As a writer of bokmål but a speaker of a dialect featuring eg, me, and dokker, I found this video extremely interesting and much more informative than anything I have ever come across in my native Norway. Thank you!
This seems quite niche, but it is always fun when someone shows interest. Grew up with nynorsk. Changed to writing bokmål when I started my education and work. Outside of the west, where I am from, there is quite the stigma attached to nynorsk. Even more than if your native tongue is something else than Norwegian. The written language I grew up with is most likely dying out within a generation or two. In my lifetime, the number of students using nynorsk has gone down drastically. I do not think any of my kids will pick nynorsk...
I am dutch, but use Nynorsk as I written language. I currently live in Troms and Im surprised by the stigma against nynorsk here. Nynorsk represents northern-norwegian waaaaay better than bokmål (despite being far from perfect, its therefore everyone just writes phonetically in informal settings), but people will still straight up refuse to use Nynorsk
@@RonnieAttema The stigma is usually not based on anything rational, however the nynorsk movement and Ivar Aasen himself probably underestimated the advantage riksmål/bokmål had and still has as the language being associated with the upper class and high social and cultural status in general. The idea of the national romanticists that the common people would naturally drift towards the language most closely resembling their own speech, was pretty flawed, as history has shown. P.A. Munch, who himself belonged to that upper class so hostile to Nynorsk, had some ideas about Nynorsk that Aasen perhaps ought to have taken up to a greater extent than he actually did. Additionally, linguists in the 19th century lacked important knowledge about Old and Middle Norwegian, such as the fact that there were several dialect groups already in the Middle Ages and that standardized Old Norse is most closely resembling Old Norwegian as it was spoken in the south-western part of the country. Therefore, by sometimes choosing words and pronouns that he thought were closest to the Old Norse spoken by ALL Norwegians during the MIddle Ages, Aasen ended up, unwittingly, "favouring" the Western dialects. However, despite this, the Western Norwegian influence on Nynorsk is often overstated by those that criticize it.
@Vandredaskald I also think that Nynorsk's effort to resemble middle Norwegian is its main weakness. Because of this it is not able to resemble the novelties that have come in recent times. Many of the Northern characteristics (such as apocope, palatalization and lowering of front vowels) do often follow from some pretty consistent rules, but still arent represented by it.
@@RonnieAttema Just to clarify: By 'Middle Norwegian' I mean the historical stage of the language's development. The term is used by linguists to refer to Norwegian as it was spoken roughly between 1350 and 1550, after which the Modern Norwegian, or New Norwegian (this is the reason behind the name 'Nynorsk'), stage was reached. Also, I use Nynorsk myself, but I agree that there are several problems with it in its current form. I think it might have been better to stick to the etymological logic Aasen largely followed, but obviously revised in light of the current state of knowledge about the language's development. Furthermore, I would have let go of the rather strange phobia against using words of Low German and Danish descent --- after all, the influence of Low German and Danish is just a fact of history and something that has been a natural part of how people in Norway speak since the Late Middle Ages. To try to erase this influence is actually what is "unnatural".
Very good! Although a small mistake: The way you write it, is translated to: "I'm learning Norwegian for four years". If you want to write that you have been learning Norwegian for four years, it's "Jeg har lært norsk språk i fire år". Or better: "Jeg har *studert* norsk i fire år". The latter is more natural and more correct, even if the
Not criticism, just wanting to help. The idiomatic way to say this is "jeg har lært norsk i fire år", even though you're still learning. And as often, the correct preposition can rarely be deduced. It's just how it is, in this case "i".
I'm from a part of Western Sweden that was a part of Norway until the mid 17th century, and the local dialects are very obviously in a transitional zone between clearly Swedish and clearly Norwegian. The word for "I" is typically "jä" (like English "yeah" but with a very short vowel) and many say "ve" (like English "veh", with a fairly short vowel) and not "vi".
In this video, an american doctor of old norse talks about norwegian dialects that makes me understand the reason why old song lyrics in my native swedish are the way they are. Viljen I veta och viljen I förstå, så är det Jackson Crawford ni ska lyssna på. ;) Love your content!
Det er dårlig vane å bruke dialekt når man skriver, synes jeg. Er enkelte som er så voldsom på dialekt at det knapt er mulig å forstå hva de skriver for noe. Men respekterer at man er stolt av dialekten sin. Selv har jeg dog en snål blanding av vestlandsk, bergensk og nordlandsk.
I write and speak bokmål, but we all have to learn Nynorsk too. I understand both (of course). Great presentation! :D I speak what would be bokmål-ish (saying "jeg" for "I"), but I can also speak more basic dialects of the city I live in (where we would say "eg" for "I") :D Edit: Western Norway here.
Sist gang jeg dro til Oslo, spurte jeg noen om vegen til et sted jeg skulle møte opp til sesjon - hun svarte på engelsk (med super-bokmåls-schwang) .. Jeg tror ikke hun forstod dialekta mi, så jeg spurte noen andre etterpå
The huge diversity explains why it became necessary for the function of states to have "standard" languages. Small Denmark until a few decades ago had a number of dialects that were not mutually intellible. Without "rigsdansk" as a common means of communication nothing would have kept the country together. This was even true for the Danish-Norwegian union time. It is also important to note that no law imposed anything on the tongues the population would actually speak. Denmark-Norway was a multi-lingual kingdom.
I'd say it's very rare to find people in Norway pronouncing things how they are written in Bokmål. Even in Oslo, everyone but the most severely posh pronounce "Jeg" as "Jæh". Elements of Oslo's dialects certainly have spread due to their dominance of TV and radio, but not to a degree where I'd say "most people 'speak' Bokmål", not even close.
You could say the same about general american English. Americans don't pronounce the in 'thought', yet there is an agreed upon "standard" way of pronouncing that word in the US. The same holds true for Bokmål. There are of course cases of historical spellings, but it's pretty unanimous that East Urban Norwegian is the de facto standard way of speaking bokmål. I think that's what Crawford is getting at here.
As someone who has dabbled in learning Swedish, I sang the traditional Swedish song "Goder afton i denna sal" for a Lucia concert this year and it has what I assume is the older form "eder" for the second person plural pronoun "er". It's been interesting to see older features of the language in these traditional songs.
4 години тому
You can also just look at the name of the song. "Goder" are an older form, no idea how old, but everyone use "god" without the "-er" now. And we usually just pronunced it as "go" to.
My previous employer used "osseran" (which sounds like "at us") instead of the typical "vi/oss/me" - but she came from a far away island, so i guess that makes sense..
jaja på tide🎉 I am a bokmal reader myself but when you get good enough and with enough practice you can still read nynorsk. For me it started with kven=hvem.
In Norway you drive a car for 30 minutes, then someone have a different dialect, more unique then if someone from England would travel to the other side of the globe and chat with someone in Australia.
@elvenkind6072 ok, men hvis noen fra England kjører 30 min med bil kan de også havne er sted med dialekt like variert som sognamål, jæren eller setedalsk. English speakin can be variit ower, some ye micht find ardeous tae comprehend.
