# Norwegian dialects



## Orione60

Is it reliable the assertion according to which in Norway every municipality has its own dialect?
It’d mean there’re something like about 400 dialects, given that there are sometimes different dialects within a municipality, is it possible to hypothesize the existence of about 450/500 dialects/subdialects/fonological variety in this country?

Thanks


----------



## j0nas

That's totally a matter of definition. 

The number could range from 5 to 500, according to how narrowly you want to define things.


----------



## Orione60

Yes, i Know, usually there're 5 main dialects, but as I explained above, if one counts all the possibile varieties, also including dialects which differ only for accent/prosody reasons, one could reach up to 500?


----------



## tennet

I'm afraid this is an impossible question to answer, because the division of dialects in Norway is rather arbitrary. There are no absolute dialect borders, but rather a continuum from town to town. Even within a municipality there can be small phonetic and grammatical differences. So the number of dialects will depend on what linguistic criteria are used in the classification. See the Wikipedia article on "norwegian dialects".


----------



## j0nas

Orione60 said:


> if one counts all the possibile varieties, also including dialects which differ only for accent/prosody reasons, one could reach up to 500?



I grabbed that number out of thin air.


----------



## Dan2

Orione60 said:


> Yes, i Know, usually there're 5 main dialects, but as I explained above, if one counts all the possibile varieties, also including dialects which differ only for accent/prosody reasons, one could reach up to 500?


If one includes all possible variations, it could reach 5 million, the population of Norway.  No matter what your language, if you are at a gathering of friends and family members, you can close your eyes and still know who is speaking, from which it follows that each individual has linguistic characteristics that distinguish him from other people.  Where the difference between two speakers goes from "differences within a dialect" to "two different dialects" is an arbitrary call.

I think that what tennet wrote in the previous post with respect to Norway and Norwegian is exactly correct for countries and languages in general.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Dan2 said:


> If one includes all possible variations, it could reach 5 million, the population of Norway. No matter what your language, if you are at a gathering of friends and family members, you can close your eyes and still know who is speaking, from which it follows that each individual has linguistic characteristics that distinguish him from other people. Where the difference between two speakers goes from "differences within a dialect" to "two different dialects" is an arbitrary call.
> 
> I think that what tennet wrote in the previous post with respect to Norway and Norwegian is exactly correct for countries and languages in general.


 I think that Norway is a bit different from many other countries, as there is no standard spoken language. Everybody is free to speek his/her own personal dialect, and many make use of this opportunity.


----------



## Dan2

There are really three separate issues that have been touched on in this thread:

1. Is there a principled definition that allows one to say whether speakers A and B are speaking different varieties of the same dialect or different dialects?  I and others have said "no".  This is a general statement, not a statement about Norway.

2. None of our statements about the definition of "dialect" is inconsistent with a claim such as, "there is much more dialectal variation among the 5 million residents of Norway than among the 5 million residents of the US state of Colorado."  The latter is unarguably true.  Norway is a very dialectically diverse place.

3.





Ben Jamin said:


> I think that Norway is a bit different from many other countries, as there is no standard spoken language. Everybody is free to speek his/her own personal dialect, and many make use of this opportunity.


If there's no standard spoken language, _everyone_ would have to do so!

Re "there is no standard spoken language": Since I'm not Norwegian I can't answer the question, only state the issue.  The US is known for having relatively _little_ dialectal variation, yet even in the US, when you listen to professional speakers on television news and discussion programs, there are dialectal differences an American can clearly hear.  So one could say that in the US (or Germany or Italy or Spain) "there is no standard spoken language".   Similarly, I don't doubt that there are differences among the Bokmål announcers on NRK and between them and educated speakers in Oslo.  I don't know how this compares to the situation in the US.  I just wonder (I don't know) if it's really fair to say "there is no standard spoken language" in Norway but there _is_ in the US, Germany, etc.

