12 ms·

Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

152 points by cmbothwell 3y ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.
- larsiusprime 3y ago
  Most Norwegian you will encounter in such contexts is almost certainly Bokmål; a rule of thumb is that you are pretty unlikely to encounter Nynorsk unless you are actually in Norway itself, or consuming a lot of Norwegian media.
  - rvense 3y ago
    If you thought you understood Norwegian but then suddenly don't, it's Nynorsk.
- vidarh 3y ago
  You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article. 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.
  - Tor3 3y ago
    Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just enter the digits as they are spoken and not wait for the next word. In any case, as it's an original feature of Norwegian (Danish has its own variety of course.. with its own quirks) it's still fairly alive and well among a large patch of Norwegians.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection. I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time. The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve" * 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits * 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes) * 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform) (the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread) vs. "trettifem": * 2000-2024: 2587 * 1950-1999: 5728 * 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform) (You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)
      - Tor3 3y ago
        In writing, I totally agree - even though I will speak the reversed form often, I don't use that in writing. If I for some reason aren't writing the actual numbers (22) I will write "tjueto", not "to-og-tjue" even if that's what I would say. It's extremely rare to see reverse notation in writing.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Gmail will helpfully underline a third of my words as being wrong.
- perlgeek 3y ago
  My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. 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.
  - NorwegianDude 3y ago
    People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.
    - Sesse__ 3y ago
      There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.) Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
      - Tor3 3y ago
        As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.
- olavgg 3y ago
  Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school) 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.
mistrial9 3y ago
this energetic overview necessarily blurs a lot of distinctions when describing the changes in population and language over time. The Vikings (aka pirates) were a dominant form for a very long time, with care going to ferocity and travel skills, not fancy verb forms or leather bound books. It was literally larger and larger Feudal associations that led to merging into this kingdom or that kingdom, and not everyone was in great agreement. "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..
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I don't think you understand the extent of the variety of differences in spoken Norwegian. This is geographic in nature as most of the west coast is rock walls of varying height perpendicular to their emergence from the sea. This has led to isolated communities that continue to be isolated in various regards even to this day. 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!
vages 3y ago
Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: 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/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten
- vidarh 3y ago
  The numbers switch was slow, though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger. (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".)
  - semi-extrinsic 3y ago
    I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.
goblin89 3y ago
The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English. 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.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Nynorsk is not considered higher status other than maybe by tiny groups of its users.
  - goblin89 3y ago
    I know nothing about it except what is in the article, and the article characterizes Nynorsk as “cultural elite language”—it looks like the article is not accurate? That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…
    - vidarh 3y ago
      A small cultural elite within its own user base likes to thumb their nose at Bokmål, but the proportion of the population who uses Nynorsk is only 10%. The vast majority of the "cultural elite" of Norway as a whole uses Bokmål. There are perhaps some small subsets where it might punch above its weight relative to the total number of users, and I think that is what the article is hinting at. E.g. we have had perhaps more prominent authors who use Nynorsk than the proportion of Nynorsk users might have made you expect. But conversely, you'll if anything be more likely to find people with negative attitudes to Nynorsk, with at least some proportion of people who resent having to deal with a language only used by 10%.
ksimukka 3y ago
As a student of Bokmål (for immigration and integration), Nynorsk is an ongoing mystery to me. 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-prosesseringsvansker-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.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  Nynorsk isn't so bad once you get used to Bokmål. When I come across it in writing, it just seems like everything is spelled wrong. (am an immigrant as well) 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)
  - sundvor 3y ago
