Bokmål

Bokmål (lit. "book language") is the most commonly used of two official written standards of Norwegian, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by around 85-90% of the population (regardless of spoken dialect) and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of Norwegian. Bokmål and Riksmål (see below) are based mostly on written Danish language and also adhere more closely to Eastern Norwegian, particularly the variants spoken around the capital of Oslo. The various dialects of Norwegian that are traditionally written using Bokmål orthography are the ones that have evolved away from Old Norse under the influence of Danish and Middle Saxon. In contrast, the west-coast dialects that are commonly written using Nynorsk, retain certain features typical of the older form of the language.

Previously, the official term for Bokmål was Riksmål. The latter name is still used for an unofficial writing standard and a few spoken dialects that are closer to Danish than Bokmål and today only a minority of the population will feel familiar with Riksmål. While Riksmål gradually developed from Danish after 1814, when the close union with Denmark was dissolved and Norway regained national independence in a loose personal union with Sweden, Bokmål was an invention by the Parliament and by parliamentary subcommittees. First the name Bokmål was coined by an act in 1929 and up to 1938 it was attempted used as a name for Riksmål. Bokmål as we know it today was shaped by additional acts of Parliament in 1938 and 1958, with subsequent acts in the 1980s and in 2005.

After the Reformation in 1537 Norwegian as a written language gradually disappeared, as Danish was the language of administration and education. The Bible was printed in Danish, as were all other books, and Danish was preached and sung in the churches. This had the effect that officials and educated people spoke Danish with a Norwegian phonology and intonation and some native words. Common people spoke Norwegian dialects, which evolved in different directions, more or less influenced by the Dano-Norwegian spoken by the upper classes. All books were written in Danish until Nynorsk was introduced and practiced by a number of authors during the late 19th century. The official written majority language was Danish until the language reforms of 1907 and 1917 transformed it into the distinctly Norwegian Riksmål, corresponding closely to the spoken language of educated people in the towns of southeastern Norway. The official name was changed from Riksmål to Bokmål in 1929. In 1938, another reform introduced many features from dialects, intended to bring about a rapprochement between the two written languages. These efforts were widely resisted by the adherents of Riksmål, causing heated strife, until the policy of linguistic merger was abandoned in the 1960s.

Neither Bokmål nor Nynorsk may be considered natural human languages in its own right; they are better described as artificial written standards at the disposal of the various dialects comprising one language – the Norwegian language. A few people, however, persist in calling Bokmål and Nynorsk separate languages, often for the sake of language genealogy: the former is considered an East North Germanic language (like Danish and Swedish), the latter a West North Germanic language (like Faroese and Icelandic). Few people speak either form literally, but some dialects are closer to Bokmål than to Nynorsk or vice versa. For dialects that are equally close to both written standards or differ significantly from both, the choice of orthography may be a political decision by the municipalities, or self-determined by parents in primary and secondary schools where the municipalities teach both, or self-determined by students in tertiary school, colleges and universities.

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Forskrift om målvedtak i kommunar og fylkeskommunar - Legal document in Norwegian listing which counties and municipalities have declared their official written standard to be specifically Bokmål, Nynorsk or undeclared. (Note that six municipalities have declared Northern Sami co-official in addition with Norwegian).

Norwegian language

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Bokmål

See also

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