(Maybe Europeans are not aware of this: If you said to an American from South Carolina or Georgia or Texas, "you sound different from people from New York and Chicago; why don't you try to talk more like them?", they would reply with annoyance, "I'm proud of the way I speak; I have no interest in sounding like them."  So while the situation may be more extreme in Norway, I (again) wonder if it's as black-and-white as "countries like the US _do_ have a standard spoken language" but Norway does _not_.)


----------



## kirsitn

Dan2 said:


> So while the situation may be more extreme in Norway, I (again) wonder if it's as black-and-white as "countries like the US _do_ have a standard spoken language" but Norway does _not_.)



I don't think the situation in the US is that different from the situation in Norway, except that English dictionaries probably indicate the pronunciation for each word, whereas Norwegian dictionaries don't. The difference between Norway and Germany is however much larger. In Germany the standard pronunciation is used instead of regional dialects in many situations, and that would never happen in Norway.


----------



## oskhen

Dan2 said:


> I just wonder (I don't know) if it's really fair to say "there is no standard spoken language" in Norway but there _is_ in the US, Germany, etc.



Perhaps not in the US, but I'm quite sure there is a "standard spoken language" in Germany, for instance. They learn it in school.


----------



## Dan2

I suspect we're reaching the point where if I continue to ask questions about this topic, I will only annoy people, rather than elicit  information, so I'll try to wrap it up.

People have claimed:
1. There is no standard spoken language in Norway.
2. There *is *a standard spoken language, but nobody (outside radio/TV/govt) speaks it.
3. There *is *a standard spoken language, I'm from Oslo, and *I *pretty much speak it.

Here's an outsider's perspective.  I've looked at a lot of material for learning Norwegian, in libraries, on the internet, etc., and all the written descriptions of Norwegian pronunciation for learners, and all the audio samples, are very consistent, i.e., there seems to be a standard.  I've listened to NRK broadcasts, and altho at my stage I miss more than I understand, I do hear words and phrases that are very similar to those in the learning material.  So I think we clearly have to reject #1 above.

#2 and #3 seem to contradict each other, but: a) maybe the "nobody" of #2 is not meant literally, like when one says of a clothing fashion, "oh, nobody wears that anymore", when in fact it's gone from 90% to 30%.  And b) as I've tried to say before, most people in _most _countries don't talk exactly "like they talk on radio/TV".  What I've been asking for is "calibration": if you compare NRK or a "Learn Norwegian" CD  to an educated Oslo resident, is the difference significantly greater than that between the BBC and an educated Londoner, or Deutsche Welle and an educated Berliner?

Maybe the answer is, "OK, those differences are similar and not that great, but those of us not from the Oslo area don't talk that way, and _no one expects us to_; that's different from other countries."  Fine, that would be the kind of answer I was looking for.

kirsitn: "In Germany the standard pronunciation is used instead of regional dialects in many situations, and that would never happen in Norway."
oshken: "I'm quite sure there is a "standard spoken language" in Germany, for instance. They learn it in school."

These last two comments are very useful.  I would summarize: both Germany and Norway have a lot of dialectal variation; both Germans and Norwegians like to use their local dialects among family and friends; but when two Germans whose dialects are very different meet, they tend to fall back on the standard Hochdeutsch they were taught in school, whereas in Norway, no standard spoken language _is taught in school_, so two Norwegians will tend to just use their respective dialects with each other.

Thanks for your patience.  Are we getting closer to something we can all agree on?


----------



## kirsitn

Dan2 said:


> People have claimed:
> 1. There is no standard spoken language in Norway.
> 2. There *is *a standard spoken language, but nobody (outside radio/TV/govt) speaks it.
> 3. There *is *a standard spoken language, I'm from Oslo, and *I *pretty much speak it.
> 
> Here's an outsider's perspective.  I've looked at a lot of material for learning Norwegian, in libraries, on the internet, etc., and all the written descriptions of Norwegian pronunciation for learners, and all the audio samples, are very consistent, i.e., there seems to be a standard.  I've listened to NRK broadcasts, and altho at my stage I miss more than I understand, I do hear words and phrases that are very similar to those in the learning material.  So I think we clearly have to reject #1 above.