    I'm in my 50s now and emigrated, but as a Norwegian child growing up in Oslo/Fredrikstad (both bokmål districts) I absolutely loathed the forced Nynorsk classes in the 80s/early 90s. 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.
- bigpeopleareold 3y ago
  A fun and relevant challenge would be to read some works by Jon Fosse, who was the recent Nobel Prize winner. He writes in Nynorsk. It's just different at a reading level (writing it is different, since there are some different grammar rules with it.)
  - vintermann 3y ago
    For an easier challenge, there's the comic artist Jens K. Styve, who makes a newspaper comic ("Dunce") good enough that even the national newspapers didn't mind that it was in Nynorsk.
rob74 3y ago
> Already around 1830, shortly after Norway’s separation from Denmark, there grew an uncertainty as to what to call the language. Some preferred Danish, just as most American nationals called their language English. Others insisted on Norwegian, just as some Americans preferred American; this usage, however, caused sharp reactions from some Danish circles. 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.
yalok 3y ago
I learned Bokmål Norwegian through my Norwegian friends, and they spoke and wrote to me in it consistently, while some of their patients would use heavy dialect that I didn’t understand at first and was shocked how different it sounded. Hva for noe - sounded as “Ka fo noka” from her mom, shouting through the house, to inquire on something…
- Tor3 3y ago
  I think you meant "parents" not patients - I was a bit confused at first :-) 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.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    I'm from a dialect speaking part of Norway (Hallingdal), and my peers and I would speak like Oslo (so closer to bokmål) together. But they would always speak in dialect with teachers, their parents etc. My parents are foreigners, so I then never picked up on speaking the dialect myself. But it's still a shock to have a conversation with them, and how they suddenly switch when picking up the phone or whatever. Not entirely sure why they switch. Was it to "be cool" with friends? Or to suck it a bit up to authority figures?
finnjohnsen2 3y ago
Is this on my front page on HN because I'm Norwegian, or is it there for everyone?
- berkes 3y ago
  HN doesn't do personalized homepage feeds, does it?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  This reminds me of the old IRC password prank ****. :)
downsplat 3y ago
Such a tantalizing article... come on, where are the examples? It's like reading a description of a painting without being shown a picture! What are some of these vulgar urban words that the Riksmål elites didn't want their children to be taught? What are some of these rural dialectal words that were kept optional but fell out of even moderate Nynorsk? More than a few readers of a chapter-length history of the Norwegian language might have some familiarity with Scandinavian, and the rest of us can handle a few words in italics!
berkes 3y ago
> Danish pronunciation sounds extremely «blurred» in Norwegian (and Swedish) ears. 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."
- hurtigare 3y ago
  As a Swede I always thought you would relate to Danish more since both Danish and Dutch sounds "blurry" to us.
  - zilti 3y ago
    Does it? Now I wonder what Alemannic (Swiss-German, maybe especially the heavier dialects like Bernese and Walliserdeutsch) sound to you, because to my Bernese ears, Dutch sounds a lot closer to my own language than pretty much all other germanic languages.
- PringleBoy 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
TrackerFF 3y ago
Norwegian here. 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/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0ScDvQ.jpg https://gfx.nrk.no/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0Sc... ) EDIT: And if you travel far enough north-east, to Kirkenes, you will also find some Russian/Cyrillic signs
- vintermann 3y ago
  The reason Nynorsk isn't so widespread is because it's been under attack, for the obvious reasons and in the obvious ways you'd expect a lower prestige/more rural language to be under attack. It used to be the norm in a lot of places you might not have expected, such as most of Trøndelag (Olav Duun, anyone?). 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.
- Tor3 3y ago
  Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago. 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.
unixhero 3y ago
Nynorsk fucking sucks and ruined my future.
chaosprint 3y ago
I passed the A2 exam mostly by following this course: https://www.ntnu.edu/now/1/ken 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.
tamimio 3y ago
Languages are fascinating, I always try to learn few words in any language just for the fun of it and to see the sparkling eyes when I say these words in front of the native speakers, they appreciate that you learned some of their languages, except English, people get hostile if you don’t even speak the local accent.
jwr 3y ago
Which one should I support in my (automatically translated) SaaS?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vages 3y ago
  This is answered by the page. “Bokmål is dominant in the rest of the country, and is used in writing by close to 90 %”
- sburud 3y ago
  Neither. Almost all Norwegians understand English, and automated translations of single words without the surrounding context are so shitty it becomes hard to understand without mentally translating back to English. Edit to add: see also the "postcode file" post about Windows 11 from a few months back.
  - jwr 3y ago
    My automated translations do have context and aren't bad at all. Not perfect, but not crappy either.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

