Five Million Voices

The Norwegian language - even after five years - is still an enigma to me. I've always been aware that languages have dialects, just as the American version of English has its own varying dialects; the Minnesotan near-Canadian sound; the various dialects of the southern states; and of course, the ever-so-famous Bostonian and New York dialects.

The languages and dialects in Norway, however, exist due to special circumstances over the past several hundred years. Norway's language began as the Viking language, or Old Norse. Danish and Swedish rule of Norway heavily influenced Norwegian for nearly 500 years from the early 1300s through the early 1800s, and for the latter half of that period, Danish was the official language. Then, as Norway gained its independence in 1814, the country was faced with somewhat of a dilema as to what it was to do with the official language; continue to speak Danish, "Norwegianize" the Danish language, or actually create an entirely new language based on the various dialects, including the old ones that survived in rural and secluded areas. They put the latter two ideas into practice, and it is still being debated today.

(Naturally, during my first year here I could not discern the difference between Norwegain, Swedish and Danish. I could walk into a room filled with all three, and could not tell you who was whom . . . incidentally, SAS employs citizens of all three countries, and I will never understand how they manage to understand one another. Anyhow, I can now tell you with ease where a Scandinavian is from, and even in rare cases, the part of their country they come from. On a side note, I am rather glad that Norway decided to distance itself from the Danish dialect - no offense to those of you that are Danish, but it is an awful sound to my ears. It seems as if it's a drunk German attempting to speak Norwegian.)

The main icons responsible for language reform were Ivar Aasen and Knut Knudsen, driven to create Norway's two official languages - what in the early days was known as landsmål and riksmål, now known as nynorsk (New Norwegian) and bokmål (book language). They were made as the dual official languages in 1929, with a hope that the two would drift towards a blend commonly known as samnorsk. The cities, towns and other things that had held Danish names for so long reverted to their original Norwegian names; Oslo previously had become Christiania, and now returned back to Oslo once again.

In spite of all the attempts to combine the two, the country is split between the two, as many prefer dialect rather than bokmål, as you will especially find in the western coast of the country, and now throughout radio and tv - it seems as if nynorsk is gaining ground. In fact, there are many proponents that even created websites saying, "Speak your dialect and write New Norwegian!", as you will see in the following website's example: Snakk dialect - skriv nynorsk!

Tim