Officially there is no standard for spoken Norwegian, just two standard written versions. But obviously you need to have some kind of pronunciation guide for foreigners learning the language, and that is usually based on the Oslo dialect. Foreigners living in Norway are however usually taught the dialect that is used where they live and not the Oslo dialect (unless they live in or around Oslo, of course.) Similarly most of the news readers in NRK use a kind of standardized version of either bokmål (Oslo dialect) or nynorsk (Sogn og Fjordane/Møre og Romsdal dialect), but I doubt that they speak like that when they're not on TV.


----------



## Cerb

This might be a slight digression, but how the newsreaders should speak has been the subject of some debate lately. To be precise this pertains to the NRK (The Norwegian Broadcasting Company) as it's a government-owned public service broadcaster. Their guidelines state that nationwide broadcasts should be in either bokmål or nynorsk, but their new rules do open for more use of dialects. Historically, presenters have adjusted to meet these requirement, but I think we'll see less of this from now on. In fact we already do. 

As for bokmål as a "standard spoken language" there are some elements that add to the confusion. First of all there's the term "standard østnorsk" used to describe a dialect to learners. This is also tied to an at least historical political interest and bias towards bokmål as spoken in Oslo and the surrounding areas which this term is meant to describe. 

The idea of this dialect as a dialect at all is actually not that old and awkwardly enough, people from Oslo may even describe the way they speak as not having a dialect. The wiki page on "standard østnorsk" boldly enough claims it as a "not officially recognised standard way of speaking (talemål)", perhaps betraying that some people try to keep that political/lingual struggle alive.. Of course, this goes even further back with Denmark and Norway, union, Oslo as a powerbase for the heads of state and so on.

It is a fact however that a very large amount of people in Norway speak something very close, or even identical for the purpose of dialects, to the bokmål newsreaders use. It's not the standard however. It's just about where written bokmål originated and of course is used.


----------



## oskhen

For what it's worth, I think Cerb's and Kirsitn's last comments describe the Norwegian situation very well. 

Meaning, again, that there is no "official spoken language" in Norway. The written languages will, however, very easily be common points of reference. To illustrate: A while ago a friend of mine told me that when he talked with people not sharing his dialect, he changed his choice of words a bit so that he should be easier to understand. This kind of change will in most cases obviously make one's speech closer to bokmål (or nynorsk), since that what everyone understands (should understand, at least, in the case of nynorsk).


----------



## Ben Jamin

The situation of spoken language in Norway is different in comparison to most other countries in that respect that speaking in public (giving a university lecture, political speech, TV-interview, etc) using a language with clear non metropolitan traits gives the speaker a higher status then speaking the "standardized educated Oslo language (SEOL)" . The use of the latter is regarded either as snobbish, or at least "rootless", that is having no connection to any "real" part of the country. 

The other trait is that no standard spoken language is taught at schools, and the teachers never correct the pupils pronunciation or (spoken) grammar.

Foreign students have a real problem if they decide to follow a syllabus not in the English but in the Norwegian language, and having learned the SEOL they get served a lecture in for instance in Kristiansand or Stavanger dialect.


----------



## Dan2

Altho I didn't start this thead, I did ask a lot of questions, and I wanted to thank everyone who contributed.  I think I understand the situation better now.


----------



## ladymarinii3

j0nas said:


> I grabbed that number out of thin air.


You could potentially reach 5 mio because any person has their own "language" - it is basically a matter how stringent you define it. Example: a person may grow up in one area and may move on to another area and that way be influenced by 2 different dialelects and that way be entirely unqiue dialect.


----------



## Orione60

My question may be reformulated in this way: I wonder if the phonological variations in Norway are so much, that people is living in a municipality / town is able to identify another one, as belonging to another municipality / town, and this for every municipalities / city. For this reason I spoke of about 400/450 subdialects or phonological varieties.


----------



## Cerb

Trying to find a ball park number is likely to be guess work even by that definition. While one subdialect or dialect for each municipality might fit in some places, it won't for Norway as a whole. 

