Nynorsk: The Literary Language of Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse

The following post is by Troy Smith, Nordic Area Reference Librarian in the European Reading Room.

With a new Nobel Prize in Literature to be announced on October 10, 2024 and awarded on December 10, 2024, now is a good time to recognize the reigning Nobel Laureate, the Norwegian Jon Fosse (b. 1959). According to the Nobel Committee, he received the prize “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” Septology is perhaps Fosse’s greatest prose work. It first appeared in English translation as three books, The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name. The other genres in which Fosse has worked are children’s literature, translation, poetry, and essays. Previously, three Norwegians had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) in 1903; Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) in 1920; and Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) in 1928. Fosse, however, is the first Nobel Prize in Literature winner to write his works in Nynorsk (new Norwegian). But what is Nynorsk?

This question is best answered by turning to Norway’s geography and history. As Norway is a country of mountains and fjords, many communities have developed in isolation from one another, leading to a profusion of local dialects. Indeed, even in this age of mass communication and rapid transportation, Norway is a favored destination for linguists; there are just so many variants of spoken Norwegian, the possibilities for study and research seem almost endless.

While geography continues to determine the language Norwegians speak with their family and hometown friends, history has been a decisive influence on the orthographies in which they write. After Sweden left the Kalmar Union in the sixteenth century, Denmark and Norway formed a personal union that would come to be known as Denmark-Norway. But for siding with Napoleon, Denmark had to surrender Norway to Sweden in 1814 according to the terms of the Treaty of Kiel. Claiming independence, Norway ratified its Eidsvoll Constitution (celebrated each year on May 17) before settling for a much freer personal union with Sweden. With the dissolution of this union in 1905, Norway became a sovereign state.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the language of literature and bureaucracy in Norway was Danish (even if it was sometimes still called Norwegian), and educated elites in Kristiana (present-day Oslo) spoke Dano-Norwegian, a koine (mixed language) that favored Danish norms with Norwegian pronunciations. After 1814, the Norwegians were a relatively free people with their own constitution. Why, some asked, were they still writing in Danish?

For the linguist Knud Knudsen (1812–1895), this problem was easily solved. Just take Danish and adjust the spelling to reflect Norwegian pronunciation! This amalgam of Danish and Norwegian supposedly imitated the language spoken in Norway’s larger towns and cities, but Knudsen’s critics argued that it was neither quite Danish nor quite Norwegian. Knudsen’s orthography became known as Riksmål (kingdom-language) and later, in 1929, Bokmål (book-language).

Ivar Aasen (1813–1896), on the other hand, had a different idea. From the dialects he had collected on his travels throughout Norway, he created the synthetic Landsmål (country-language). In designing Landsmål, Aasen borrowed heavily from the dialects of the western and central regions, where Danish had had less of an impact. Landsmål thus has greater affinities with Old Norse and modern Icelandic than Riksmål/Bokmål does. By calling his invention Landsmål, Aasen meant that it reflected the country (Land) of Norway as a whole, and not just the rural (landlig) regions, as one might assume. Landsmål became Norway’s second national written language in 1885. In 1929, the name Landsmål was officially changed to Nynorsk. Today all Norwegian students learn both Bokmål and Nynorsk, although they choose one or the other as their primary orthography.

Fosse may be the first Nynorsk writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Landsmål/Nynorsk has a long and proud legacy in Norwegian literary history. Arne Garborg (1851–1924) was among the first authors to achieve a critical breakthrough with Aasen’s literary language, and he is now firmly installed in the Norwegian canon. In 1877, Garborg authored (in Riksmål!) Den ny-norske Sprog- og Nationalitetsbevægelse (The new-Norwegian language- and nationality-movement), in which he challenged those who demanded a monolingual Norwegian literary culture. Aslaug Vaa (1889–1965) won fame for her exploration of Nynorsk’s lyrical potential, and Tarjei Vesaas’ (1897–1970) depictions of rural Norway jive with Nynorsk, as it is largely derived from rustic dialects.

While there are no official statistics on the use of Nynorsk, a recent estimate claims that there are a half million Norwegians who regularly employ it. (This might include some who also write in Bokmål.) In a country of five-and-a-half million inhabitants, that would put Nynorsk users in a decided minority. Furthermore, the percentage of grunnskole/grunnskule (comprehensive school) pupils who choose Nynorsk as their preferred orthography has gone down from 14.8 percent in 2001 to 11.6 percent in 2021. Fortunately, the Norwegian government rallied in support of Nynorsk in 2021, passing a språklov (language-law) that went into effect in January of the next year. In addition to protecting the recognized languages (Quainish, Romani, the Saami languages, and Norwegian sign language), the språklov reaffirmed the equality of Bokmål and Nynorsk. With his Nobel Prize win, Fosse has proven the parity of the two Norwegian orthographies.

The following Website was consulted in writing this post:

“Jon Fosse: Facts.” The Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 2024.