I speak Norwegian fluently in a few dialects, and I just want to say that Norwegian is not as easy to learn as some say. There are multiple dialects, as well as some really unusual tongue positions you have to learn in order to pronounce certain words correctly. The Norwegian R in particular took me quite a long time to master. The slight whistle you make with the tip of your tongue against your two front teeth for the word ikkje was also difficult to learn. There are also some very specific emphases on syllables that may not matter so much in English but completely change the word in Norwegian. I bring this up because Nynorsk in particular is not easy. I think that a lot of UA-cam channels that promote the Scandinavian languages as relatively easy to learn are generally out of their depth and do not speak those languages in business situations. I recently refreshed my language skills with a course in business Norwegian, and after speaking Norwegian for over 20 years I had more to learn. Thank you Jackson for posting this content. It is interesting.
About East Norse and West Norse. My Swedish dialect, in Ostrobothnia Finland, has some West Norse features. We have the diphthongs of course (heim, stein, röyk, bröut), three genders and some leftovers of pronouns. E.g. we say "hon/hennar" for her, but tu/du. In the Närpes dialect you is tu/et ("et" really peculiar). Demonstrative pronouns are still used by elderly people in the Vörå dialect (tann, ton, te, for "that", similar to Faroese!) and hisin/hison/hittje in the Närpes dialect for "this" (hisa/hiso/hitt in another dialect).
Bokmål dere/dere is a bit of a mystery. When Danish was made more Norwegian around 1900, people in Oslo and surrounding areas would have the nom/acc distinction "di" and "dere", and since Danish also has a distinction, "I" and "eder" it's a bit odd that the written norm would drop this distinction which was so common. Today, hardly anyone native to Oslo younger than 100 years would use the distinction "di" - "dere", and it's probably disappearing elsewhere as well. On the other hand, the written norm adopted the distinction in the third persion, "de" and "dem", despite being very rare in the spoken language. It was usually "dem" - "dem" south of Oslo, "dom" - "dom" north of Oslo, now "di" - "di" becoming more common. Bokmål "deres" is also confusing, since it can be both second and third person. In my opinion, Bokmål would have been better if it had adopted the most common forms of the southeastern urban language of around 1900: vi - oss - vår de - dere - deres de(m) - dem - dems
There's also Riksmål Norwegian, but that's basically Danish. It was how the very learned and civilized, the very polite method to write a generation or two ago. If I'm not mistaken Riksmålsforbundet is still active. Some of the greatest Norwegian authors, like Bjørnson, Hamsun, Øverland and Bjørneboe, used Riksmål. It's the opposite of landsmål, or common Norwegian, that is more widespread on the west-coast and in the more thinly inhabited regions of the fjords and valleys.
For what it is worth. On the one side old fashioned nynorsk and Swedish are more similar. On the other side bokmål and Danish are more similar. Swedish has some really old fashioned words, that many Norwegians do not understand directly. Nonetheless, if one knows the very conservative and old fashioned nynorsk, then one suddenly understands the old fashioned Swedish words, since they are very often the same words. For example "surface" in bokmål is "overflate". Nonetheless, the Swedish word is "yta", which most Norwegians may not understand. Wait a little, if you know the old fashioned nynorsk word for "surface" which is "yte", then you understand the Swedish word after all.
Ah.... "spoken" bokmål... nah, not really, at least I did not experience it that way. It's a bit more complex, basically it's mostly dialects, and some are closer to bokmål or nynorsk. Interesting thing is that in Northern Norway the written language is bokmål, but the dialect is closer to nynorsk, as far as I get that as a non-native speaker.
I live in a town called Vennesla, where there is a heavy mix of Bokmål and Nynorsk. I'm a bokmål speaker, and my wife used to be quite heavy on the nynorsk, but now is more bokmål than anything else. In this area of Norway, we are made fun of because of the way we say "I am". We say "Æ æ" (with slight change in tonation) .
Off hand here are the ways of saying I in Norwegian I can think at the moment.... Jeg, Eg, E, Æ, Je, og I. We... Vi, Mi, Me, Mæ. You (pl) De, Dem, Dere, Dokk, Dokka, Dykk, Dykka, Dykja, Dykjen. "Hæ dykjen kykjen heim hos dykjen? Nei, mi hæ berre en skåb i krogen" - Vennesla
The use of "me" to say "we" is also widespread in the West-Flemish dialect of Dutch, and it is also the normal form for "we" in most of the Slavic languages, like "my" (= we) in Polish, Russian, etc. So the form may be quite ancient in my opinion.
Awesome series I'll be following. Just arrived back from watching a live performance of _Spynorsk the Musical_ about populism, Ivar Aasen, verb conjugations, and waffles. (Symje - sym -sumde gang!) and I had an exam today in language history including a long question about nynorsk.
I remember my friend identifying my Sola dialect apart from the more metropolitan Stavanger dialect from me using Dokker instead of Dokk, I never had really thought of the distinction even....also someone saying I spoke more neatly (pent)when starting high school also threw me back as the two are more or less identical or so I thought.
That's funny. I say dokka, and learned Norwegian in Sandnes. I am American and live in LA now but still go back to visit friends. When I run into Norwegians here, they say, "You speak Stavanger dialect!"
For ek not breaking, maybe using Faroese eg is a better modern equivalent as it still hasn't broken while modern Icelandic ég has an initial j now, so it's pronounced jeg (and was spelled as such until not that long ago (historically)). There are some Faroese dialects which have jeg but these amount to less than 10% of Faroese speakers. While yes, vi could be a danicism in Norwegian, also consider the fact that in both Faroese and Icelandic the plural pronoun vér is lost and replaced with the dual pronoun vit. Now, in Icelandic this t is fricativised and becomes við. Something like this could have happened in Norwegian too and the ð is then lost, so we get vit > við > vi. Not sure if there is any paper trail on this but it's certainly possible.
I have Norwegian as a heritage language, and I really struggle to parse Nynorsk. Even so, I have some affection for it, because I empathize with underdog languages that aren't seen as the default... even though in this case I don't really speak it.
Well me and 2 other non-Norwegian colleagues asked a Norwegian colleague how many variants there were for first person singular. She came up with about 10 distinctly different variants (as far as I recall no separation between bokmål and nynorsk). Last time I made this note/joke someone added that each pronoun in each form had a matching number of variants. Maybe this is not the rabbit hole to get into, or maybe there is some interesting aspects?
In the only known text in the extinct Frisian of the Dutch province of Noord-Holland, the pronoun 'I' is written as 'jeck'. I don't think there is any North Germanic influence involved, but as far as I know this is unique among Western Germanic languages.
Yes, vi is spreading out across my area, which was previously a 100% me using nynorsk area. Some years ago, the commune started writing vi. Most people still use me, but those living close to the bokmål writing cities (Bergen, in practice) have a greater chance of changing to vi, whether they're conscious of it or not. If me is on the retreat, it's being intentionally done, sad to say.