Even with all the points raised here you're right in that the local variation is huge however. As for myself sociolects blur the lines a bit around Oslo, but I don't have to travel far outside to detect some variation.


----------



## louisjanus

Also back to Norwegian dialects, have you heard the samples here:
Nordanvinden og sola: Norske dialekter på kartet

<Moderator note: posts edited, new topic moved to Measuring distances...>


----------



## DeadMule

Orione60 said:


> I wonder if the phonological variations in Norway are so much, that people is living in a municipality / town is able to identify another one, as belonging to another municipality / town, and this for every municipalities / city.


Short answer: Yes!
But the size/definition of "municipality" would be a bit different depending on the region.


----------



## Alxmrphi

<post moved from here>



> First: "Nynorsk dialect" doesn't really make sense, since nynorsk is a written language.


Please forgive my complete and utter ignorance, but if nynorsk is a written language, then what's Bokmål? Is that another written language? If nynorsk is the written language then what's the spoken language? Norway and its variations of languages have always confused me (well I haven't really aimed to find out about my doubts until now), but now that Scandinavian languages are beginning to interest me a lot more I suppose it's about time I found out!


----------



## TomTrussel

Norwegian has no official spoken standard, but 2 official written standards, nynorsk and bokmål. As I see it, Bokmål is based on old Riksmål, which in turn was Danish if a bit old fashioned, while nynorsk was "manufactured" based on the spoken Norwegian dialects, and when in doubt, went with what sounded less Danish. Both languages have "softened up" towards each other over the years since nynorsk was introduced. I guess you can connect Danish with Icelandic like this; Danish <200 years of separation> Bokmål <-> Nynorsk <(800 years of separation)> Icelandic 

TT


----------



## NorwegianNYC

TT - spot on! I am a linguist, and I write and endorse both forms of Norwegian. And - sadly - I often hear the old story about Bokmål being Danish, and that Nynorsk is a more genuine language. Which is simply not true! In 1814, at the break-up of the union, written Norwegian and Danish was pretty much the same thing. However, neither Danish nor Norwegian is like that anymore (people for some reason think Danish of 1814 is the same as Danish of 2011), as both languages have evolved. Spoken Norwegian has always been closer to Swedish, even at the time when people wrote Danish. Moreover, Bokmål Norwegian of 2011 is distinct from both Danish and Swedish - especially based on the two features: a THREE gender-system and postpositioned possessive ("bilen min").

The uncomfortable truth about Nynorsk (and I feel you pointed this out so well in "manufactured") is that Ivar Aasen - himself a genius - created a written form of Norwegian based on a handful of selected dialects. Ivar Aasen did not include the entire country as he felt many dialects were too "polluted", but only the most old-fashioned dialects, and ironically, often dialects with few native speaker. If Aasen HAD included Eastern and Southern dialects in his work, I think there is a good chance we would all write Nynorsk today.


----------



## Donnerstag

Just one small tidbit about the development of Norwegian:

I once had the pleasure of visiting the Fornbréfasafn (library of old nordic letters) in Snorrastofa in Reykholt, Iceland. Geir Waage, who is both the director of the library as well as the priest of the Reykholt parish, showed us old Norwegian letters which were written before the Black Plague. What was particularly striking to us, was that they were written almost exactly like Icelandic - in a way which none of us had any problems understanding.

After the arrival of the Plague, 60% of the population of Norway died, priests (which were the educated class at the time) were imported from Denmark, and it is in this time that the language changed massively. Grammar was simplified; the case system was lost, verb conjugation greatly simplified, vowel reduction, the letters þ and ð disappeared, etc.

And then Geir showed us Norwegian letters written just 80-100 years after the Plague arrived in Norway. The language used was extremely different and would have been unintelligible to us if we hadn't studied Danish in school.


----------



## Alxmrphi

Svartidauðinn hefur haft mikil tungumálaáhrifin víðsvegar! (The Black Death has had a lot of linguistic linguistic consequences all over the place!)


