Re: Norwegian languages

* John Cowan said on 2002-08-30 19:38:28 +0200
> Roberto Suarez Soto scripsit:
>
> >         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:-)).
>
> Bokmal has a-with-ring, and it's "Nynorsk" ("New Norse").
>
> > What are their differences?
>
> Bokmal is basically Danish, but given a Norwegian pronunciation and
> with many borrowings from Norwegian dialects.  "Danish spoken in Swedish",
> as the joke has it.
Bokmål is semi-standardized into several different varieties (written and
spoken).

One resembles Danish even more and is called riksmål. It is used by the
conservatively inclined, people pretending to be conservative and a
visible minority of engineering-students at my university :) It has its
own dictionaries etc. Some consider it to sound learned, others think it
posh, and some other think it a proof of successful brainwashing :)

Then there's the variety learnt at school.

Furthermore, there's samnorsk (together-norsk), which is trying to be a
compromise between bokmål and nynorsk. Personally, I think it's butt ugly.

Finally there's raddis-mål (radical tongue) aka. a-mål (due to the endings
of definite feminine singular noun endings and past tense endings of a
particular class of verbs and a few more being -a) and a lot of other pet-
names, which is spoken by the young, the angry, the less-rich (aka. poor),
eastern Norwegians, quite a few of the intellectual, and the old-communists.
It is somewhere between school-bokmål and samnorsk in its word-choice and
grammar.

> Nynorsk is a fusion of those dialects, with many archaic features realtive
> to the other (continental) North Germanic languages.
As for nynorsk, it has it's own hyper-conservative variety in addition to
the school-learnt type.

Some argue that the dialect spoken in Bergen should be regarded as its own
language, since it is simply weird and Bergensians are weird, but that can
probably be said for quite a few of the other major dialects.

Personally, I think it'd be nice if we wrote Norwegian as if it was Norse,
which would lead the written language to resemble Færøysk.

Here's a light comparison of Norse, Icelandic, the two official Norwegians
and (whatever færøysk is called in English):

    http://vestnorden.no/norrontekst.html


t., who writes bokmål mixed with a-mål and considers riksmål pretentious

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