King’s College 2004 v Mistress Gunnvör sílfrahárr
11
Overview:
Modern Scandinavian Languages
Modern Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and Swedish
vFrom about the middle of
the 16th century on we can speak simply of Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish; all three written
languages were by then much
like their modern counterparts, just as Shakespeare's English is recognizably modern compared with, say,
Chaucer's Middle English.
vIn Norway the situation
was different, thanks to Danish rule. The written language was essentially contemporary Danish,
and the spoken language of
the elite was heavily influenced by the written standard. When Danish rule of Norway ended in the early 20th century, this
Dano-Norwegian mixture was
codified as a standard language. Its contemporary
descendent, called bokmål 'book language', is one of the two modern standard Norwegian languages and is the
standard of a majority of
Norwegian school districts. The other standard, called nynorsk 'new
Norwegian', was created in the mid-19th century by Ivar Aasen. Roughly speaking, it is a reconstruction of what
Old Norwegian might have
become had it developed with much less outside influence, based especially on the conservative western dialects of
spoken Norwegian. The official
bokmål and nynorsk standards converged noticeably during the 20th century, but
significant differences remain.