----------



## NorwegianNYC

You have to remember that a language changes all the time. The scribes and clergy BEFORE the Plague did almost all the writing, and they wrote in a conservative language - not because people spoke that way, and after 1349 suddenly started to speak differently, but because they were TRAINED to write in a conservative language. A Norwegian of 1300 did probably not speak Old Norse anymore, and already at that time, Norwegian and Icelandic had started to move apart. Norway was more exposed to Scandinavian and continental influx than Iceland, but the written language of sagas and poetry in Norway had remained the same for centuries already. This means that Norwegian scribes and scholars must, around 1300, have authored their pieces in an outdated language, but this language was prestigious simply because is was old-sounding.

There are many examples of this happening. Latin was used as the language of science and diplomacy long after the last (pure) Latin speaker was gone. English still spells 'light' with a gh-sound that has not been pronounced since the days of Elizabeth I. Tibetan has a spelling and orthography that is so different from pronunciation and what people say it is almost impossible for outsiders to learn the language. Old English faced the same problems as Old Norse. After the Norman invasion the court language switched to Norman French, and nothing was written in Old English anymore. A hundred years later, the French had become the enemy, and the scholars and clergy switched back to writing in English, but a very different English from before the invasion. Not because the language had changed that much, but because the knowledge on how to write in Old English (which had remained more or less the same since Alfred the Great) was gone, and they had to establish a new standard


----------



## Alxmrphi

> After the Norman invasion the court language switched to Norman French,  and nothing was written in Old English anymore. A hundred years later,  the French had become the enemy, and the scholars and clergy switched  back to writing in English, but a very different English from before the  invasion. Not because the language had changed that much, but because  the knowledge on how to write in Old English (which had remained more or  less the same since Alfred the Great) was gone, and they had to  establish a new standard


Exactly.

Many times you read about people's bewilderment between how OE could have turned into ME in just a small period of time, but as many linguists have pointed out, you have a tradition of writing in a certain way, things get passed on. After French arrived and took over, these teachings were lost so when English made it back onto the page, the previous archaic traditions were non-existent, they wrote more like they spoke. Of course there was also massive massive changes, but this difference in the written document is eccentuated by the fact that pre-Norman England had archaic traditions in the ways of documenting language on paper.

We're lucky to have access to the Peterborough Chronicle for even a glimpse into more real changes, since this was the last set of documentation in Old English before the new period kicked in, and those traditions were kept to an extent, but even so you can see edition by edition the language slowly coming closer to that of the modern age. I know this thread is about Norway and its dialects, but I just wanted to back up the point showing that what happened in Norway's situation wasn't unique. I don't mean to drive the theme anywhere off-topic, just adding in relevant background information on a parallel issue.


----------



## Donnerstag

NorwegianNYC said:


> You have to remember that a language changes all the time. The scribes and clergy BEFORE the Plague did almost all the writing, and they wrote in a conservative language - not because people spoke that way, and after 1349 suddenly started to speak differently, but because they were TRAINED to write in a conservative language. A Norwegian of 1300 did probably not speak Old Norse anymore, and already at that time, Norwegian and Icelandic had started to move apart. Norway was more exposed to Scandinavian and continental influx than Iceland, but the written language of sagas and poetry in Norway had remained the same for centuries already. This means that Norwegian scribes and scholars must, around 1300, have authored their pieces in an outdated language, but this language was prestigious simply because is was old-sounding.



Languages do indeed change all the time, but the rate of change is variable. Icelandic for example has barely changed at all for the past 1000 years. If you discount the influx of new words - which relate to things and ideas which didn't exist 1000 years ago - and slang, the language is essentially the same. The grammatical structure and the basic vocabulary is almost identical. An Icelander can read a 1000 year old Old Norse text without any prior study; in fact every student has to read several sagas in "gymnasium" in Iceland and no prior knowledge of Old Norse is expected.

I am not a linguist, but based on everything I've read and heard, the language spoken in Iceland and Norway was mutually intelligible (and very similar) before the Black Plague. For example, Icelandic documents which detail the accession of Iceland to the Kingdom of Norway under Hakon IV in 1262, and then the renewment of the accession agreement in 1302 indicate that the people of both countries spoke the same language. There are numerous other Icelandic sources as well. Then, after the arrival of the Black Plague in Norway, the languages became mutually unintelligible in the span of only one generation.


