Hi, and welcome to this video
introducing the Norwegian language. I'm Adam, and I'll be your teacher. Norwegian is spoken by about 5 million people. It is the primary official language of Norway, and spoken by about 90 %
of the population as a first language. Geographically, it is the majority language
in all of Norway, with the exception of two municipalities in the north, where this position is instead held by North Sami. Norwegian is however,
the common language of Norway, and is spoken and understood by the entire population. The Norwegian alphabet consists of the Latin alphabet, with 3 extra letters attached at the end, and is identical to the Danish alphabet,
with which it is also related. The extra letters are proper letters in their own right, and are not regarded as variations of ae, o or a, as you can see and hear in words such as: Now, a very distinguishing feature of Norwegian, and one of the most important things to learn about, is that Norwegian actually has
two official written standards. That's right, and I'm not talking
about two different languages here, but two standardized and official ways
of writing the same language. It's not a very common thing to do,
so I can understand if this might seem puzzling to you. Anyway, the names of these two language forms are: The original meanings of these names are
'modern Norwegian' and 'book language' respectively, but today the names are completely standalone, and nobody really cares about
what they originally referred to. Also, I want to reiterate that these are
different written forms of the same language, and that nobody speaks them. The language is simply Norwegian,
no matter how you write it. Anyway, to get a better grip on this situation,
let's look at some history. In 1537, shortly after the collapse of the Kalmar Union, Norwegian sovereignty was effectively ended
and the country became a province of Denmark. This led to a complete stop in the writing of Norwegian, which until then had had quite a rich literary tradition, and instead, writing was done only in Danish. Then, in 1814, after the Napoleonic wars, Norway declared its independence, and with the newfound sense of nationalism,
people started to think about, you know, not writing in Danish anymore. But then Sweden came along
and forced Norway into a union, and then the Norwegians were like,
"Oh well, at least it's not Swedish", and so they kept writing in Danish. But the question remained,
and all throughout the 19th century, there was a hot debate on how to actually implement
a written Norwegian language. And this is where the entire thing starts. Because there were two camps, with different ideas on how to actually do this. On the one hand you had the opinion: Let's not break with tradition,
and the language people already know how to write. Let's just make it more Norwegian, step by step, until it better represents how we actually speak. This position was mainly held by conservatives
and by middle-class urban dwellers. And this makes sense, since Norwegian
and Danish are closely related to begin with, and since the spoken language
of the urban upper classes had been significantly influenced by Danish
and the Danish written language, and thus they wouldn't have to modify it all that much before it was a reasonable representation
of their speech. Well, that and the fact that most people
do tend to be quite conservative when it comes to language. Anyway, the other opinion, was basically:
Well, screw this. Let's just get rid of everything and start over, and make a new written language based on
how Norwegians actually speak. This position was advocated primarily
by liberals and by non-urban dwellers. And this position makes sense too, since the spoken language outside of the major cities was generally so distant from the written language, that it'd be way simpler
to just make a new written language than try to fit the old Danish one onto it. And what happened then, was that both
of these movements prevailed. The Norwegianization of the Danish standard
resulted in bokmål, and the creation of an entirely new Norwegian standard
gave today's nynorsk. Strength wise, bokmål has always had the advantage
over nynorsk, since it didn't start from zero. although up until the Second World War,
the gap was closing rapidly, and in the 1940s,
about a third of elementary school pupils were using nynorsk as their primary written form. But since nynorsk failed to get a foothold
in the major urban areas, post-war urbanization and exclusion in mass media
led to a decline in its use. Today, about 15 % of the total population
are users of nynorsk, and about 85 % are users of bokmål, and when it comes to using the other variety, users of nynorsk are more likely
to be proficient in bokmål, than the other way around. As an example of the difference
between the two language forms, here are some common words written in both of them, that you can also use when trying to identify
what variety a text is written in. But remember, that even though
these words are different, there are also a whole lot of words
that are completely identical in the two language forms. Geographically, bokmål is the official written form
in 158 municipalities, primarily in eastern and northern Norway. Nynorsk is the official written form
in 113 municipalities, primarily in western Norway. The remaining 157 municipalities are officially neutral, but in practice,
bokmål tends to dominate in such places. We can also note that of the 20 largest municipalities, none use nynorsk as their official language form,
regardless of location, which further reflects the historical status
of bokmål in the urban areas. And here I want to make another thing clear— and that is that this municipal distribution
of nynorsk and bokmål as official language forms. does not necessarily correspond
to the spoken language in these areas. In fact, neither variety is based
on the speech of a specific region, and as you saw earlier, the geographic distribution of the two varieties
hasn't always been the same either. Of course, the present distribution
is not entirely coincidental either, but the relationship between the two written varieties
and the spoken language is a complex issue, and we're probably better off saving this
for another presentation. Anyway, let's talk about
the spoken Norwegian language instead. Compared to most other Western languages,
dialects in Norwegian have a very strong position, and have not been streamlined or replaced to the same extent as those
of many other languages of Europe. In theory, every dialect is equally valid
and considered correct Norwegian, and there is no officially promoted
standard spoken language. In practice however, this can vary significantly. In general, urban dialects and varieties
that take many elements from the written language often enjoy high covert prestige,
especially in Southeastern Norway. On the other hand, in many areas