152 points by cmbothwell 3y ago

Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.

larsiusprime 3y ago
Most Norwegian you will encounter in such contexts is almost certainly Bokmål; a rule of thumb is that you are pretty unlikely to encounter Nynorsk unless you are actually in Norway itself, or consuming a lot of Norwegian media.
- rvense 3y ago
  If you thought you understood Norwegian but then suddenly don't, it's Nynorsk.
vidarh 3y ago
You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article. 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.
- Tor3 3y ago
  Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just enter the digits as they are spoken and not wait for the next word. In any case, as it's an original feature of Norwegian (Danish has its own variety of course.. with its own quirks) it's still fairly alive and well among a large patch of Norwegians.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection. I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time. The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve" * 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits * 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes) * 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform) (the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread) vs. "trettifem": * 2000-2024: 2587 * 1950-1999: 5728 * 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform) (You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)
    - Tor3 3y ago
      In writing, I totally agree - even though I will speak the reversed form often, I don't use that in writing. If I for some reason aren't writing the actual numbers (22) I will write "tjueto", not "to-og-tjue" even if that's what I would say. It's extremely rare to see reverse notation in writing.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Gmail will helpfully underline a third of my words as being wrong.
perlgeek 3y ago
My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. 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.
- NorwegianDude 3y ago
  People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.
  - Sesse__ 3y ago
    There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.) Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
    - Tor3 3y ago
      As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.
olavgg 3y ago
Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school) 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.

mistrial9 3y ago

this energetic overview necessarily blurs a lot of distinctions when describing the changes in population and language over time. The Vikings (aka pirates) were a dominant form for a very long time, with care going to ferocity and travel skills, not fancy verb forms or leather bound books. It was literally larger and larger Feudal associations that led to merging into this kingdom or that kingdom, and not everyone was in great agreement. "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..

williamcotton 3y ago
I don't think you understand the extent of the variety of differences in spoken Norwegian. This is geographic in nature as most of the west coast is rock walls of varying height perpendicular to their emergence from the sea. This has led to isolated communities that continue to be isolated in various regards even to this day. 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!

vages 3y ago

Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: 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/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten

vidarh 3y ago
The numbers switch was slow, though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger. (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".)
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.

goblin89 3y ago

The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English. 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.

vidarh 3y ago
Nynorsk is not considered higher status other than maybe by tiny groups of its users.
- goblin89 3y ago
  I know nothing about it except what is in the article, and the article characterizes Nynorsk as “cultural elite language”—it looks like the article is not accurate? That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…
  - vidarh 3y ago
    A small cultural elite within its own user base likes to thumb their nose at Bokmål, but the proportion of the population who uses Nynorsk is only 10%. The vast majority of the "cultural elite" of Norway as a whole uses Bokmål. There are perhaps some small subsets where it might punch above its weight relative to the total number of users, and I think that is what the article is hinting at. E.g. we have had perhaps more prominent authors who use Nynorsk than the proportion of Nynorsk users might have made you expect. But conversely, you'll if anything be more likely to find people with negative attitudes to Nynorsk, with at least some proportion of people who resent having to deal with a language only used by 10%.

ksimukka 3y ago

As a student of Bokmål (for immigration and integration), Nynorsk is an ongoing mystery to me. 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-prosesseringsvansker-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.

Broken_Hippo 3y ago
Nynorsk isn't so bad once you get used to Bokmål. When I come across it in writing, it just seems like everything is spelled wrong. (am an immigrant as well) 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)
- sundvor 3y ago
  I'm in my 50s now and emigrated, but as a Norwegian child growing up in Oslo/Fredrikstad (both bokmål districts) I absolutely loathed the forced Nynorsk classes in the 80s/early 90s. 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.
bigpeopleareold 3y ago
A fun and relevant challenge would be to read some works by Jon Fosse, who was the recent Nobel Prize winner. He writes in Nynorsk. It's just different at a reading level (writing it is different, since there are some different grammar rules with it.)
- vintermann 3y ago
  For an easier challenge, there's the comic artist Jens K. Styve, who makes a newspaper comic ("Dunce") good enough that even the national newspapers didn't mind that it was in Nynorsk.