----------



## Alxmrphi

Yeah, as Donnerstag has mentioned before, usually around 1400 it is said that they'd become considerably unintelligible (and the Black Death was not too much earlier so seems to correspond). But when you do look at the changes, I wouldn't say there were not considerable (of course compared to the same time-scale with any other language it's a tiny amount) but things that had changed were various ranges of brottfall (deletion), hljóðvörp (umlauts), klofning (breaking). All the nasal vowels fell away in unstressed syllables and shortened many words, as you can see in hlewagastir->hlégastr->gestr->gestur. Then i-mutation and u-mutation mixed a lot of the vowels around and the fracturing process changed the appearance of many words (erilar->jarl, erþu->jörð, you can see here the former ones look so much alike to the English cognates _earl_ and _earth_). After the Quality Shift (hljóðdvalarbreytingin) the sound system went from having two diphthongs to five and other various monophthongs changed. 

I suppose a lot of that doesn't have a huge visual impact on looking at old sagas, but I couldn't resist throwing in the input because it's something I've been studying over te last few months  The only other structural changes that come to mind right now is the verb group of some vowels (i.e. hjálpa) moving over to a weak pattern from a strong pattern (same thing happened with 'help' in English), then the pronominal system went through a bit of a shake-up, losing the plural pronouns and using the dual in place of the pronoun (after 100 years of up and down inconsistencies in the written record around 1500), reserving plurals as an honorific. Then the -ði -> -di shift happened in some weak verbs, slightly changing their form. Besides that, a few minor letter changes (ek->eg) are all I can remember about how it has shifted. The conjugations have changed in their form over the centuries, but I think this might be predating when we're talking about (i.e. vit kallaðim -> við kölluðum). The adjective declensions haven't really changed as far as I'm aware, I know that in the weak declension of plural datives there used to me an -m following the -u, but it dropped out to conform with the rest of the weak -u sounds in the plural declension.

But, having said all that, the language of Shakespeare, from only 500 years ago, is vastly more different to us by comparison. Meanings have shifted for us massively, the sound system, we still hadn't completely got rid of our SOV word order and we had the singular/plural distinction in pronouns etc. So in essence, putting it on comparisons with other languages it's fair to say it hasn't really changed. But when you see the changes written in books, that talk in detail about them, you sort of get the impression you were fooled a little bit by the way everyone always claims it hasn't really changed at all over time.

I didn't know that the changes in Norwegian however were due to a different language coming into play. I thought that the dialects around had never been officially standardised because of another reason, but if the language imported was considerably different, I guess it sort of resets the timer so-to-speak, that a language and situation would need to have gained a certain grounding before it moves on to develop into its own language. The First Grammarian managed to show (and I've seen this argued for English as well) that by the time he was around, Danish, Norwgian, Icelandic and English could still have been mutually intelligible, and there's some interesting evidence of this, which pushes forward the date that these all became completely different languages. It's a hotly debated point, but there are interesting points being made about it. I wonder if I can find the source that talks about it with relation to Norwegian.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Nynorsk is a constructed language made up of a portion of West Norwegian dialects, deemed to be pure enough from Danish admixtures, and extrapolated forms of Old Norwegian. The language is extremely puristic (similar to Icelandic) and subject to strict regulation of accepted forms. No form resembling Danish or German is allowed. It could shortly be described as "anti Danish".


----------



## Alxmrphi

Ben Jamin said:


> Nynorsk is a constructed language made up of a portion of West Norwegian dialects, deemed to be pure enough from Danish admixtures, and extrapolated forms of Old Norwegian. The language is extremely puristic (similar to Icelandic) and subject to strict regulation of accepted forms. No form resembling Danish or German is allowed. It could shortly be described as "anti Danish".