I moved to Norway 9 years ago, to a small village where I went to school for 5 years and even tho being a foreigner I was encouraged to learn Nynorsk for what I am very grateful. Unfortunately after moving to the city of Aalesund, where I study for a profession. even tho it is a municipality where Nynorsk is the official form, I wasn’t provided with Nynorsk books, and later when I started working with people where the half speak a bokmålised variant of sunnmøre dialect, my dialect kinda mixed, my writing is bad too since it is mixed, only now am I realising this and I am trying to fix my speach. So I think that Nynorsk is definitely under represented and has been forcefully drawn closer to Bokmål, and the logic people of the other side tell me also makes no sense, why they speak that form? Because it is easier, and that’s why they hate Nynorsk. I learned the language and as a foreigner I can say Nynorsk is definitely more logical than Bokmål will ever be. If you are interested in checking out a purer form of Nynorsk, there is a form referred to as Høgnorsk with inspires its name from high German since Nynorks is primarily used in the mountainous fjords.
In my dialect (south western Norway, close to Flekkefjord), we say "okke" (EN: us, NO: oss) and "okka" (EN: ours, NO: vår) in addition to dokke (EN: you, NO: dere) and dokka (EN: yours, NO: deres)
There was no historical or linguistic contextualization in the Norwegian school system when they "tried" to learn us Nynorsk, which made the process much more robotic, and quite frankly boring. Bokmål might practically be considered an "administrative Danish language remnant", given how easy it was to pick up and read Danish books, before learning English. Some people in Norway see Nynorsk as artificially imposed, given how it is not really used outside of a few areas. I must say this approach is much better, as it put things into a a larger perspective. Or any perspective at all!
My wife is from south-eastern norway and they say "mi" as the first person plural. I have assumed (based on somehting you said in an earlier video (with Luke?)) that it was from dual form. Though they say "mi" they write "vi"
Few years ago there was some debate about gender-neutral pronouns: "hen" came out on top. From the Finnish "hän", this is kinda cool, cause we don't have enough Finnish loan-words, imho. Interestingly the debate pretty much ignored the fact that, they've been using "na" in the north-west for centuries?
1st person pronouns in my Romsdal dialect: I / me (singular), me / oss (plural). The "g" in "meg" is not pronounced, so "me" gets a double pronominal function.
How do you explain the proliferation of pronouns in Norwegian dialects, the simplified version of Jeg/Eg only exists on paper after all. In Møre og Romsdal alone you get Eg, Ej, E, I, Æ and Jeg.
When did theses changes due to "wrong analysis" occur, could many of them have happened due to the probable lessened focus on "correct" language during and after the black death?
When the pronoun "dere" was introduced in 1917, it created an unfortunate situation where the most widely used written form of Norwegian lacks one of the core grammatical nuances all of the Norwegian dialects have (including Eastern Norwegian dialects). Where Bogsprog had "eders eller deres" and Nynorsk had "dykkar eller deira" Bokmål ended up with "deres eller deres". Some have suggested that the Northern and Eastern Norwegian genitive form "dems" should be allowed into Bokmål (e.g. "bilen deres eller bilen dems") to correct the older reform, but it seems more likely that things will carry on as they have for over a century. Norwegians will have to guess based on context what is meant by "på deres side" or "deres flanke". Even if a new reform allowed for a distinction between "dems" and "deres" it would create a situation where "deres" is separated from its original meaning, which is a problem, since most Norwegian dialects use deres, deira, deiras, deires etc. with the old meaning "their" (like Danish "deres" and Swedish "deras"). The entire problem could have been avoided. In the 1800s, this lack of distinction between "deres" and "deres" was limited to the sociolect of Christiania's upper class, and most of them wanted to continue writing in Bogsprog rather than creating a new written language.
I think it has to do with 'the DU form" becoming informal, then archaic and then being replaced by the 2nd plural leaving a void. In Dutch "you"has done the same as in English and French with various stages of replacement or whatever. jij/gij was originally plural replacing du/dij (already informal in Middle Dutch ) with object forms jouw/u. But toi make a new plural form we compounded is with lieden (people/ lads) to give standart jullie ("you lads" of you guys in ) In Groningen dialects still rretained "DU" as dou.
I know you Danish knowledge is less than icelandic and norwegian, but one thing you should be aware of is that the dialects in Jutland are not completely east-norse. eg where I grew up 1p.sing.nom was often pronounced "a". My dad and my older brother used/uses "a" consistently while I seem to use a mix of "a"/"ja"/"jeg".
I speak closer to nynorsk (I am from the south west - Rogaland, Ålgård. Always wrote bokmål cuz there were to many odd stuff in nynorsk… but when we were allowed to also write in dialect then I jumped off both official written language 😂 My dialect we say: æg, not eg or jeg ☺️
The plural "you" is "dokker" in Northern Norway as well, in Stavanger they say "me". Just wanted to say that. Really interesting stuff! As a bokmål writer I kinda get the idea behind nynorsk. I feel like nynorsk is like the unpopular diet coke, we have 0 TV shows with this written language only. The news channel NRK is forced to use nynorsk. Unfortunately nynorsk will never reach higher percentages than 15 percent in the country, no matter how much we force it upon us Norwegians.
Jeg (jæi), eg, eig, e, æ, æg, je, jæ, i, ek, ej are the Norwegian 1st person singular pronouns I've gathered over the years. 11 versions of the same pronoun. I don't remember which part of the country they're all from tbh. I swear I heard a northerner say "jej" (not jeg/jæi) once, but I'm struggling with finding evidence for it actually existing in a dialect. Perhaps it died out, or he was just a weirdo, idk.
Im a Swede.. I talk to Norwegians and Danes, in Swedish.. its often more intelligble then shift to English! Sometimes one put in a "english words".. when we use different words! However.. Norweigans write like Danes but speak like swedes.. in any case in Bokmål! And then Norwegian supose to be West norse.. its Nynorsk that is, but bokmål is east norse (Danish).. west norse is probably Icelandic? Its this funny thing when I talk to Norweigans.. I can talk to them in "standard swedish" and they reply in "standard norweigan/bokmål".. we sometimes use different words.. its still this that those words is in our vocabulary, but not allways used in the same way! And then to "Thou" in old english.. isnt this swedish "Du" = You? Deg, dig, dej, dou, whatever?? In anycase.. scandinavian languges is often the esyest to learn for English speaker!
It is my understanding Bokmål and Nynorsk have been converging over time and Bokmål has increasingly become more Nynorsk, especially in that Bokmål accepts more Nynorsk as "proper" now than before. Hopefully eventually there will only be 1 way to write Norwegian, neither give a particularly good view of what spoken Norwegian is like.
@@essi2 Not quite true. Bokmål is gradually incorporating various spoken forms, so it is becoming more like Nynorsk in a way. Thisbis how living languages work. Nynorsk, on the other hand, is a dead language which only exists by virtue of holding on to archaic forms like «kva» and «kvifor».
