{"id":2040,"date":"2015-03-15T19:45:30","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T19:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/?p=2040"},"modified":"2015-03-15T19:45:30","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T19:45:30","slug":"norwegians-speak-dialects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/norwegians-speak-dialects\/","title":{"rendered":"Norwegians Speak Dialects"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"7023108951_481541f37c_z\"<\/a>

Fish village. (Photo by This Pilgrim’s Progress at Flickr<\/a>, CC License.)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201dI don\u2019t understand people who speak Nynorsk Norwegian, why can\u2019t they just switch to Bokm\u00e5l Norwegian?\u201d<\/em> Now and then, readers ask such things. I\u2019ve written about the nynorsk<\/b>\/bokm\u00e5l<\/b> split before. Of course, it may still be confusing for new learners of Norwegian. So, I\u2019d like to set the record straight as simply as I can:<\/p>\n

Norwegians speak <\/i>Norwegian dialects. They write <\/i>Bokm\u00e5l Norwegian or Nynorsk Norwegian.<\/p>\n

In other words, nobody really \u201dspeaks\u201d Nynorsk or Bokm\u00e5l! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

They\u2019re just two different ways of putting down what Norwegians say and think in writing. Think about someone from Yorkshire who\u2019s speaking a traditional Yorkshire dialect of English. When writing an e-mail, she\u2019ll probably write it in Standard English. The same thing happens in Norway, except that everybody<\/i> speaks a dialect and has two choose between two<\/i> \u201dStandard Norwegians\u201d when firing off that e-mail!<\/p>\n

Admitted, some Norwegian dialects \u2013 especially in Bergen and in the Oslo area \u2013 are very<\/i> close to written bokm\u00e5l<\/b>, so some people will say that they do \u201dspeak Bokm\u00e5l\u201d, even if that is not entirely accurate. And some nyhetsopplesere<\/b> (news presenters) and skuespillere<\/b> (actors) do \u201dspeak Nynorsk\u201d in their jobs \u2013 but switch to dialect when they get back home. (Just like people at the BBC maybe don\u2019t speak BBC English with their families\u2026)<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve shown you before, Bokm\u00e5l and Nynorsk are quite close to each other \u2013 after all, they both represent Norwegian! (Just think about how Americans write color<\/i> while Britons write colour<\/i>.) The differences boil down to a handful of token words such as jeg<\/b> vs. eg<\/b> for \u2019I\u2019, as well as some variations in vowels and inflections:<\/p>\n

Bokm\u00e5l:<\/i> Jeg liker ikke eplebiter i gr\u00f8ten. <\/b>(I don\u2019t like pieces of apple in the [my] porridge.)<\/p>\n

Nynorsk:<\/i> <\/i>Eg liker ikkje eplebitar i grauten.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Every Norwegian has to learn both ways of writing in school. 8 % of the people enrolled in the Norwegian army in 2014 said nynorsk<\/b> was their main m\u00e5lform<\/b> (\u201dlanguage variety\u201d), so bokm\u00e5l <\/b>is clearly dominant. Still, many people speak a dialect that\u2019s closer to nynorsk<\/b>. To\u00a0these people, bokm\u00e5l<\/b> feels a bit foreign, while nynorsk <\/b>feels a bit closer to the heart. In social media such as Facebook, many Norwegians avoid the \u201dlanguage conflict\u201d entirely, trying to write in their local dialect instead!<\/p>\n

Many Norwegian kommuner<\/b> (municipalities, \u201dtownships\u201d) have chosen an official m\u00e5lform<\/b>, while some are \u201dneutral\u201d. This map should tell you why many people associate nynorsk<\/b> with Vestlandet <\/b>(Western Norway):<\/p>\n

\"Red<\/a>

Red = bokm\u00e5l; blue = nynorsk; grey = neutral. (Image from Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, CC License.)<\/p><\/div>\n

Why are there two \u201dStandard Norwegians\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1814, Norway left a political union with Denmark (only to enter a new union with Sweden). For four centuries, Norway had been ruled by Danish kings. Old Norwegian (which was almost identical to Icelandic) had died out as a written language, and people were writing their documents in Danish instead. The hunt for a new Norwegian writing system began\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2022 Knud Knudsen wanted to write Norwegian as spoken (by the upper clases) in cities like Oslo, where the dialects had been most exposed to Danish. This led to the (gradual) creation of bokm\u00e5l<\/b>. (And now you know why Danish looks so similar to Norwegian!)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ivar Aasen wanted to write Norwegian as spoken (by farmers, fishermen\u2026) in the rural districts. He travelled around in the countryside, collecting words and expressions from many dialects who had been less influenced by Danish. From this cocktail he created nynorsk.<\/b><\/p>\n

Got it? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

\u201dI don\u2019t understand people who speak Nynorsk Norwegian, why can\u2019t they just switch to Bokm\u00e5l Norwegian?\u201d Now and then, readers ask such things. I\u2019ve written about the nynorsk\/bokm\u00e5l split before. Of course, it may still be confusing for new learners of Norwegian. So, I\u2019d like to set the record straight as simply as I can…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":2042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[269727,11652,8214,4904,10178,274066,274067,362421,8215,8705],"class_list":["post-2040","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language","tag-269727","tag-bergen","tag-bokmal","tag-danish","tag-dialects","tag-ivar-aasen","tag-knud-knudsen","tag-malform","tag-nynorsk","tag-oslo"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2043,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040\/revisions\/2043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/norwegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}