Bokmål
One of two official written standards for the Norwegian language / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bokmål (Urban East Norwegian: [ˈbûːkmoːɫ] ⓘ) (UK: /ˈbuːkmɔːl/, US: /ˈbʊk-, ˈboʊk-/;[1][2][3][4] lit. 'book-tongue') is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by 85% to 90%[5] of the population in Norway. There is no countrywide standard or agreement on the pronunciation of Bokmål and the spoken dialects vary greatly.
Norwegian Bokmål | |
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bokmål | |
Pronunciation | Urban East Norwegian: [ˈbûːkmoːɫ] |
Native to | Norway |
Native speakers | None (written only) |
Indo-European
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Early forms | |
Standard forms |
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Latin (Norwegian alphabet) | |
Official status | |
Official language in | |
Regulated by |
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Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | nb |
ISO 639-2 | nob |
ISO 639-3 | nob |
Glottolog | (insufficiently attested or not a distinct language)norw1259 |
Linguasphere | 52-AAA-ba to -be and 52-AAA-cd to -cg |
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Bokmål is regulated by the governmental Language Council of Norway. A related, more conservative orthographic standard, commonly known as Riksmål, is regulated by the non-governmental Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. The written standard is a Norwegianised variety of the Danish language.
The first Bokmål orthography was officially adopted in 1907 under the name Riksmål after being under development since 1879.[6] The architects behind the reform were Marius Nygaard and Jacob Jonathan Aars.[7] It was an adaptation of written Danish- commonly used since the past union with Denmark- to Dano-Norwegian, the koiné spoken by the Norwegian urban elite, especially in the capital. When the large conservative newspaper Aftenposten adopted the 1907 orthography in 1923, Danish writing was practically out of use in Norway. The name Bokmål was officially adopted in 1929 after a proposition to call the written language Dano-Norwegian lost by a single vote in the Lagting.[6]
The government does not regulate spoken Bokmål and recommends that normalised pronunciation should follow the phonology of the speaker's local dialect.[8] Nevertheless, there is a spoken variety of Norwegian that, in the region of South-Eastern Norway, is commonly seen as the de facto standard for spoken Bokmål. In The Phonology of Norwegian, Gjert Kristoffersen writes that
Bokmål [...] is in its most common variety looked upon as reflecting formal middle-class urban speech, especially that found in the eastern part of Southern Norway [sic], with the capital Oslo as the obvious centre. One can therefore say that Bokmål has a spoken realisation that one might call an unofficial standard spoken Norwegian. It is in fact often referred to as Standard Østnorsk ('Standard East Norwegian').[9]
Standard Østnorsk (lit. ''Standard East Norwegian'') or sometimes described as "Urban East Norwegian" is the pronunciation most commonly given in dictionaries. However, Standard Østnorsk as a spoken language is not used (and does not have prestige) outside South-Eastern Norway. All spoken variations of the Norwegian language are used in the Storting (parliament) and in Norwegian national broadcasters such as NRK and TV 2, even in cases where the conventions of Bokmål are used. The spoken variation typically reflects the region the speaker grew up in.