the local dialect enjoys equally high status, and speaking a dialect close to the written
language might instead be considered conspicuous. The most prominent Norwegian dialect today,
is called Urban East Norwegian, and many people do consider this variety a
kind of unofficial standard. This is essentially a kind of spoken bokmål, which traces its origins to Western Oslo and the prestigious Danish-Norwegian hybrid language
once spoken there. This variety has spread and mixed
with surrounding dialects, radiating out from Oslo, and is now the main dialect
for many people living in this area. This form of spoken Norwegian
is the one usually taught to foreigners and the one described in Norwegian grammars, but in learning or speaking Norwegian,
you should nevertheless be prepared to encounter a lot of spoken,
and often even written, variation. As for the dialects throughout Norway, these are traditionally divided into a western
and an eastern branch, as you can see here. The most prominent feature of these two areas
is the intonation, which in the western dialects
is more levelled and falling, while in the eastern ones it's instead quite rising, and you'll be able to hear this difference
in the samples later on. Anyway, there's also another four-way division
of the Norwegian dialects. This division is more commonly seen today, and also corresponds better to how Norwegians
themselves perceive the various dialectal areas. Each of these groups have
a set of defining characteristics, but there is also a lot of variation within
each group, and all of them can of course be divided even further. But in any case, it's important to note
that speakers of most dialects have little trouble understanding each other, and most people are also quite used
to adapting their speech when encountering people speaking another variety. And, if Norwegian hasn't struck you as unique thus far, it's time for yet another striking feature of the language, namely its optional forms
and freedom of choice between them. It so happens, that foreigners
are not the only ones to question the use of having two written standards for the same language, and so during the first half of the 20th century, several attempts were made
to bring them closer to each other, with the ultimate goal of merging them
into a single, common Norwegian, written standard. But, since bokmål and nynorsk is basically all
I've been talking about so far, this obviously failed. But it did result in a number of new forms
entering both varieties, with many of them being made optional, meaning that every person is free to choose
whichever form they wish, as long as they're being consistent. In bokmål, the optional forms
usually represent a conflict between reintroduced Norwegian forms
and original Danish forms, called radical or moderate,
as we can see in these examples. 'Sju', 'kasta' and 'boka' are radical,
originally Norwegian, forms, and 'syv', 'kastet' and 'boken' are moderate,
originally Danish forms. In nynorsk, optional forms instead
usually represent different dialectal forms, and there is no historical opposition between them. Examples of this are 'vera' and 'vere',
'me' and 'vi', and 'tenkjer' and 'tenker'. Relationship wise, Norwegian belongs
to the North Germanic languages, of the Indo-European language family. This makes it closely related to languages
such as Swedish, Danish and Icelandic, more distantly related to languages
like English, Dutch and German, and very distantly related to languages
like French, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Hindi. Swedish and Danish are the closest relatives
of Norwegian, and the three languages are generally considered
to be mutually intelligible, meaning that speakers of these languages
can use their own languages with each other and expect to be understood, especially if written. How well this works in practice
varies a lot from person to person, but especially Norwegians and Swedes will tend to
communicate with each other in their own languages, and Norwegian speakers are also better
at understanding Swedish and Danish than the other way around, not unlikely because Norwegians are used to
a lot of variation in their own language already. As an example of the similarity
of the three Scandinavian languages, let's take the phrase
"I've bought myself a new car", which in Eastern Norwegian is: And upon seeing this, there should be no wonder that these languages
are intelligible to each other, right? Now, moving on to grammar, Norwegian nouns have no cases, but they do have 3 genders:
masculine, feminine or neuter. Although, in moderate bokmål,
the feminine gender is optional, and it's quite common
to use the masculine forms instead, which is similar to how it works in Swedish and Danish. So in bokmål we get: meaning 'a car', 'a book' and 'a house', respectively. Now, a peculiarity in the nouns, is that the definite article
is attached to the end of a word. instead of being independent, like English 'the'. So from the indefinite words just mentioned, we get the definite forms: meaning 'the car', 'the book',
and 'the house', respectively. As for the verbs,
there is no conjugation for person, so for example 'to live' is 'lever' in the present tense, 'levde' in the past, and 'har levd' in the perfect, no matter what person is doing the living. This is unlike English, where you say for example
'I live', but 'she lives', and so on. And besides grammar, there is also an interesting thing to note
about the pronunciation of Norwegian: the pitch accent. Simply put, this is a kind of tone contrast where a word can have either accent 1 or accent 2, and where this can change
the meaning of a word entirely. So for example, with the Eastern accent shown here, we have 'hender' and 'hender', where the first means 'hands',
and the second means 'happens'. Other such pairs are 'vatnet' and 'vatne', and 'bønder' and 'bønner', which despite the spelling
are otherwise identical in pronunciation. Alright, to round off, I'm gonna let you listen and read along
to two texts in Norwegian. The first one is a passage from the 1991 novel
'Sophie's World', by Jostein Gaarder, written in moderate bokmål and read with a local accent by a native speaker
from the Østfold region. The original title is 'Sofies verden',
and it is an international best seller, having been translated
into fifty-nine different languages. The next passage is from the 1963 novel
'The Ice Palace', by Tarjei Vesaas, written in nynorsk, and read with a local accent by a native speaker
from the Sunnhordland region. Its original title is 'Is-slottet',
and it is considered a classic of Norwegian literature, being awarded the Nordic Council's Literature prize
in 1964. And so we're at the end of this presentation about the in many ways unique Norwegian language. Be sure to follow this channel
for more videos about Norwegian, and for introductions to other languages. Thank you for watching!
