Editing Nynorsk (section)

==History==
Norway had its own written and oral language—[[Old Norse|Norwegian]]. After the [[Kalmar Union]], Norway became a [[Denmark–Norway|less important part of Denmark]]. At that time, [[Danish language|Danish]] was declared the written language of Norway until 1814, and Danish with Norwegian intonation and pronunciation was on occasion spoken in the cities (see [[Dano-Norwegian]]). With the independence of Norway from Denmark, Danish became a foreign language and thus lost much of its prestige, and a conservative, written form of Norwegian, Landsmål, had been developed by 1850. By this time, however, the Danish language had been gradually reformed into the written language Riksmål, and no agreement was reached on which of the two forms to use. In 1885, the parliament declared the two forms official and equal.

Efforts were made to fuse the two written forms into one language. A result was that Landsmål and Riksmål lost their official status in 1929, and were replaced by the written forms Nynorsk and Bokmål, which were intended to be temporary intermediary stages before their final fusion into one hypothesised official Norwegian language known at the time as Samnorsk. This project was later abandoned<ref name="språkråd" /><ref name="jahr">Jahr, E.H., The fate of Samnorsk: a social dialect experiment in language planning. In: Clyne, M.G., 1997, Undoing and redoing corpus planning. De Gruyter, Berlin.</ref> and Nynorsk and Bokmål remain the two officially sanctioned standards of what is today called the Norwegian language.

Both written languages are in reality fusions between the Norwegian and Danish languages as they were spoken and written around 1850, with Nynorsk closer to Norwegian and Bokmål closer to Danish. The official standard of Nynorsk has been significantly altered during the process to create the common language form Samnorsk. A minor purist fraction of the Nynorsk population has stayed firm with the historical Aasen norm where these alterations of Nynorsk were rejected, which is known as [[Høgnorsk]] ({{langx|en|High Norwegian}}, analogous to [[High German languages|High German]]). [[Ivar Aasen-sambandet]] is an umbrella organization of associations and individuals promoting the use of Høgnorsk, whereas [[Noregs Mållag]] and [[Norsk Målungdom]] advocate the use of Nynorsk in general.

The Landsmål (Landsmaal) language standard was constructed by the Norwegian [[Linguistics|linguist]] [[Ivar Aasen]] during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian-based alternative to [[Danish language|Danish]], which was commonly written, and to some extent spoken, in [[Norway]] at the time.

The word ''Nynorsk'' also has another meaning. In addition to being the name of the present, official written language standard, Nynorsk can also refer to the Norwegian language in use after [[Old Norwegian]], 11th to 14th centuries, and [[Middle Norwegian]], 1350 to about 1550.<ref name="OldNyn">{{cite web|title=Nynorsk som talemål|url=http://www.sprakradet.no/svardatabase/?CurrentForm.SearchText=skulen+nynorsk+og+bokm%C3%A5l+i&CurrentForm.KategoriFilter|website=Språkrådet|access-date=8 January 2017|quote=[Nynorsk] kan i tillegg bety ‘norsk språk i nyere tid (etter 1500)’, altså etter gammelnorsk og mellomnorsk.}}</ref> The written Norwegian that was used until the period of Danish rule (1536-1814), closely resembles Nynorsk (New Norwegian).{{citation needed|date=January 2020}}  A major source of old written material is [[Diplomatarium Norvegicum]] in 22 printed volumes.

In 2023 [[Jon Fosse]] received the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]]. He was the first person awarded this prize to write in Nynorsk.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/05/jon-fosses-nobel-prize-announces-his-overdue-arrival-on-the-global-stage|title=Jon Fosse's Nobel prize announces his overdue arrival on the global stage|first=Philip|last=Oltermann|date=5 October 2023|newspaper=The Guardian}}</ref>