How Norwegian Got Two Written Languages

Almost everything that confuses learners about written Norwegian — two official standards, dozens of optional spellings, no single "correct" pronunciation, and dialects spoken proudly everywhere — is the residue of one tangled history. This page tells that history as a timeline, because the synchronic puzzle (why is it boka or boken? why frem or fram?) only makes sense once you know how the language got here. The competing forms themselves are covered on the Bokmål vs Nynorsk and Radical vs Conservative Bokmål pages; here we explain where the whole situation came from.

The timeline at a glance

Old Norse and the Danish centuries

In the Viking age and high Middle Ages, Norway had its own robust language, Old Norse (norrønt) — the language of the sagas, written and spoken across the North Atlantic. Then came the long decline of independence. From 1380 Norway was tied to Denmark, and over the following centuries the union became thoroughly Denmark-led. Crucially, when the Reformation brought printing, Bibles and an administrative class, the written language of all of it was Danish. For roughly 400 years, anyone in Norway who wrote — clerks, priests, the educated — wrote Danish.

The decisive consequence: Norwegian survived only as spoken dialects. There was no Norwegian written standard to anchor a "correct" pronunciation, because the written language was foreign. People across the country went on speaking their local Norwegian dialects, but they read and wrote Danish. This single fact — written language and spoken language belonging to different languages for four centuries — is the seed of everything that follows, including the modern reality that Norway has no spoken standard at all (see No Spoken Standard).

1814 and the language question

In 1814 Norway broke from Denmark (entering a looser personal union with Sweden) and got its own constitution. National feeling surged — but the written language was still Danish. A newly self-conscious nation reading and writing the language of its former ruler is an obvious tension, and out of it grew the language question (språkstriden): if Norway is a nation, what is the Norwegian language, and how should it be written?

Two very different answers emerged in the 1850s, from two very different men.

Two men, two solutions

Ivar Aasen (1813–1896), a self-taught linguist from the rural west, took the bottom-up route. He travelled the country recording dialects — especially the conservative rural and western ones least touched by Danish — and from them constructed a brand-new written standard meant to express the "true" Norwegian that had survived in the countryside. He called it Landsmål ("language of the country/land"). It later became Nynorsk ("New Norwegian").

Knud Knudsen (1812–1895), a schoolteacher and grammarian, took the top-down route. Rather than build something new, he proposed gradually Norwegianising the Danish already in use — respelling it and reshaping it step by step toward educated urban Norwegian speech. His evolving form was called Riksmål ("language of the realm"), and it became Bokmål ("book language").

So the two standards have opposite origins: Nynorsk is dialects assembled upward into a new norm; Bokmål is Danish filed downward toward Norwegian. That contrast explains their characters to this day — Nynorsk closer to western/rural speech, Bokmål closer to the Danish-descended written tradition and eastern urban speech.

In 1885 Parliament resolved the standoff not by choosing but by making both official and equal — the decision Norway has lived with ever since.

The reforms and the samnorsk dream

Having two official norms, the state then spent the 20th century trying to manage and even merge them through a series of spelling reforms — most importantly 1907, 1917 and 1938. These reforms did two things at once: they pushed Bokmål further away from Danish (more Norwegian spellings, native vowels, the p/t/k of løpe, vite rather than Danish b/d/g), and they nudged the two norms toward each other.

That second aim had a name: samnorsk ("common Norwegian") — an ambitious official policy to eventually fuse Bokmål and Nynorsk into a single standard. The chosen method was telling: instead of legislating one form, the reforms admitted lots of optional variant forms into each norm, hoping the two would gradually converge in the middle as speakers picked the overlapping options.

Here is the distinguishing insight, the historical key to the whole spelling-variant puzzle. The samnorsk project failed. It met fierce resistance — especially from Riksmål/Bokmål conservatives who did not want their written language dragged toward rural Nynorsk — and by the later 20th century the merger policy was quietly abandoned. But the machinery it installed, the flood of permitted variant forms, was never fully cleared away. That is why Bokmål today carries so many optional spellings: boka or boken, fram or frem, sju or syv, the whole radical-vs-conservative spectrum. The optionality is a fossil of a failed merger. When you wonder why Norwegian lets you write a word two ways, the answer is almost always samnorsk: those alternatives were planted to pull the norms together, and they outlived the plan.

A Danish-era spelling, then and now

To feel the distance Bokmål travelled, compare a phrase as it would have been written in the Danish-influenced orthography of the 1800s with its modern Bokmål form. Older texts use Danish-style consonants (b, d, g where modern Norwegian has p, t, k), the doubled aa for what is now å, and other Danish conventions.

The most visible single change is aa → å, made official in 1917: a pre-1917 text writes paa, baade, aar; modern Norwegian writes på, både, år. If you ever read a 19th-century Norwegian text and it looks "wrong," it is usually this — Danish-era spelling, not error.

Why this history explains everything

Three modern facts fall straight out of the timeline:

1. Two written norms — because the nation answered the 1814 language question twice, once bottom-up (Aasen) and once top-down (Knudsen), and chose in 1885 to keep both.
2. No spoken standard — because for 400 years the written language was Danish while real Norwegian lived only in dialects, so no spoken norm was ever crowned. Dialects therefore carry prestige, not stigma; speaking your local dialect publicly is normal and respected.
3. Optional spellings — because the failed samnorsk merger left a permanent layer of permitted variant forms in Bokmål.

Learner pitfalls

Assuming Norwegian split from Danish recently. The two are close because Norway wrote Danish for 400 years and only began consciously Norwegianising it from the 1850s — Bokmål is, by ancestry, Norwegianised Danish. The closeness is the product of a long shared written history, not of a recent divergence.

Not understanding why so many spellings are optional. Learners often read the variant forms (boka/boken, fram/frem) as messy inconsistency. They are not random: they are the deliberate residue of the samnorsk merger policy. Knowing that turns a confusing list into a coherent story.

Confusing Nynorsk with "old Norwegian" or a dialect. Nynorsk is a constructed modern standard (Aasen, 1850s), built from dialects but not identical to any one of them, and certainly not Old Norse. It is as modern as Bokmål; the two simply have opposite origins.

Reading a pre-1917 text as full of errors. Paa, bog, løber, mig are correct Danish-era Norwegian spelling, not mistakes. The 1917 reform (and later ones) changed them; the older forms are historical, not wrong-for-their-time.

Thinking one norm is "real Norwegian" and the other artificial. Both Bokmål and Nynorsk are official, equal, and the product of conscious 19th-century language planning. Neither is more authentically Norwegian than the other — they answered the same national question by different routes.

Key Takeaways

• Old Norse → 400 years of Danish rule (Danish the only written language; Norwegian surviving only in dialects) → 1814 independence with Danish still written → the language question.
• The 1850s split: Ivar Aasen built Landsmål → Nynorsk bottom-up from rural dialects; Knud Knudsen Norwegianised Danish top-down into Riksmål → Bokmål. In 1885 both became official and equal.
• Reforms of 1907, 1917, 1938 Norwegianised Bokmål (e.g. aa → å in 1917) and pushed the norms together under the samnorsk merger policy.
• Samnorsk failed and was abandoned, but its permitted variant forms stayed — which is why Bokmål has so many optional spellings today (boka/boken, fram/frem). The optionality is a fossil of a failed merger.
• This history explains the three big facts of modern Norwegian: two written norms, no spoken standard (hence high dialect prestige), and optional spellings.