There are now two official Norwegian languages in use in Norway: Bokmål ("book language") and Nynoshk ("New Norwegian"). In addition, two more unofficial ones are used: Riksmol ("sovereign speech") and Hugnorks ("high Norwegian"). In addition, there are many local "vulgar" dialects. The majority of the population uses them in everyday life, not recognizing the official languages. A single Norwegian language has not yet been created. Although they tried. But first things first.
In the United Kingdom of Denmark and Norway, which existed from 1536 to 1814, Danish was the official language. The urban population spoke mainly Norwegian-Danish. It was slightly different from Danish. Danish words were spoken with a local accent. After the division of the union, Norwegian-Danish became the official language of the young Norwegian state. However, romantically minded Norwegian nationalists dreamed of their own language.
In the middle of the 19th century, a young self-taught linguist Ivar Aasen set about creating the proper Norwegian language. He traveled all over the country, compared the local dialects, studied Icelandic. As a result, in 1848 he introduced a new written language - "Landsmall" ("rural language"). The main feature of this language was that words from Danish and Lower German were excluded from it, as much as possible. They have been replaced by synonyms, supposedly inherited from the "Old Norse". In 1885, Landsmall was adopted as the official written language, along with the Norwegian version of Danish.
(Ivar Aasen)
At the same time, Knud Knudsen proposed to bring the spelling of Norwegian-Danish closer to the national pronunciation. For example, replace the letters "c" and "q" with "f". (Later, the letters "p", "t" and "k" were proposed to be replaced by "b", "d" and "d"). So a new written language was born, with the light hand of Björnstierne Björnson, called "Riksmol". In 1892, spelling reforms were officially enshrined in law.
(Knud Knudsen)
At the beginning of the 20th century, a heated debate arose between the supporters of "Landsmall" and "Riksmol". (In one form or another, the debate continues to this day.) It even came to fights. In 1929, the languages were officially renamed Rixmall to Bokmall and Landsmall to Nyunoshk.
As a result of the language reforms of 1917, 1938 and 1959, the languages were significantly converged. The reforms were aimed at uniting the two languages into a single Norwegian language - Samnorks. This was the policy of the Norwegian government. However, despite the support of the majority of the population (according to polls, 79 out of 100 Norwegians supported the idea in 1946) it failed. In the 1950s, the opponents of Samnorks were strongly opposed to the penetration of “radical forms” into school textbooks written in “Bokmål”. Starting from the 60s, the activity of creating samnorks gradually faded away and was officially terminated in 2002.
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