Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
sprakradet.no

But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then.

So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing.

What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.)

Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.

For the most part your comment is largely tangential to the article, where the rough sketch of older Norwegian history just sets the scene for why there was a growing conflict between spoken Norwegian and the imposed Danish written language, and the written language used by the church and the state were a large part of that - hence e.g the still extant but increasingly meaningless term "Riksmål" ("state/national language") used for conservative Bokmål.

At school we had an exchange student from Germany one year who quickly learnt to speak the local dialect, not too far from your rendition of Oslo dialect, but more -a endings, e.g. "kirka" rather than "kirken", but she struggled to understand me, because of those differences.

Those dialects are a 15 minute train ride apart.

People who grow up in Norway will understand multiple of these variants without necessarily being entirely aware of how different they can seem to foreigners, exacerbated by the fact we tone down the differences a lot in writing - in particular spoken Norwegian merges a lot of words. E.g. you can find people saying "skarru bli med?" ("are you coming?") while writing "skal du bli med?". But even those speaking forms of Norwegian close to conservative Bokmål like me will have pauses that are surprisingly short between some words - e.g. I have a gap between "bli" and "med" in my example sentence, but it's short enough that it's not a given it's clear for non-native speakers that I'm saying two words.

And despite the destigmatisation of dialect use in recent decades, a lot of the spoken Norwegian dialects that today deviate from both Nynorsk and Bokmål are rarely written down except in dialogue in novels, and even then it's politics - it's more common for more radical Norwegian writers to write dialogue in dialects (ironically, several of the most radical older Norwegian writers promoted Riksmål / conservative Bokmål - e.g. Arnulf Øverland was both a member of the communist Mot Dag - "Towards Dawn - and a president of the Riksmåls-association), making it even harder for foreign learners to get exposure to them during study.

To your issue of understanding people from Eastern Norway, in a reversal I still recall an embarrassing moment on holiday in Denmark as a child. I mostly understood spoken Danish (the article is polite and say they sound "blurred", while the old common joke is that Danish sounds like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth), but at one point some kid was trying to talk to me at the beach, and I apologised to him, telling him I didn't understand his Danish very well.

That afternoon I learned my mum had talked to his parents, and the family was Norwegian, from Bergen, and most certainly not speaking Danish. I wouldn't mistake those two today, but he spoke differently enough to me that as a child guessing he spoke Danish was not a big leap.