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"A language is a dialect backed by an army,"
according to a critical perspective on nation-building. Nation-builder
Iver Andreas Aasen (1813-96), later famous under the name of Ivar
Aasen, had no illusions about any army backing him at any time
during his long life of dedicated hard work. He nevertheless created
an entirely new language from bits and pieces, and lived to see
it become an official language in his country. We are celebrating
the centenary of his death this year.
Ivar Aasen's name is known abroad to a few linguists, historians
of nationalism and other specialists. In Norway, his is a household
name. Hated by some, loved by more and respected by all, the self-taught
and extremely prolific scholar Aasen singlehandedly devised a
comprehensive grammar, a lexicon and indeed a literature for the
new language, nynorsk or New Norwegian. Nynorsk or landsmaal ("Rural
Language") as it was first called, was envisioned to replace
Dano-Norwegian as the national language of the new nation. Alas,
this never came about. Ironically, rather than uniting the people,
the new national language quickly became the source of one of
the most bitter and protracted controversies dividing the Norwegian
nation, right from the beginning in the mid-nineteenth century
up to the present.
Like in many small, peripheral and colonised European countries,
Norwegian elites were in this period busy negotiating and developing
their national identity as a prelude to serious claims of political
independence. For centuries, the country had been a mere Danish
province; it was now in an enforced union with big brother Sweden,
which would last until 1905. The Danish influence was still very
strong, not least in the cultural field. Notably, the written
language, as well as the spoken language of the urban bourgeoisie,
was all but Danish. Many Norwegian dialects, on the other hand,
were quite remote from Danish. The winds of German Romanticism
blew powerfully across the land, preaching that the soul of a
people resided in its language. In other words, the time was ripe
for a generation of Norwegian intellectuals who had the capacity
and courage to counter the Danish cultural hegemon. Ivar Aasen
was perhaps the most uncompromising and brilliant of them. Born
and raised in modest conditions in western Norway, Aasen found
his vocation early in life. Collecting vocabulary and grammar
from large parts of the country, he meticulously built his distinct
form of Norwegian, as a rule retaining the words and phrases which
he deemed as the most ancient and closest to Old Norse.
Aasen's project was compatible with the Romantic nationalism in
vogue at the time, which emphasised both the virtues of the rural
life and postulated connections with the Viking era in its anti-Danish
and anti-Swedish imagery. However, during the early attempts to
officialise Aasen's New Norwegian, it quickly transpired that
a large part of the Norwegian elite would be happy to see Aasen's
innovation as a symbol of nationhood, but were less enthusiastic
about actually using it. As a result, the country was divided
between Dano-Norwegian and New Norwegian inclinations. This is
still the situation, despite ingenious attempts at bridging the
gap between the two varieties -- which are mutually intelligible
-- through the development of hybrid forms, which have only contributed
further to the general linguistic confusion in the country.
Today, there are "radical" and "conservative"
variants of both New Norwegian and reformed Dano-Norwegian (bokmål,
Book Language, or riksmål, National Language). Both are
official languages, although the great majority of the population
uses some form of bokmål, nynorsk being predominant in the
west and in the central mountain areas of Southern Norway. Twenty-five
per cent of national broadcasts are in nynorsk. In the areas where
the majority of the population use nynorsk, it is the language
of instruction in schools; and schoolchildren all over the country
have to write compositions in both variants of Norwegian.
The choice of language form is not a mere linguistic issue. Indeed,
one probably has to be Norwegian in order to fully understand
the subtle political nuances and connotations associated with
the language controversy. Nynorsk is associated with the rural
life and with a commonsensical scepticism vis-à-vis the
affectations, hierarchies and mannerisms of the urban centres.
It is perceived as more "folksy" and more "rooted"
than bokmål, which does not mean that it is anti-intellectual.
Many of Norway's finest writers and most outstanding thinkers
write in nynorsk. It nevertheless remains in many ways a counterculture
of resistance - more than a hundred years after its officialisation.
So which language form, then, does the Norwegian army support?
The obvious answer is: Neither, but it remains firmly committed
to defending the dispute to the last man.
© Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1996
Nexus
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