@@SvenElven No way, Nynorsk has had loads of updates, as has Bokmål, and they are getting closer to each other. Nynorsk is not dead at all, it is not even a language, but a way of writing the Norwegian language, which is spoken in very many different dialects. I think Nynorsk is a more poetic way of writing Norwegian.
@@SvenElven There are comitees for both of them, no difference in that respect. You might want to consider travelling to different parts of the country every so often.
Lol everyone hates Nynorsk as it’s unnecessary to learn unless you live in one of those areas that has it as their written language. Nynorsk is also a constructed language so not even a real dialect🤣🤣🤣 What’s truly Norwegian are our dialects which are in the thousands. The closest you get to Old Norse, besides Icelandic, are certain dialects on the west coast as the Norse settlers who fled to Iceland and settled there was from Sogndal, and some deep in the Setesdal valley… We have many nice dialects, but Nynorsk isn’t one of them. Equally as foul as Trønders, Totning, and Østfold (thick -L).
You'd think so but despite the geographical closeness to Germany, Swedish has more German loan words. Like take the Danish word for Window -- Vindue, Germany and Sweden instead say Fenster.
The problem I find with nynorsk is that it tries to take parts from all dialects, making it kind of a hybrid language where it's hard to guess the right words, whereas bokmål you only need to think of Eastern Norwegian. Maybe I don't say "jeg", but I for sure don't say "eg" either. When it comes down to practicality bokmål wins sadly, and the unpopularity around nynorsk is mostly down to the government forcing students to juggle both of them.
It doesnt really take parts from every dialect, it tries to be neutral, using middle/old norwegian as the common ground. What happens is that each dialects tends to have a unique trait still kept from that branch out.
maybe im being a pedantic dickhole, but your e-sounds are a bit short making, for instance, "dere" sound like "derre" which is another word altogether. dont be scared of the long eeeeee
Jack, I study the Indoeuropean languages, when it comes to the Old norse branch, the vowel developments due to several umlauts can be a nightmare compared to Gothic, Old high German or Old Saxon, do you agree?
4:10 I don't think most Norwegians use "jeg", but rather that "jeg" holds the largest share of usage without forming an outright majority, yet. In fact, the 1st person singular pronoun forms seem to be one of the strongest features of dialects, being the one thing people are more likely to keep even as their speech is influenced by bokmål. The dominance of spoken "bokmål" or dialects similar, are the majority in media, not in the country in general, though its influence is growing. Which I find unfortunate as someone interested in linguistics and find the dialectal diversity of Norwegian to be very interesting. I have been collecting and analysing my own dialect of Norwegian, and in that project also making a system of spelling for it as well, which I will use here to demonstrate the pronouns in my dialect. If anyone wishes to guess at the dialect, feel free. Though I suspect the pronouns give it away easily. 1st.per.sing. subject I /iː/ object mé~me /meː~mə/* 2nd.per.sing subject dú /dʉː/ object dé~de /deː~də/* 3rd.per.sing.masc. subject hann /hɑɲː/ object hono /hoːno/ 3rd.per.sing.fem. subject hó /huː/ object hena /hænɑ/ 3rd.per.sing.neut. subject dæð /deː/ object dí /diː/ 1st.per.plu. subject mið /meː/ object oss /osː/ 2nd.per.plu. subject dið /deː/ object dokk(o) /dokː(o)/ 3rd.per.plu. subject and object dei /dɛː~dæɪ̯/** * - Stressed and unstressed forms respectively. ** - Monophthong pronunciation is the more "pure" dialectal form, while the diphthong pronunciation is gaining ground again. Younger speakers are dropping the object forms in the 3rd person singular pronouns and the subject form in the 2nd person plural pronoun, and increasingly using "vi" instead of "mið". But it does vary from place to place. Generally the further from a city the stronger the dialectal forms are. For myself, all the plural forms stand strong, while the object forms of the 3rd person singular pronouns are more sporadic, though I do still use them, just not as consistently. I find the 1st person singular subject form to be particularly interesting. If we assume that it followed the regular sound changes in the dialect, then it must have come from an older form "ik" rather than "ek", as from "ek" we would have expected /eː/ as the pronunciation. There is a possibility of an irregular sound change, of course, but surely a simpler solution is more likely. Beyond this, it is a very interesting dialect as it forms a crossroad between eastern and western features, and northern and southern features within Norway. As well as having features in common with Swedish, such as the intransitive "brínne /briɲːə/(to burn)", contrasting with the transitive "brenne /bræɲːə/(to burn)"(note; /æ/ is realised as [ɛ] before geminate dorsal consonants)
As a writer of bokmål but a speaker of a dialect featuring eg, me, and dokker, I found this video extremely interesting and much more informative than anything I have ever come across in my native Norway. Thank you!
Please, give us more norwegian videos! I'd love this to be a series
det finnes videoer av Jackson snakker flytende norsk. han forstår alt av norsk også
This seems quite niche, but it is always fun when someone shows interest. Grew up with nynorsk. Changed to writing bokmål when I started my education and work. Outside of the west, where I am from, there is quite the stigma attached to nynorsk. Even more than if your native tongue is something else than Norwegian. The written language I grew up with is most likely dying out within a generation or two. In my lifetime, the number of students using nynorsk has gone down drastically. I do not think any of my kids will pick nynorsk...
I am dutch, but use Nynorsk as I written language. I currently live in Troms and Im surprised by the stigma against nynorsk here. Nynorsk represents northern-norwegian waaaaay better than bokmål (despite being far from perfect, its therefore everyone just writes phonetically in informal settings), but people will still straight up refuse to use Nynorsk
@@RonnieAttema The stigma is usually not based on anything rational, however the nynorsk movement and Ivar Aasen himself probably underestimated the advantage riksmål/bokmål had and still has as the language being associated with the upper class and high social and cultural status in general. The idea of the national romanticists that the common people would naturally drift towards the language most closely resembling their own speech, was pretty flawed, as history has shown. P.A. Munch, who himself belonged to that upper class so hostile to Nynorsk, had some ideas about Nynorsk that Aasen perhaps ought to have taken up to a greater extent than he actually did.
Additionally, linguists in the 19th century lacked important knowledge about Old and Middle Norwegian, such as the fact that there were several dialect groups already in the Middle Ages and that standardized Old Norse is most closely resembling Old Norwegian as it was spoken in the south-western part of the country. Therefore, by sometimes choosing words and pronouns that he thought were closest to the Old Norse spoken by ALL Norwegians during the MIddle Ages, Aasen ended up, unwittingly, "favouring" the Western dialects. However, despite this, the Western Norwegian influence on Nynorsk is often overstated by those that criticize it.
@Vandredaskald I also think that Nynorsk's effort to resemble middle Norwegian is its main weakness. Because of this it is not able to resemble the novelties that have come in recent times. Many of the Northern characteristics (such as apocope, palatalization and lowering of front vowels) do often follow from some pretty consistent rules, but still arent represented by it.
