar to me, and I suppose that bokmal and nyorsk
 > can't be so much different from them :-)
 >
 > --

I don't speak either, even a little bit, so I'll leave a discription
of the features to our Scandinavian representatives.  But here's what
Campbell has to say on the matter in _Concise Compendium of the
World's Languages_:

[note: å is aring, which probably won't show correctly when this is
transmitted]

|From the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century Norway was part of
|Denmark, and Danish was the written, and, at least as far as the
|educated and urbanized classes were concerned, the spoken language of
|the country.  With the end of Danish hegemony in the nineteenth
|century, nationalistic demands began to make themselves heard for
|'pure' or 'rural' Norwegian, harking bace via the many dialects to the
|Old Norse of the Middle Ages, in preference to the alien, though
|genetically very closely related, Danish.  Groups of intellectuals
|explored the potentialities of various dialects in search of the basis
|for a _landsmål_ or popular speech, to replace the Danish form of the
|_riksmål_ or state language.  Here, a crucial part was played by Ivar
|Aasen, whose grammar, based on the very conservative West coastal
|dialects, appeared in 1864, to be followed by a dictionary in 1873.
|Of course, a Doric, however pure linguistically, was bound to have an
|uphill struggle against the social prestige and the economic use-value
|of the Dano-Norwegian _riksmål_, and it took the rest of the century
|for a somewhat artificial construct like _landsmål_ to emerge as a
|serious contender.  The Nynorsk, 'New Norwegian', that took shape from
|Aasen's pioneer work, received officeal sanction in 1884, and by 1892
|individual schools were empowered to choose it as as language of
|instruction, in preference to Standard Norwegian.  In 1907, an
|orthographical reform changed the Dano-Norwegian intervocalic voiced
|plosives _b_, _d_, _g_ to their unvoiced counterparts _p_, _t_, _k_,
|thus falling otno line with actuol Norwegian pronunciation.  A furthur
|reform in 1917 brought mare sectors of _riksmål_ - or _bokmål_ as it
|was by then known - into line with _landsmål_ usage.  In 1938-9 an
|attempt was made to create a new unified form - _samnorsk_.  This
|never got off the ground.
|
|Today, both Standard Norwegian and Nynorsk are the joint official
|tongues of Norway.  Theoretically, they have equal status, and are
|used at all levels and in all walks of life.  In practice, however,
|Standard Norwegian remains very much in the ascendent.  Only about 16
|or 17 per cent of Norwegians - resident mainly on the coastal fringe
|and in the central mountains - actually speak Nynorsk as a mother
|tongue, and this percentage is reflected in Nynorsk's share of the
|media.  The urban population remains solidly committed to Standard
|Norwegian, the leading language of administration, business, and the
|media.