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20 2 Historical Background of Norwegian 2.1 What is Norwegian 1 In our day any dictionary that presents itself as "Norwegian" must begin by answering this question, which is not as easy as one might expect. Within Norway there is sharp disagreement, stemming from a century-old conflict over the problem of providing Norway with a written language which should be at once distinctively and representatively Norwegian . The conflict is not purely linguistic , but runs through the entire fabric of Norwegian social life, and has found frequent and vigorous expression in Norwegian politics. The government officially recognizes the existence of two major types of Norwegian, Bokrrui ,l (literally "Book Language") and Nynorsk (literally "New Norwegian"). The former continues a Danish tradition of writing, which has been greatly modified under the influence of Norwegian speech habits, and is sometimes referred to as Dano-Norwegian. The latter was constructed as a purely Norwegian form of writing about a century ago, based on those modern dialects which most faithfully preserved the forms of Old Norwegian. Either one is admissible in the schools and in government offices, as determined by local and national political authorities. All pupils are required to learn to read both, but individual adults are free to choose their own medium. Bokmal is predominant in urban usage in all parts of the country, while Nynorsk has its strongholds in therural areasof western and midland Norway. Both languages have a vigorous literary tradition, though Bokrrui,l is overwhelmingly predominant in terms of quantity and variety of writing. The differences between Bm and Nn (as we here abbreviate them) are not great from an outsider's point of view. In speech, users of either language communicate easily with those Introduction of the other, and the obstacles to reading are not insuperable. In modern times the differences have been decreasing , in part through natural development and in part through deliberate reform by government action. There are many today who envisage as a future goal the fusion of the two languages into one so-called Samnorsk (literally "Common Norwegian") language . Previous Norwegian-English dictionaries have all been dictionaries of Bm alone. It is no longer fair to the student of Norwegian to exclude the body of Nn literature from his reading, and give the impression that only Bm really exists. At the same time the large area of common ground between the two languages makes it wasteful to prepare two separate dictionaries for them. The place of Norwegian in a larger scheme of things is given by its close neighborhood to Swedish on the east and Danish on the south. The contact between these three has never been entirely broken, and their mutual relationships through the centuries have been crucial in determining their present-day form. Even today they communicate without interpreters in most situations, each speaker using his own language in a kind of pan-Scandinavian harmony. Together with the more remote and archaic Faroese and Icelandic they constitute the Scandinavian group of languages, which all stem from Old Scandinavian. This was the northern branch of the Germanio family of languages, which includes also modern Dutch, English, and German . These, in turn, are members of the Indo-European stock of languages, extending from Iceland to India, and in modern times throughout the greater part of the world. 2.2 Norwegian and its Neig1Wors. Norway came into existence as a political entity in the 9th Century A.D., united according to tradition by King Harald the Fairhaired in 872. The only written Introduction monuments from this period are inscriptions on rock and other permanent objects in a highly inadequate alphabet known as the Younger Runes. Runes had been in use for magic and monumental writing since at least the 3rd Century, and it is clear from these that the language of Norway in the prehistoric period was a Common Nordic which did not differ essentially from that of Denmark and Sweden. Christianity was permanently established in Norway soon after 1030 A.D. by the Roman Catholic Church, which brought with it the Latin alphabet and the practice of writing on parchment. The earliest manuscripts in Norwegian are from around 1150. These show a Norwegian language which in some respects was different from contemporary Danish and Swedish. At about the same time as Harald united Norway, a predominantly Norwegian population had established an independent settlement in Iceland, where the Norwegian language flourished in a form that gradually differed more and more from that of the...

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