@@RonnieAttema Just to clarify: By 'Middle Norwegian' I mean the historical stage of the language's development. The term is used by linguists to refer to Norwegian as it was spoken roughly between 1350 and 1550, after which the Modern Norwegian, or New Norwegian (this is the reason behind the name 'Nynorsk'), stage was reached.
Also, I use Nynorsk myself, but I agree that there are several problems with it in its current form. I think it might have been better to stick to the etymological logic Aasen largely followed, but obviously revised in light of the current state of knowledge about the language's development. Furthermore, I would have let go of the rather strange phobia against using words of Low German and Danish descent --- after all, the influence of Low German and Danish is just a fact of history and something that has been a natural part of how people in Norway speak since the Late Middle Ages. To try to erase this influence is actually what is "unnatural".
@@Vandredaskald Tak for den sproghistoriske analyse.
Jeg lærer norsk for fire år. In my learning, you can really see the more modern words vs. older ones that were kept. Det er veldig interessant! 😊🍻
where are u from
@duff0120 USA
Very good! Although a small mistake: The way you write it, is translated to: "I'm learning Norwegian for four years". If you want to write that you have been learning Norwegian for four years, it's "Jeg har lært norsk språk i fire år". Or better: "Jeg har *studert* norsk i fire år". The latter is more natural and more correct, even if the
Not criticism, just wanting to help. The idiomatic way to say this is "jeg har lært norsk i fire år", even though you're still learning. And as often, the correct preposition can rarely be deduced. It's just how it is, in this case "i".
@midtskogen oh I know 😆 I don't get to speak it with anyone, so my abilities are limited by it. 😊🍻
Bro you're doing Norwegian now? Nice! I love comparing languages
he speaks fluent norwegian. there are vidoes where he speaks it. im norwegian, i can understand everything he said
I'm from a part of Western Sweden that was a part of Norway until the mid 17th century, and the local dialects are very obviously in a transitional zone between clearly Swedish and clearly Norwegian. The word for "I" is typically "jä" (like English "yeah" but with a very short vowel) and many say "ve" (like English "veh", with a fairly short vowel) and not "vi".
jauddå dette er de såkalla hjemtland og herjedalen? Då er du vel ein trønder då, gratulerer. Dere er velkomne tilbake 😄😄
In this video, an american doctor of old norse talks about norwegian dialects that makes me understand the reason why old song lyrics in my native swedish are the way they are.
Viljen I veta och viljen I förstå, så är det Jackson Crawford ni ska lyssna på. ;)
Love your content!
"Friskt mod, I gossar blå".
"Vi" is practically nonexistent in Rogaland. I don't see "me" disappearing here any time soon.
It's very common to confuse spoken dialect with written language and Nynorsk is a horrible example of this. Time to put it in the museum.
Det er dårlig vane å bruke dialekt når man skriver, synes jeg. Er enkelte som er så voldsom på dialekt at det knapt er mulig å forstå hva de skriver for noe. Men respekterer at man er stolt av dialekten sin. Selv har jeg dog en snål blanding av vestlandsk, bergensk og nordlandsk.
@@SvenElven Agreed
I write and speak bokmål, but we all have to learn Nynorsk too. I understand both (of course). Great presentation! :D I speak what would be bokmål-ish (saying "jeg" for "I"), but I can also speak more basic dialects of the city I live in (where we would say "eg" for "I") :D
Edit: Western Norway here.
Sist gang jeg dro til Oslo, spurte jeg noen om vegen til et sted jeg skulle møte opp til sesjon - hun svarte på engelsk (med super-bokmåls-schwang)
.. Jeg tror ikke hun forstod dialekta mi, så jeg spurte noen andre etterpå
@@8bitRemakes 😂
The huge diversity explains why it became necessary for the function of states to have "standard" languages. Small Denmark until a few decades ago had a number of dialects that were not mutually intellible. Without "rigsdansk" as a common means of communication nothing would have kept the country together. This was even true for the Danish-Norwegian union time. It is also important to note that no law imposed anything on the tongues the population would actually speak. Denmark-Norway was a multi-lingual kingdom.
I'd say it's very rare to find people in Norway pronouncing things how they are written in Bokmål. Even in Oslo, everyone but the most severely posh pronounce "Jeg" as "Jæh". Elements of Oslo's dialects certainly have spread due to their dominance of TV and radio, but not to a degree where I'd say "most people 'speak' Bokmål", not even close.
You could say the same about general american English. Americans don't pronounce the in 'thought', yet there is an agreed upon "standard" way of pronouncing that word in the US. The same holds true for Bokmål. There are of course cases of historical spellings, but it's pretty unanimous that East Urban Norwegian is the de facto standard way of speaking bokmål. I think that's what Crawford is getting at here.
@@singularitas4163 Bokmål is a way of writing, not a dialect.
As someone who has dabbled in learning Swedish, I sang the traditional Swedish song "Goder afton i denna sal" for a Lucia concert this year and it has what I assume is the older form "eder" for the second person plural pronoun "er". It's been interesting to see older features of the language in these traditional songs.
You can also just look at the name of the song. "Goder" are an older form, no idea how old, but everyone use "god" without the "-er" now. And we usually just pronunced it as "go" to.
Bavarian German has also generalised the dual number for the plural in 2pl. „eß“, „enk“…
My previous employer used "osseran" (which sounds like "at us") instead of the typical "vi/oss/me" - but she came from a far away island, so i guess that makes sense..
jaja på tide🎉
I am a bokmal reader myself but when you get good enough and with enough practice you can still read nynorsk. For me it started with kven=hvem.
I use nynorsk natively and always wondered where the "me" thing comes from, thanks!
In my local dialect of norwegian we often use "mi" instead of "vi"/"me"
In Norway you drive a car for 30 minutes, then someone have a different dialect, more unique then if someone from England would travel to the other side of the globe and chat with someone in Australia.
Do you write 'vi' or 'mi'?
@@brthrjon Vi (us) is correct, written Norwegian.
Five million Norwegians, four million dialects.
@elvenkind6072 ok, men hvis noen fra England kjører 30 min med bil kan de også havne er sted med dialekt like variert som sognamål, jæren eller setedalsk.
English speakin can be variit ower, some ye micht find ardeous tae comprehend.
I speak Norwegian fluently in a few dialects, and I just want to say that Norwegian is not as easy to learn as some say. There are multiple dialects, as well as some really unusual tongue positions you have to learn in order to pronounce certain words correctly. The Norwegian R in particular took me quite a long time to master. The slight whistle you make with the tip of your tongue against your two front teeth for the word ikkje was also difficult to learn. There are also some very specific emphases on syllables that may not matter so much in English but completely change the word in Norwegian. I bring this up because Nynorsk in particular is not easy. I think that a lot of UA-cam channels that promote the Scandinavian languages as relatively easy to learn are generally out of their depth and do not speak those languages in business situations. I recently refreshed my language skills with a course in business Norwegian, and after speaking Norwegian for over 20 years I had more to learn. Thank you Jackson for posting this content. It is interesting.
