12 The Linguist Vol/62 No/4
thelinguist.uberflip.com
What form of Norwegian should we teach, asks James
Puchowski as he examines the diversity of the language
Many readers will be familiar with the fact
that Norwegian has two written standards –
Bokmål and Nynorsk – and I should stress
that they are only written. The reality on the
ground in Norway is that dialect use is
mainstream and part of everyday life; there is
no one standard spoken form of Norwegian.
So as I teach the language to university
students in the UK, the question I ask myself
is 'what sort of Norwegian am I actually
teaching?' It is, perhaps, a question language
teachers should ask more often in relation to
the specific variations of their own languages.
That said, as a relatively new nation-state,
Norway's situation is unique. Historically it is
sparsely populated, its villages and coastal
towns separated by mountain ranges and
vast fjords – a fertile environment for
significant dialectal heterogeneity. Gaining
autonomy in 1814 after being part of
Denmark for over 250 years, it was able to
establish its own national institutions and
adopt a constitution. A constitution, mind,
that was written in Danish.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are, for
the most part, mutually intelligible languages
that exist along a dialect continuum. For
educated Norwegians, it was relatively simple
to write in Danish and speak their local
Norwegian dialect with family and members
of their community. As soon as the country
gained autonomy, debates began between
scholars, politicians, authors and poets,
resulting in a collective desire for a
distinctively Norwegian orthography. The
question was how it was to be done.
The standards we have today reflect two
general lines of thought in this national
conversation. Bokmål is effectively a
'Norwegianisation' of the written Danish of
TEACHING VARIETY
the time. Nynorsk took a more radical shift.
Starting from scratch, it represents dialects
spoken outside the main urban centres and
an attempt to link the language back to the
older Norwegian and Old Norse features that
were lost while Norway was part of Denmark.
Today, everyone has the legal right to use
either form to do their exams, receive written
materials at school, and correspond with
public bodies, including the government.
Nynorsk, having never gained much traction
in Norway's cities, is the standard used by a
minority of the population (around 15%), living
mainly in rural central and western Norway.
Since a law of 1878 (Undervisningen i
Almueskolen bør saavidt mulig meddeles paa
Børnenes eget Talemaal), teachers have been
forbidden from preventing pupils from
speaking their local dialect. Teaching in state
schools should be done as much as possible