That's interesting!
So it really is an attempt to move away from Danish linguistic influence, hence the further west / north you go, the naturally further away the dialects would be.
So do new words get invented that have been traditionally used in Danish (I mean Danish-inflluenced Norwegian languages here, like Bokmal)? Like the way Icelandic coins new words to remain more pure of foreign loanwords?

If a new word had been used in Danish, and therefore Bokmal, then in Nynorsk would a new term be found (even if it was common in most European languages)?
Or just anything that seemed to have the German/Danish feel to it?


----------



## NorwegianNYC

Ben Jamin is correct in that Nynorsk is a constructed (some will argue reconstructed) language. Also, the mastermind behind nynorsk, Ivar Aasen - a self-taught linguistic genius - did select a handful of dialects for this purpose. The dialects he considered "pure" (some Western, a few Eastern, and the rest from the inland and mountain valleys) became the basis for the written norm. The problem is, and has always been in the case of nynorsk, that the dialects selected only had a limited number of native speaker. For a Norwegian speaking a different dialect, the choice was between writing Dano-Norwegian or this new construct. Ivar Aasen was a visionary, but his problem was that he was a purist. If more - twice or three times as many - dialects were included in this new written norm, it is overwhelmingly possible that Norwegian would have elected nynorsk as its only written standard.

Icelandic, and to some extent Swedish, were more conservative languages, and instead of just importing a word, they created _calques_ (direct translations) instead. Norwegian never had a habit of doing so until the 1950s, and then ironically only related to words that had came from English (I say ironically because English is a fairly closely related language, whereas French is more distantly related, but French words are not altered the same way). Evidence for this is clear in any conversation you have with a Norwegian (also people who write nynorsk). 40-45% of the Norwegian vocabulary today came from German/Plattdeutsch/Dutch, and these words started arriving as early as the mid 13th Century. It is impossible in Norway today to conduct any7 kind of trading, commerce, administrastion, employment and professions without using German/Plattdeutsch/Dutch words.

Nynorsk have been 'better' at finding and substituting foreign words with old Norwegian words, but when a word has been in the language 6-700 years, people are not going to stop using them, since they are as much Norwegian by now as any other word


----------



## Ben Jamin

Alxmrphi said:


> That's interesting!
> So it really is an attempt to move away from Danish linguistic influence, hence the further west / north you go, the naturally further away the dialects would be.
> So do new words get invented that have been traditionally used in Danish (I mean Danish-inflluenced Norwegian languages here, like Bokmal)? Like the way Icelandic coins new words to remain more pure of foreign loanwords?
> 
> If a new word had been used in Danish, and therefore Bokmal, then in Nynorsk would a new term be found (even if it was common in most European languages)?
> Or just anything that seemed to have the German/Danish feel to it?


Yes, you are right. The idea was to "dedanificate" the language. This is best seen in the prohibition against all words beginning with prefixes "be- and  an-" (German via Danish), and formant endings like "-ed (from German -heit and -else (pure Danish, related to English -lth in health or stealth)". New words were invented to substitute the forbidden words, but as NorwegianNYC has remarked, it was impossible to turn back to the Norse roots in 100%, and Nynorsk contains a good deal of the "impure" Low and High German loans. A whole new vocabulary has been invented  for legal terms, something that makes t Norwegian legal documents extremely hermetic, as they are written in two different legal languages (50% each).


----------



## Gavril

According to a Wikipedia article I read, by the end of the 1000s, Old Norwegian had lost the _h- _in words that had previously begun in _hr-, __hl- _and _hn-_. Thus the distinction would have been lost between _hraun / raun_, _hljóð / ljóð_, _hlé / lé- _and so on.

Is this accurate? Would this change have applied to all of what were then dialects of Norwegian?


----------



## NorwegianNYC

Yes, more or less. Probably not to all the dialects at the same time, but the h-aspiration was the first to go, and within a a century or two is was pretty much gone. Next to go was -th- and -dh-, and the nominative ending -r, which in Icelandic became -ur, but in Norwegian disappeared or became -e. Soon after the accusative case conflated with nominative and disappeared.


----------