Takk for dette… ha en fin dag!
About East Norse and West Norse. My Swedish dialect, in Ostrobothnia Finland, has some West Norse features. We have the diphthongs of course (heim, stein, röyk, bröut), three genders and some leftovers of pronouns. E.g. we say "hon/hennar" for her, but tu/du. In the Närpes dialect you is tu/et ("et" really peculiar). Demonstrative pronouns are still used by elderly people in the Vörå dialect (tann, ton, te, for "that", similar to Faroese!) and hisin/hison/hittje in the Närpes dialect for "this" (hisa/hiso/hitt in another dialect).
Bokmål dere/dere is a bit of a mystery. When Danish was made more Norwegian around 1900, people in Oslo and surrounding areas would have the nom/acc distinction "di" and "dere", and since Danish also has a distinction, "I" and "eder" it's a bit odd that the written norm would drop this distinction which was so common. Today, hardly anyone native to Oslo younger than 100 years would use the distinction "di" - "dere", and it's probably disappearing elsewhere as well.
On the other hand, the written norm adopted the distinction in the third persion, "de" and "dem", despite being very rare in the spoken language. It was usually "dem" - "dem" south of Oslo, "dom" - "dom" north of Oslo, now "di" - "di" becoming more common.
Bokmål "deres" is also confusing, since it can be both second and third person.
In my opinion, Bokmål would have been better if it had adopted the most common forms of the southeastern urban language of around 1900:
vi - oss - vår
de - dere - deres
de(m) - dem - dems
There's also Riksmål Norwegian, but that's basically Danish. It was how the very learned and civilized, the very polite method to write a generation or two ago. If I'm not mistaken Riksmålsforbundet is still active. Some of the greatest Norwegian authors, like Bjørnson, Hamsun, Øverland and Bjørneboe, used Riksmål. It's the opposite of landsmål, or common Norwegian, that is more widespread on the west-coast and in the more thinly inhabited regions of the fjords and valleys.
Yeah riksmål is not used anymore in Norway
In my dialect of German we also use a plural 1. Person starting with "m". "Mia" , not "wir".
Is that in the Rhineland?
No, Austria. Does anyone actually say "wir"?
@@christianbensel Ich bin ziemlich sicher, dass Norddeutschland 'wir' sagt, aber ich komme aus Dänemark und kenne mich damit nicht so gut aus.
Yes! More videos like this pls, Nynorsk is amazing 😍
Not turning verb ending into pronoun onset challenge.
I look forward to that video
For what it is worth. On the one side old fashioned nynorsk and Swedish are more similar. On the other side bokmål and Danish are more similar.
Swedish has some really old fashioned words, that many Norwegians do not understand directly. Nonetheless, if one knows the very conservative and old fashioned nynorsk, then one suddenly understands the old fashioned Swedish words, since they are very often the same words.
For example "surface" in bokmål is "overflate". Nonetheless, the Swedish word is "yta", which most Norwegians may not understand. Wait a little, if you know the old fashioned nynorsk word for "surface" which is "yte", then you understand the Swedish word after all.
Trying to regain enthusiasm. Thank you.
Ah.... "spoken" bokmål... nah, not really, at least I did not experience it that way. It's a bit more complex, basically it's mostly dialects, and some are closer to bokmål or nynorsk. Interesting thing is that in Northern Norway the written language is bokmål, but the dialect is closer to nynorsk, as far as I get that as a non-native speaker.
I live in a town called Vennesla, where there is a heavy mix of Bokmål and Nynorsk. I'm a bokmål speaker, and my wife used to be quite heavy on the nynorsk, but now is more bokmål than anything else.
In this area of Norway, we are made fun of because of the way we say "I am". We say "Æ æ" (with slight change in tonation) .
Off hand here are the ways of saying I in Norwegian I can think at the moment.... Jeg, Eg, E, Æ, Je, og I. We... Vi, Mi, Me, Mæ. You (pl) De, Dem, Dere, Dokk, Dokka, Dykk, Dykka, Dykja, Dykjen.
"Hæ dykjen kykjen heim hos dykjen? Nei, mi hæ berre en skåb i krogen" - Vennesla
The use of "me" to say "we" is also widespread in the West-Flemish dialect of Dutch, and it is also the normal form for "we" in most of the Slavic languages, like "my" (= we) in Polish, Russian, etc. So the form may be quite ancient in my opinion.
Awesome series I'll be following. Just arrived back from watching a live performance of _Spynorsk the Musical_ about populism, Ivar Aasen, verb conjugations, and waffles.
(Symje - sym -sumde gang!)
and I had an exam today in language history including a long question about nynorsk.
I remember my friend identifying my Sola dialect apart from the more metropolitan Stavanger dialect from me using Dokker instead of Dokk, I never had really thought of the distinction even....also someone saying I spoke more neatly (pent)when starting high school also threw me back as the two are more or less identical or so I thought.
That's funny. I say dokka, and learned Norwegian in Sandnes. I am American and live in LA now but still go back to visit friends. When I run into Norwegians here, they say, "You speak Stavanger dialect!"
For ek not breaking, maybe using Faroese eg is a better modern equivalent as it still hasn't broken while modern Icelandic ég has an initial j now, so it's pronounced jeg (and was spelled as such until not that long ago (historically)). There are some Faroese dialects which have jeg but these amount to less than 10% of Faroese speakers.
While yes, vi could be a danicism in Norwegian, also consider the fact that in both Faroese and Icelandic the plural pronoun vér is lost and replaced with the dual pronoun vit. Now, in Icelandic this t is fricativised and becomes við. Something like this could have happened in Norwegian too and the ð is then lost, so we get vit > við > vi. Not sure if there is any paper trail on this but it's certainly possible.
I have Norwegian as a heritage language, and I really struggle to parse Nynorsk. Even so, I have some affection for it, because I empathize with underdog languages that aren't seen as the default... even though in this case I don't really speak it.
In my dialect of Swedish the reanalysis kommen I > komme ni never occurred. We say ji [ji:], both subject and object form.
Where is that? Ångermanland?
@troelspeterroland6998 Correct
As for the second person plural, Aasen in his original grammar, in a comment, tells that he considered øder, but rejected it.
Makes me really courious about why in my southern Northern Norwegian dialect the word for "jeg/eg" has turned into just the simple letter "e"
Well me and 2 other non-Norwegian colleagues asked a Norwegian colleague how many variants there were for first person singular. She came up with about 10 distinctly different variants (as far as I recall no separation between bokmål and nynorsk). Last time I made this note/joke someone added that each pronoun in each form had a matching number of variants. Maybe this is not the rabbit hole to get into, or maybe there is some interesting aspects?
The "vi "to "me" thing happened in many German dialects to where "wir" became "mir."
