Why does Norway have two names?
The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Jon Fosse, who writes in Nynorsk, one of the two official standards of Norwegian. The following article tries to explain the peculiar linguistic situation in that country.
Why does Norway have two names?
I don’t know if any of my readers have ever had the pleasure of going to Norway. I haven’t — and I’d love to! I’ve never been there, but I like to imagine the journey… Off we go on these European roads until we finally reach the border between Sweden and Norway.
When you get there, you see a sign without our familiar twelve stars (Norway is not part of the European Union) and with two names for the country…
It’s true that everyone notices what interests them. With Norway’s breathtaking landscapes, perhaps few will focus on a piece of metal. But those who like to know what languages societies use will certainly be intrigued by this plaque… Norway, in Norwegian, appears to be “Norge” — or “Noreg”! So they haven’t decided how to name the country?
What’s going on here? Why two names? Are there two languages?
Norway does have more languages (remember Sámi languages), but the sign is only in Norwegian. It’s just that it’s in both official versions of Norwegian…
A bit of history
To understand the peculiar situation, we have to go back to the 19th century. Norway was united with Denmark for over 400 years. The union ended in 1814 — and right after the divorce, Norway immediately married Sweden. It only decided to live on its own in 1905.
In 1814, when Norway broke away from a 400-year-old union, there was no official Norwegian language used by the state. The language used by the Crown and the elites was Danish. In a city like Oslo, those who wrote and argued in cafés spoke Danish with some Norwegian features.
If we moved away from the cities and travelled around the country, we would hear different ways of speaking, all descended from Old Norse (the language of the Viking people). It should be noted that Danish is also descended from Old Norse — in fact, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish (in all their variants) are very closely related languages.
But let’s continue the story.
With Norway separated from Denmark, it was natural for Norwegians to think about a Norwegian language. In the capital, Danish spoken in a Norwegian manner became the standard. Basically, the urban population was happy to call Norwegian to their Norwegian Danish. They got their own language without changing much.
We were, however, in the days of Romanticism and the idealisation of popular speech and customs. This idealisation went hand in hand with the nationalism that was sweeping across Europe: a new country shouldn’t have a standard so similar to the language of the nation it had freed itself from.
There were those who wanted to drink from the purest Norwegian dialects (the notion of linguistic purity is a very 19th-century notion) and create a new Norwegian language. Ivar Aasen, a Norwegian philologist, was the central figure in this process of creating a standard based on Norwegian dialects and not on Danish as spoken in Norway.
As a result, two standards for writing Norwegian were created: one based on the uses of the capital, very close to Danish; the other closer to the forms used in regions of Norway far from the capital. The two standards have gone through various phases and names, but today they are known as bokmål (the standard close to Danish and the most widely used) and nynorsk, created on the basis of Ivar Aasen’s study of Norwegian dialects.
This binormativity is inscribed in our own computers. If you open Microsoft Word and try to change the language of the text, you’ll find “Norwegian (bokmål)” and “Norwegian (nynorsk)” in the list of languages.
What differences are there between the two versions of Norwegian? Let’s use the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to get a rough idea of the degree of distance:
Bokmål: Alle mennesker er født frie og med samme menneskeverd og menneskerettigheter. De er utstyrt med fornuft og samvittighet og bør handle mot hverandre i brorskapets ånd.
Nynorsk: Alle menneske er fødde til fridom og med same menneskeverd og menneskerettar. Dei har fått fornuft og samvit og skal leve med kvarandre som brør.
This comparison has its dangers, because even using the same standard, two different translators would translate differently. But it stands as an example.
The plot thickens…
So every Norwegian chooses the language they speak? Not really: every Norwegian speaks the way they learnt in their region — it’s in writing that these two standards are most noticeable.
If we want to imagine a similar situation in Britain, let’s think of this hypothetical scenario: each Briton speaks as they learnt in their hometown, with a certain accent, some of their own vocabulary and typical constructions. Then, when they write, they have to choose: either they use a standard based on Southern English or they use a standard based on elements collected in various regions of the North of England. The comparison seems a bit forced because the Norwegian situation is, in fact, a peculiar situation, to say the least.
Throughout the 20th century, the Norwegian government tried to bring the two standards closer together with the ultimate aim of creating a unified Norwegian standard. This single standard would be called samnorsk. Thus, in a series of reforms promoted by the state throughout the 20th century, bokmål moved closer to nynorsk and nynorsk moved closer to bokmål.
The result? Some advocates of bokmål rejected the approach and switched to a standard even closer to Danish than bokmål: it’s called riksmål and has its own academy.
On the nynorsk side, there were also those who refused the reforms and switched to høgnorsk, a traditionalist version of nynorsk.
This leaves us with four versions of Norwegian:
- bokmål (official), close to Danish
- riksmål, used by several newspapers and even closer to Danish
- nynork (official), further from Danish
- høgnorsk, used by some defenders of nynorsk
But why didn’t some Norwegians accept these gradual changes?
The emotions that the use of our language provokes are difficult for outsiders to understand.
To help understand the problem, let’s go back to the alternative reality in which Britain also has two official language standards. There’s one standard based on London usage and another based on Northern usage. Now let’s imagine that the government decides to bring the two standards closer together. The Northern standard would include constructions such as “us cars” (instead of “our cars”). Let’s imagine that, in this endeavour to merge both standards, the government decided that the form “us cars” should be used in the whole country (the choice would always be random, as is the case of many language interventions). I can’t imagine how people would react (“they are going to teach ‘us cars’ in school??”)…
One language, two standards
In short, the good intentions didn’t work. Reforms aimed at unifying two linguistic standards ended up creating even more standards. This top-down approach to language is always dangerous… The government gave up and, from the 1980s onwards, tried to contain the damage. Norwegian has two standards and that’s it. The two standards are, in fact, regulated by the same institution: the Språkrådet. As a remnant of the conflict, there is yet another academy that regulates riksmål (which is now practically indistinguishable from bokmål).
In practice, each municipality decides on the form it prefers to communicate with the state, each school decides which standard to apply in the early years and, throughout their education, all students learn the two official standards. A large majority of Norwegians write in bokmål, but nynorsk is well protected and defended. Almost all newspapers are written in bokmål (or its more conservative version, riksmål), but there are some local newspapers and books published in nynorsk. The books by the new Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, are written in nynorsk.
So we’ve arrived at the situation where the name of the country itself exists in two flavours, as we saw on the sign that greets us on arrival in Norway. “Norge” is the name in bokmål and “Noreg” is the name in nynorsk.
Notes
A very complete description of the case can be found in the article “Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk”. Interestingly, the article was first published in Portuguese (in a version that is not accessible online), in the book Quem fala a minha lingua, vol. 2, published by Através, a Galician publishing house specialising in language issues. And while we’re on the subject of Galicia, it should be noted that some Galicians have advocated a Norwegian-style solution for Galician (called “binormativismo”). There would be two official standards in Galicia: Galician, which is the official standard today, and Galician with forms and spelling closer to Portuguese. José Ramom Pichel wrote a recent article on the issue, which mentions other articles in the Galician discussion about the Norwegian-style solution.
Another reading suggestion: in 2017, Gaston Dorren published an opinion piece presenting a solution to unify the two standards of Norwegian. The English version is here. If you like these issues, I suggest you read the book Lingo, by the same author. It’s one of those books I can’t recommend enough!