rob74 3y ago

> Already around 1830, shortly after Norway’s separation from Denmark, there grew an uncertainty as to what to call the language. Some preferred Danish, just as most American nationals called their language English. Others insisted on Norwegian, just as some Americans preferred American; this usage, however, caused sharp reactions from some Danish circles. 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.

yalok 3y ago

I learned Bokmål Norwegian through my Norwegian friends, and they spoke and wrote to me in it consistently, while some of their patients would use heavy dialect that I didn’t understand at first and was shocked how different it sounded. Hva for noe - sounded as “Ka fo noka” from her mom, shouting through the house, to inquire on something…

Tor3 3y ago
I think you meant "parents" not patients - I was a bit confused at first :-) 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.
- matsemann 3y ago
  I'm from a dialect speaking part of Norway (Hallingdal), and my peers and I would speak like Oslo (so closer to bokmål) together. But they would always speak in dialect with teachers, their parents etc. My parents are foreigners, so I then never picked up on speaking the dialect myself. But it's still a shock to have a conversation with them, and how they suddenly switch when picking up the phone or whatever. Not entirely sure why they switch. Was it to "be cool" with friends? Or to suck it a bit up to authority figures?

finnjohnsen2 3y ago

Is this on my front page on HN because I'm Norwegian, or is it there for everyone?

berkes 3y ago
HN doesn't do personalized homepage feeds, does it?
actionfromafar 3y ago
This reminds me of the old IRC password prank ****. :)

downsplat 3y ago

Such a tantalizing article... come on, where are the examples? It's like reading a description of a painting without being shown a picture! What are some of these vulgar urban words that the Riksmål elites didn't want their children to be taught? What are some of these rural dialectal words that were kept optional but fell out of even moderate Nynorsk? More than a few readers of a chapter-length history of the Norwegian language might have some familiarity with Scandinavian, and the rest of us can handle a few words in italics!

berkes 3y ago

> Danish pronunciation sounds extremely «blurred» in Norwegian (and Swedish) ears. 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."

hurtigare 3y ago
As a Swede I always thought you would relate to Danish more since both Danish and Dutch sounds "blurry" to us.
- zilti 3y ago
  Does it? Now I wonder what Alemannic (Swiss-German, maybe especially the heavier dialects like Bernese and Walliserdeutsch) sound to you, because to my Bernese ears, Dutch sounds a lot closer to my own language than pretty much all other germanic languages.
PringleBoy 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

TrackerFF 3y ago

Norwegian here. 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/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0ScDvQ.jpg https://gfx.nrk.no/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0Sc... ) EDIT: And if you travel far enough north-east, to Kirkenes, you will also find some Russian/Cyrillic signs

vintermann 3y ago
The reason Nynorsk isn't so widespread is because it's been under attack, for the obvious reasons and in the obvious ways you'd expect a lower prestige/more rural language to be under attack. It used to be the norm in a lot of places you might not have expected, such as most of Trøndelag (Olav Duun, anyone?). 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.
Tor3 3y ago
Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago. 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.

unixhero 3y ago

Nynorsk fucking sucks and ruined my future.

chaosprint 3y ago

I passed the A2 exam mostly by following this course: https://www.ntnu.edu/now/1/ken 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.

tamimio 3y ago

Languages are fascinating, I always try to learn few words in any language just for the fun of it and to see the sparkling eyes when I say these words in front of the native speakers, they appreciate that you learned some of their languages, except English, people get hostile if you don’t even speak the local accent.

jwr 3y ago

Which one should I support in my (automatically translated) SaaS?

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vages 3y ago
This is answered by the page. “Bokmål is dominant in the rest of the country, and is used in writing by close to 90 %”
sburud 3y ago
Neither. Almost all Norwegians understand English, and automated translations of single words without the surrounding context are so shitty it becomes hard to understand without mentally translating back to English. Edit to add: see also the "postcode file" post about Windows 11 from a few months back.
- jwr 3y ago
  My automated translations do have context and aren't bad at all. Not perfect, but not crappy either.

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