In the only known text in the extinct Frisian of the Dutch province of Noord-Holland, the pronoun 'I' is written as 'jeck'. I don't think there is any North Germanic influence involved, but as far as I know this is unique among Western Germanic languages.
Yes, vi is spreading out across my area, which was previously a 100% me using nynorsk area. Some years ago, the commune started writing vi. Most people still use me, but those living close to the bokmål writing cities (Bergen, in practice) have a greater chance of changing to vi, whether they're conscious of it or not. If me is on the retreat, it's being intentionally done, sad to say.
I moved to Norway 9 years ago, to a small village where I went to school for 5 years and even tho being a foreigner I was encouraged to learn Nynorsk for what I am very grateful. Unfortunately after moving to the city of Aalesund, where I study for a profession. even tho it is a municipality where Nynorsk is the official form, I wasn’t provided with Nynorsk books, and later when I started working with people where the half speak a bokmålised variant of sunnmøre dialect, my dialect kinda mixed, my writing is bad too since it is mixed, only now am I realising this and I am trying to fix my speach. So I think that Nynorsk is definitely under represented and has been forcefully drawn closer to Bokmål, and the logic people of the other side tell me also makes no sense, why they speak that form? Because it is easier, and that’s why they hate Nynorsk. I learned the language and as a foreigner I can say Nynorsk is definitely more logical than Bokmål will ever be. If you are interested in checking out a purer form of Nynorsk, there is a form referred to as Høgnorsk with inspires its name from high German since Nynorks is primarily used in the mountainous fjords.
In my dialect (south western Norway, close to Flekkefjord), we say "okke" (EN: us, NO: oss) and "okka" (EN: ours, NO: vår) in addition to dokke (EN: you, NO: dere) and dokka (EN: yours, NO: deres)
Do you think there’s any direct relation of Bokmål /East Norse jeg or Swedish jag with the Russian 1st pers. sing. Я (ya), incorporating the breaking?
There was no historical or linguistic contextualization in the Norwegian school system when they "tried" to learn us Nynorsk, which made the process much more robotic, and quite frankly boring. Bokmål might practically be considered an "administrative Danish language remnant", given how easy it was to pick up and read Danish books, before learning English. Some people in Norway see Nynorsk as artificially imposed, given how it is not really used outside of a few areas. I must say this approach is much better, as it put things into a a larger perspective. Or any perspective at all!
My wife is from south-eastern norway and they say "mi" as the first person plural. I have assumed (based on somehting you said in an earlier video (with Luke?)) that it was from dual form. Though they say "mi" they write "vi"
Few years ago there was some debate about gender-neutral pronouns:
"hen" came out on top.
From the Finnish "hän", this is kinda cool, cause we don't have enough Finnish loan-words, imho.
Interestingly the debate pretty much ignored the fact that, they've been using "na" in the north-west for centuries?
1st person pronouns in my Romsdal dialect: I / me (singular), me / oss (plural).
The "g" in "meg" is not pronounced, so "me" gets a double pronominal function.
Jaudå endeleg noko norsk innhald 🗿🗿
This'll be interesting. Your pronounciation is pretty good.
How do you explain the proliferation of pronouns in Norwegian dialects, the simplified version of Jeg/Eg only exists on paper after all. In Møre og Romsdal alone you get Eg, Ej, E, I, Æ and Jeg.
I thought I was learning the lyrics to a Danish song once but it was in Bokmål!
When did theses changes due to "wrong analysis" occur, could many of them have happened due to the probable lessened focus on "correct" language during and after the black death?
When the pronoun "dere" was introduced in 1917, it created an unfortunate situation where the most widely used written form of Norwegian lacks one of the core grammatical nuances all of the Norwegian dialects have (including Eastern Norwegian dialects). Where Bogsprog had "eders eller deres" and Nynorsk had "dykkar eller deira" Bokmål ended up with "deres eller deres". Some have suggested that the Northern and Eastern Norwegian genitive form "dems" should be allowed into Bokmål (e.g. "bilen deres eller bilen dems") to correct the older reform, but it seems more likely that things will carry on as they have for over a century. Norwegians will have to guess based on context what is meant by "på deres side" or "deres flanke". Even if a new reform allowed for a distinction between "dems" and "deres" it would create a situation where "deres" is separated from its original meaning, which is a problem, since most Norwegian dialects use deres, deira, deiras, deires etc. with the old meaning "their" (like Danish "deres" and Swedish "deras").
The entire problem could have been avoided. In the 1800s, this lack of distinction between "deres" and "deres" was limited to the sociolect of Christiania's upper class, and most of them wanted to continue writing in Bogsprog rather than creating a new written language.
I think it has to do with 'the DU form" becoming informal, then archaic and then being replaced by the 2nd plural leaving a void. In Dutch "you"has done the same as in English and French with various stages of replacement or whatever. jij/gij was originally plural replacing du/dij (already informal in Middle Dutch ) with object forms jouw/u. But toi make a new plural form we compounded is with lieden (people/ lads) to give standart jullie ("you lads" of you guys in ) In Groningen dialects still rretained "DU" as dou.
I know you Danish knowledge is less than icelandic and norwegian, but one thing you should be aware of is that the dialects in Jutland are not completely east-norse. eg where I grew up 1p.sing.nom was often pronounced "a". My dad and my older brother used/uses "a" consistently while I seem to use a mix of "a"/"ja"/"jeg".
Jutlandic has several West Norse features.
I speak closer to nynorsk (I am from the south west - Rogaland, Ålgård.
Always wrote bokmål cuz there were to many odd stuff in nynorsk… but when we were allowed to also write in dialect then I jumped off both official written language 😂
My dialect we say: æg, not eg or jeg ☺️
Oh and in my dialect we don’t use: vi, we use me or oss - oss is the dialect version of vi
We say dåkk, not dykk 😅… so yeah our dialects are now allowed in writing for quite a long time now hehe so everything is getting more complicated 🤣🤣🤣
Eg leser begge deler. Og dialekter
In the Upper Saxonian dialect my father speaks, "wir" becomes "mir" because of some kind of consonant shift for easier pronunciation.
Also happens in Swiss German, Swabian, and Yiddish
Are you sure it is not the same reanalysis as in Norwegian? I believe this is the case in the Rhineland and in Luxembourgish.
The plural "you" is "dokker" in Northern Norway as well, in Stavanger they say "me". Just wanted to say that.
Really interesting stuff! As a bokmål writer I kinda get the idea behind nynorsk.
I feel like nynorsk is like the unpopular diet coke, we have 0 TV shows with this written language only. The news channel NRK is forced to use nynorsk.
Unfortunately nynorsk will never reach higher percentages than 15 percent in the country, no matter how much we force it upon us Norwegians.
Har møtt flere fra Stavanger så seier Dokker.
"Lekte dokker med dokker når dokker var små?"
