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Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

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Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#91

Post by matsemann »

Tor3 wrote: post #47
yalok wrote: post #35

I learned Bokmål Norwegian through my Norwegian friends, and they spoke and wrote to me in it consistently, while some of their patients would use heavy dialect that I didn’t understand at first and was shocked how different it sounded. Hva for noe - sounded as “Ka fo noka” from her mom, shouting through the house, to inquire on something…

I think you meant "parents" not patients - I was a bit confused at first :-) What happened to you is probably that your friends, for your sake, tried to "speak" Bokmål to you (Bokmål is a written, not normally spoken language), as in practice that's how you have to teach Norwegian to foreigners. You have to come up with something where the writing and the speech actually matches. Where my wife was taught they did it…

I'm from a dialect speaking part of Norway (Hallingdal), and my peers and I would speak like Oslo (so closer to bokmål) together. But they would always speak in dialect with teachers, their parents etc. My parents are foreigners, so I then never picked up on speaking the dialect myself. But it's still a shock to have a conversation with them, and how they suddenly switch when picking up the phone or whatever.

Not entirely sure why they switch. Was it to "be cool" with friends? Or to suck it a bit up to authority figures?

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#92

Post by vintermann »

TrackerFF wrote: post #82

Norwegian here. Nynorsk, or "New Norwegian", is really just used by a people on the south-western part of Norway. Other than that, it is merely a formality. You'll have to take the obligatory classes in Jr. HS and HS, but that's it for most people. A certain percentage of texts published by state agencies have to be in Nynorsk. The vast majority of Norwegians will never use it. We also have two other languages used h…

The reason Nynorsk isn't so widespread is because it's been under attack, for the obvious reasons and in the obvious ways you'd expect a lower prestige/more rural language to be under attack. It used to be the norm in a lot of places you might not have expected, such as most of Trøndelag (Olav Duun, anyone?).

I think it's a bit of a double standard to praise the Sami language and lament the fact that most Sami stopped speaking it to their children a couple of generations ago, and yet cheer on the death of Nynorsk.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#93

Post by perlgeek »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #32
perlgeek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.

People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.

Well, as a foreigner, if you want to learn "the language", you have to start with something.

Since the majority speak some dialect of bokmål, and most courses teach it, that's what you end up with.

I watch some series in Norwegian, e.g. Ragnarok. I understood most of it, though some of the dialects were kinda hard to understand.

But it seems a moot point, basically nobody in any language speaks the "high" language, but some kind of dialect version of it.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#94

Post by vintermann »

matsemann wrote: post #59
goblin89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct? My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spo…

I think you're misunderstanding a bit. Those are both written languages only, but some may speak closer to one than the other. My speaking would be pretty close to bokmål, as I have "no" dialect. Nynorsk is a mix of lots of various spoken dialects. No one really "speaks" nynorsk, but for many it's closer to how they speak than bokmål would be, but it's still not 1:1 for them. The only way you really would "speak" nyn…

> as I have "no" dialect.

That almost certainly means "a moderate Oslo dialect, neither Stovner or Frogner", and it's probably not nearly as close to written Bokmål as you think (unless you learned Norwegian as a second language).

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#95

Post by vidarh »

Tor3 wrote: post #41
vidarh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article. But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conserva…

Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just…

Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection.

I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time.

The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve"

* 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits

* 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes)

* 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform)

(the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread)

vs. "trettifem":

* 2000-2024: 2587

* 1950-1999: 5728

* 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform)

(You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#96

Post by vintermann »

sfn42 wrote: post #65
goblin89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct? My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spo…

Nynorsk was an attempt at creating a written language closer to the spoken language. The problem is that in Norway out dialects are widely different. For example, the phrase "I am" is written as "Jeg er" in bokmål, "Eg er" in nynorsk. Nobody says "Jeg" - it can be pronounced as "Jei", "Eg", "Æ", or even "Oss" though that's a different word that some dialects use in place of the "correct" one.

But that word is the first example that you don't actually pronounce bokmål the way it's written: Yes, some say "Ye" and some say "Eeg", but no one pronounces it "Yeeg" except maybe foreigners reading from a text.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#97

Post by vidarh »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #19
vidarh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers switch was slow , though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger. (If anyone here wo…

I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.

I mean, there are many other vestigial pieces that will hang in there for a very long time, but see elsewhere - I searched the National Library, and you're absolutely right that it's still around to a limited extent, but the decline in written use at least has been fairly steep.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#98

Post by Tor3 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #82

Norwegian here. Nynorsk, or "New Norwegian", is really just used by a people on the south-western part of Norway. Other than that, it is merely a formality. You'll have to take the obligatory classes in Jr. HS and HS, but that's it for most people. A certain percentage of texts published by state agencies have to be in Nynorsk. The vast majority of Norwegians will never use it. We also have two other languages used h…

Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago.

As for Nynorsk - it was more common in the past. My mother had Nynorsk as main writing language, and she's from Senja (in the north). That wasn't really a bad choice. It's not entirely similar to how she spoke (but parts of it was), but then again Bokmål is also vastly different from how she spoke. It's compromises and problems whatever you do. For myself, when I write (I write bokmål) it's just a different language. I write completely differently from how I speak, both for vocabulary and to a certain extent grammar.

Nynorsk is a perfectly fine written language. After I came over my hatred for it (which was 100% caused by my teacher in middle school) I've learned to appreciate it for what it is. Whatever you say about Bokmål it isn't exactly poetic.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#99

Post by toretore »

vintermann wrote: post #94
matsemann wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding a bit. Those are both written languages only, but some may speak closer to one than the other. My speaking would be pretty close to bokmål, as I have "no" dialect. Nynorsk is a mix of lots of various spoken dialects. No one really "speaks" nynorsk, but for many it's closer to how they speak than bokmål would be, but it's still not 1:1 for them. The only way you really would "speak" nyn…

> as I have "no" dialect. That almost certainly means "a moderate Oslo dialect, neither Stovner or Frogner", and it's probably not nearly as close to written Bokmål as you think (unless you learned Norwegian as a second language).

Thank you for correcting a pet peeve of mine: People thinking they "speak Bokmål". Everyone speaks a dialect.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#100

Post by vintermann »

perlgeek wrote: post #28
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #2

Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.

My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.

Oh, they have many languages with smaller text corpora than Nynorsk, and they're not exploiting language similarity very well.

Probably they had that one Norwegian employee who struggled with it in school and came to hate it as a result (you'll find plenty of them in this thread).

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