I've read the wikis on both Bokmal and Nynorsk. Maybe I'm missing something. What is the difference between the two? I'm thinking of either traveling to, or moving to Norway, but I can't figure out this language thing over there. Which one would be better to learn? Or are they essentially one and the same?
Bokmål ([ˈbuːkmɔːl], lit. "book language") is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90%[1] of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language. Above from Wikipedia
Judging from This map in Wikipedia, it looks like Bokmal is the official dialect in the southeast of Norway, which includes Oslo. If that's where you're going, then it might be your best choice. If you're going to the southwest, then maybe you'd be better off with Nynorsk. Considering that Danes and Norwegians can understand each other with a little patience, and many educated Danes and Norwegians can also understand Swedish because it's the 500-pound gorilla of Scandinavia, I'm sure the Norwegian dialects are all easily intercomprehensible. So whichever one you choose, people everywhere will probably understand you. What matters then, if this is true, is whether you will be able to understand them. If you're considering taking a job there, or doing graduate work in a Norwegian university, or marrying a Norwegian honey, or moving there for some reason other than "I hate whales and Norway is one of the few countries where it's still legal to kill them," then surely you already know some Norwegians. You should ask them!
Lol. Naw I have a childhood friend who lives in Sweden. For a couple of years now, I feel like Norway has been calling me. Like I belong there. I don't know what it is about it. The fjords, the culture... The pretty norskie girls...
That appears to be a non sequitur. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Well then, follow your bliss. Just don't burn your bridges behind you, and don't make an expensive or irreversible commitment until you've at least seen it in all four seasons. I get the impression I'm considerably older than you (68) and therefore have probably seen a lot more places than you have. I assure you confidently that there are pretty girls absolutely everywhere. Hell, there are millions of them right here in the USA. I see new ones every day.
Several things to keep in mind, Bokmal and Nynorsk are just written, not spoken. There are a variety of dialects all through Norway, but they would all be able to read the same written forms. Bokmal is a writing system developed when Norway was under Danish rule, and is thus very similar to written Danish. If you take a look at both side by side, they are sometimes indistinguishable if you are not familiar with vocabulary. Nynorsk is a relatively recent invention, an attempt to create a new Norwegian writing system free of Danish influence. Were I you, I would focus principally upon Bokmal. All 3 of the languages are "mutually intelligible", but both Norwegians and Swedes complain that they cannot understand spoken Danish, and so conversations tend to be rather one sided. Danish and Norwegian are more similar in writing, and Norwegian is probably the best understood by speakers of both Danish and Swedish. Much of the reason Norwegians can understand Swedish is from watching Swedish television, especially so along the their border region. As far as being understood, keep in mind that almost everyone there speaks English proficiently, if not fluently. That region has the highest rate of non-native English speakers anywhere in the world, upwards of 90% IIRC. As for understanding them, I still can't make sense of a single goddamn thing they're saying.
Nynorsk is a pain in the arse that my kids have to waste time learning in school. The idea was to create a median dialect that could unify the many small local dialects but as said bokmal is the dialect which counts here. I've been here for 13 years now, originally from Phila PA if you have any questions just ask
Swedish is the easiest, danish depends on the dialect to my ears danish sounds like someone speaking norweigan with a flat tone and they swallow the words before they get all the way out But we get more swedish TV than danish which no doubt plays a part Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I did not know this of you! Where are you from originally? Is it difficult to emigrate to Norway? I mean, if I don't speak the language, how hard would it be to find a job, place to live etc?
Grew up in south jersey right over the river from Phila PA. I married a norweigan so it was easy for me. Other routes, not sure how easy or difficult they are probably a bit easier for a westerner but that's just a guess. Everybody here speaks english so language is no real barrier while you learn norsk. Right now Norway has the lowest unemployment around I believe. The ease of finding a job depends on what you do, loads of IT and Engineering jobs available in many of them english is used quite alot. Finding a place to live should be fairly easy but around Oslo it is very expensive. I live an hours drive south of Oslo (commuted to Oslo when I worked there) in a town called Fredrikstad.
Danish has certainly gone off in its own crazy direction, phonetically. It has some sounds that are very difficult for foreigners to produce, and therefore also difficult to recognize and parse when listening to someone speak. I had a friend who was a foreign exchange student in Denmark and learned a fair amount of the language while he was there. Like most people who learn a language in their youth, when their brains are still malleable, his pronunciation was just about perfect (as verified by native speakers). It's one of the oddest-sounding languages I've ever heard--and I'm a man who grew up with a mother who spoke Bohemian (we call it "Czech" today because it's easier to spell and pronounce) and who later in life lived with a lady from Sichuan. Everyone in my generation has heard Swedish in all those trendy, interminable, unfathomable Ingmar Bergman movies, and it can be almost musical. I don't believe I've ever heard Norwegian spoken. One of the most delightful sounds I've ever heard was the Swedish flight attendants on my SAS flight to Europe making the announcements in German, with a Swedish accent. German has never sounded so sweet! This phenomen occurs in many places. During the Soviet era, the Estonian language was suppressed and all TV was in Russian. So the Estonians tuned their TV sets to Helsinki, which is right across the bay from Tallinn, and within a very short time they could understand Finnish perfectly. The two languages are very closely related, although not as closely as Norwegian and Danish; perhaps more like Dutch and German. So most Finns, who have had no exposure to Estonian, can't understand it at all. Brazilians are accustomed to being inundated with Spanish-language print and broadcast media, so many of them can understand Spanish, at least well enough to help a tourist with directions. But very few people in Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, etc., can understand Portuguese, even though to us outsiders the two languages seem very similar. Bilingualism and even trilingualism (and higher orders of mulitlingualism, for that matter) is quite common all over Europe, and English is perhaps the most popular second language there, particularly in western Europe where Russian never had much influence. These are people who, throughout history, could not travel more than a couple of hundred miles without finding themselves among people who spoke a different language. So it was a matter of practicality to know the language of their neighbors. Here in the USA you can drive for a week in almost any direction and still be in a place where everyone speaks English, or at worst a place like Quebec where most of the businesses strive with a sigh of resignation to serve anglophones, or northern Mexico where the old adage, "language follows the coin, not the flag or the holy book," makes communication in American English a matter of good business sense. So not only do Americans not put a high priority on multilingualism, but they see no reason why the entire rest of the human population does not simply abandon their strange, tongue-twisting native languages and learn to "talk American" like all sensible people.
@Sock. Awesome! So If I have any further questions about moving to Norway, or the language, could I bother you?