@potetnamnbaknamn895 ja så klart, både "dokker" (dere) og "me" (vi)
Jeg (jæi), eg, eig, e, æ, æg, je, jæ, i, ek, ej are the Norwegian 1st person singular pronouns I've gathered over the years. 11 versions of the same pronoun. I don't remember which part of the country they're all from tbh.
I swear I heard a northerner say "jej" (not jeg/jæi) once, but I'm struggling with finding evidence for it actually existing in a dialect. Perhaps it died out, or he was just a weirdo, idk.
A good followup on this topic could be different casus forms -
"jeg" vs. "meg", "du" vs. "deg"
👍
Aussies use "yous" but it's considered low-rent socio-economically or those of the "their/there/they're" class see it as bAd grAMaR.
Im a Swede.. I talk to Norwegians and Danes, in Swedish.. its often more intelligble then shift to English!
Sometimes one put in a "english words".. when we use different words!
However.. Norweigans write like Danes but speak like swedes.. in any case in Bokmål!
And then Norwegian supose to be West norse.. its Nynorsk that is, but bokmål is east norse (Danish).. west norse is probably Icelandic?
Its this funny thing when I talk to Norweigans.. I can talk to them in "standard swedish" and they reply in "standard norweigan/bokmål".. we sometimes use different words.. its still this that those words is in our vocabulary, but not allways used in the same way!
And then to "Thou" in old english.. isnt this swedish "Du" = You? Deg, dig, dej, dou, whatever??
In anycase.. scandinavian languges is often the esyest to learn for English speaker!
It is my understanding Bokmål and Nynorsk have been converging over time and Bokmål has increasingly become more Nynorsk, especially in that Bokmål accepts more Nynorsk as "proper" now than before.
Hopefully eventually there will only be 1 way to write Norwegian, neither give a particularly good view of what spoken Norwegian is like.
@@essi2 Not quite true. Bokmål is gradually incorporating various spoken forms, so it is becoming more like Nynorsk in a way. Thisbis how living languages work.
Nynorsk, on the other hand, is a dead language which only exists by virtue of holding on to archaic forms like «kva» and «kvifor».
@@SvenElven No way, Nynorsk has had loads of updates, as has Bokmål, and they are getting closer to each other. Nynorsk is not dead at all, it is not even a language, but a way of writing the Norwegian language, which is spoken in very many different dialects. I think Nynorsk is a more poetic way of writing Norwegian.
@ Bokmål changes according to how people speak. Nynorsk only ever changes by comitee vote. It's stone dead, time to put it in the museum.
@@SvenElven There are comitees for both of them, no difference in that respect. You might want to consider travelling to different parts of the country every so often.
@ When did you last hear someone say «kva» or «kvifor»?
Lol everyone hates Nynorsk as it’s unnecessary to learn unless you live in one of those areas that has it as their written language. Nynorsk is also a constructed language so not even a real dialect🤣🤣🤣 What’s truly Norwegian are our dialects which are in the thousands. The closest you get to Old Norse, besides Icelandic, are certain dialects on the west coast as the Norse settlers who fled to Iceland and settled there was from Sogndal, and some deep in the Setesdal valley… We have many nice dialects, but Nynorsk isn’t one of them. Equally as foul as Trønders, Totning, and Østfold (thick -L).
Nynorsk på topp! 🔥
Nynorsk like swedish is the true Scandinavian language.
The Danish is platt German and no Scandinavian at all.
You'd think so but despite the geographical closeness to Germany, Swedish has more German loan words. Like take the Danish word for Window -- Vindue, Germany and Sweden instead say Fenster.
Plural you is clearly unstable considering that you once was the plural form of thou y’all is beginning to be used in the singular.
The problem I find with nynorsk is that it tries to take parts from all dialects, making it kind of a hybrid language where it's hard to guess the right words, whereas bokmål you only need to think of Eastern Norwegian. Maybe I don't say "jeg", but I for sure don't say "eg" either. When it comes down to practicality bokmål wins sadly, and the unpopularity around nynorsk is mostly down to the government forcing students to juggle both of them.
It doesnt really take parts from every dialect, it tries to be neutral, using middle/old norwegian as the common ground. What happens is that each dialects tends to have a unique trait still kept from that branch out.
maybe im being a pedantic dickhole, but your e-sounds are a bit short making, for instance, "dere" sound like "derre" which is another word altogether. dont be scared of the long eeeeee
Jack, I study the Indoeuropean languages, when it comes to the Old norse branch, the vowel developments due to several umlauts can be a nightmare compared to Gothic, Old high German or Old Saxon, do you agree?
4:10 I don't think most Norwegians use "jeg", but rather that "jeg" holds the largest share of usage without forming an outright majority, yet. In fact, the 1st person singular pronoun forms seem to be one of the strongest features of dialects, being the one thing people are more likely to keep even as their speech is influenced by bokmål.
The dominance of spoken "bokmål" or dialects similar, are the majority in media, not in the country in general, though its influence is growing. Which I find unfortunate as someone interested in linguistics and find the dialectal diversity of Norwegian to be very interesting.
I have been collecting and analysing my own dialect of Norwegian, and in that project also making a system of spelling for it as well, which I will use here to demonstrate the pronouns in my dialect. If anyone wishes to guess at the dialect, feel free. Though I suspect the pronouns give it away easily.
1st.per.sing. subject I /iː/ object mé~me /meː~mə/*
2nd.per.sing subject dú /dʉː/ object dé~de /deː~də/*
3rd.per.sing.masc. subject hann /hɑɲː/ object hono /hoːno/
3rd.per.sing.fem. subject hó /huː/ object hena /hænɑ/
3rd.per.sing.neut. subject dæð /deː/ object dí /diː/
1st.per.plu. subject mið /meː/ object oss /osː/
2nd.per.plu. subject dið /deː/ object dokk(o) /dokː(o)/
3rd.per.plu. subject and object dei /dɛː~dæɪ̯/**
* - Stressed and unstressed forms respectively.
** - Monophthong pronunciation is the more "pure" dialectal form, while the diphthong pronunciation is gaining ground again.
Younger speakers are dropping the object forms in the 3rd person singular pronouns and the subject form in the 2nd person plural pronoun, and increasingly using "vi" instead of "mið". But it does vary from place to place. Generally the further from a city the stronger the dialectal forms are.
For myself, all the plural forms stand strong, while the object forms of the 3rd person singular pronouns are more sporadic, though I do still use them, just not as consistently.
I find the 1st person singular subject form to be particularly interesting. If we assume that it followed the regular sound changes in the dialect, then it must have come from an older form "ik" rather than "ek", as from "ek" we would have expected /eː/ as the pronunciation. There is a possibility of an irregular sound change, of course, but surely a simpler solution is more likely.
Beyond this, it is a very interesting dialect as it forms a crossroad between eastern and western features, and northern and southern features within Norway. As well as having features in common with Swedish, such as the intransitive "brínne /briɲːə/(to burn)", contrasting with the transitive "brenne /bræɲːə/(to burn)"(note; /æ/ is realised as [ɛ] before geminate dorsal consonants)