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This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Norwegian is one of the two official languages in Norway, along with Sámi, a Finno-Ugric language spoken by less than one percent of the population. Norwegian is one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Like most of the languages in Europe, the Norwegian language descends from the Proto-Indo-European language.

As early Indo-Europeans spread across Europe, they became isolated and new languages were developed. Proto-Norse is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic during the first centuries AD in what is today Southern Sweden. Around 800 AD, the script was simplified to the Younger Futhark, and inscriptions became more abundant. Around 1030, Christianity came to Scandinavia, bringing with it an influx of Latin borrowings and the Roman alphabet. The Scandinavian languages at this time are not considered to be separate languages, although there were minor differences among what are customarily called Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Gutnish, Old Danish, and Old Swedish. In the late Middle Ages, dialects began to develop in Scandinavia because the population was rural and little travel occurred.

When the Reformation came from Germany, Martin Luther’s High German translation of the Bible was quickly translated into Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic. This section does not cite any sources. From the 1840s, some writers experimented with a Norwegianised Danish by incorporating words that were descriptive of Norwegian scenery and folk life, and adopting a more Norwegian syntax. Knud Knudsen proposed to change spelling and inflection in accordance with the Dano-Norwegian koiné, known as “cultivated everyday speech. Meanwhile, a nationalistic movement strove for the development of a new written Norwegian.

Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, began his work to create a new Norwegian language at the age of 22. He traveled around the country collecting words and examples of grammar from the dialects and comparing the dialects among the different regions. The name of the Danish language in Norway was a topic of hot dispute throughout the 19th century. Its proponents claimed that it was a language common to Norway and Denmark, and no more Danish than Norwegian. The proponents of Landsmål thought that the Danish character of the language should not be concealed. After the personal union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905, both languages were developed further and reached what is now considered their classic forms after a reform in 1917.

Bokmål lost in parliament by a single vote. The name Nynorsk, the linguistic term for modern Norwegian, was chosen to contrast with Danish and emphasis on the historical connection to Old Norwegian. Today, this meaning is often lost, and it is commonly mistaken as a “new” Norwegian in contrast to the “real” Norwegian Bokmål. Bokmål and Nynorsk were made closer by a reform in 1938.

This was a result of a state policy to merge Nynorsk and Bokmål into a single language, to be called Samnorsk. However, opponents of the official policy still managed to create a massive protest movement against Samnorsk in the 1950s, fighting in particular the use of “radical” forms in Bokmål text books in schools. While the sound systems of Norwegian and Swedish are similar, considerable variation exists among the dialects. Norwegian is a pitch-accent language with two distinct pitch patterns, like Swedish.