Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while the old Norwegian dialects before the influence of Danish and Bokmål is classified as a West Norse language together with Faroese and Icelandic.

Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology ( that is, the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of the language ) and the prosody ( the patterns of stress and intonation ) differ somewhat.

The more widespread of the two Norwegian languages, Bokmål, is a daughter language of Danish.

Norwegian has two standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, the choice between which is subject to controversy: Each Norwegian municipality can declare one of the two its official language, or it can remain " language neutral ".

Kennings are virtually absent from the surviving corpus of continental West Germanic verse ; the Old Saxon Heliand contains only one example: lîk-hamo “ body-raiment ” = “ body ” ( Heliand 3453 b ), a compound which, in any case, is normal in West Germanic and North Germanic prose ( Old English līchama, Old High German lîchamo, lîchinamo, Dutch lichaam, Old Icelandic líkamr, líkami, Old Swedish līkhamber, Swedish lekamen, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål legeme, Norwegian Nynorsk lekam ).

In Norwegian Nynorsk and Icelandic the Old Norse form has survived to this day ( in Icelandic only as a less used synonym to gluggi ), in Swedish the word vindöga remains as a term for a hole through the roof of a hut, and in the Danish language ‘ vindue ’ and Norwegian Bokmål ‘ vindu ’, the direct link to ‘ eye ’ is lost, just like for ' window '.

The Danish ( but not the Bokmål ) word is pronounced fairly similarly to window.

The present name of the Kingdom of Norway in Norwegian Bokmål is " Kongeriket Norge " and in Norwegian Nynorsk " Kongeriket Noreg ", both only a couple of letters removed from the original " northern way "; " Nor ( d )-( v ) eg ".

The division between Insular Scandinavian ( önordiska / ønordisk / øynordisk ) and Continental Scandinavian ( Skandinavisk ) is based on mutual intelligibility between the two groups and developed due to different influences, particularly the political union of Denmark and Norway ( 1536 – 1814 ) which lead to significant Danish influence on central and eastern Norwegian dialects ( Bokmål or Dano-Norwegian ).

Bokmål is used by 85 – 90 % of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language.

Bokmål is regulated by the governmental Norwegian Language Council.

Nevertheless, there is a spoken variety of Norwegian that is commonly seen as the de facto standard for spoken Bokmål.

" Bokmål [...] is in its most common variety looked upon as reflecting formal middle-class urban speech, especially that found in the eastern part of Southern Norway, with the capital Oslo as the obvious centre.

In particular, Knudsen's work on language reform in the mid-19th century was important for the 1907 orthography and a subsequent reform in 1917, so much so that he is now often called the " father of Bokmål ".

Currently, Riksmål denotes the moderate, chiefly pre-1938, unofficial variant of Bokmål, which is still in use and is regulated by the Norwegian Academy and promoted by the Riksmålsforbundet.

Red is Bokmål, blue is Nynorsk and gray depicts Ø | neutral areas. In the Norwegian discourse, the term Dano-Norwegian is seldom used with reference to contemporary Bokmål and its spoken varieties.

There are two written standards: Bokmål, " book language ", based on Danish ( Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible languages with significant differences primarily in pronunciation rather than vocabulary or grammar ) and urban Eastern Norwegian dialects, and Nynorsk, " New Norwegian ", based primarily on Western and rural inland Norwegian dialects.

Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects.

The Constitution of Norway ( formal name: the Constitution of the Kingdom of Norway ; Norwegian Bokmål: Kongeriket Norges Grunnlov ; Norwegian Nynorsk: Kongeriket Noregs Grunnlov ) was first adopted on 16 May and subsequently signed and dated on 17 May 1814 by the Norwegian Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll.

Seland chose to write in his native tongue, Nynorsk, at a time when most Norwegian authors still hung on to the Danish-inspired Bokmål.

Being the origins of the written language and thus having higher status, Danish continued to have an impact on bergensk into the 20th century, and a Dano-Norwegian koiné sociolect, resembling Riksmål, is still spoken, although it in recent decades has become much more similar to Bokmål.

From a linguistic point of view, Bokmål and Danish are the same language.

In Norway, encyclopedias follow the unique history of the Norwegian language, the Bokmål variant having branched off from Danish during the 19th century.

With certain modifications, the most important of which were introduced later by Aasen himself, but also through a latter policy aiming to merge this Norwegian language with Dano-Norwegian, this language has become Nynorsk (" New Norwegian "), the second of Norway's two official languages ( the other being Bokmål, the Dano-Norwegian descendant of the Danish language used in Norway at Aasen's time ).

The Latin term, applied to a Germanic custom, was adopted from a Germanic term, * morgangeba ( compare Early English morgengifu, German Morgengabe, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål Morgengave, Norwegian Nynorsk Morgongåve and Swedish Morgongåva ).

The nationality of the language has been a hotly debated topic, and its users and proponents have generally not been fond of the implied association with Danish ( hence the neutral names Riksmål and Bokmål, meaning national language and book language respectively ).

Historically, many Nynorsk supporters have held that Nynorsk is the only genuinely Norwegian language, since Bokmål is a relic of the dual monarchy ; therefore, the term Dano-Norwegian or simply Danish applied to Bokmål can be used to stigmatise or delegitimise the language.

The following table shows a few central differences between Bokmål and Danish.

It thus has North-Germanic grammatical forms, and Nynorsk grammar may be compared to Bokmål Norwegian, but one can note that it is closer in grammar to Old West Norse than Bokmål, which was influenced by Danish much more heavily than Nynorsk.

The situation is a bit more complicated in Bokmål, which has inherited the Danish two-gender system.

In Icelandic the word remains skegg, in modern Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk, it appears as skjegg, in Swedish, it is skägg and in Danish, skæg.

Thus, the scientific name of the Eurasian Teal – unchanged since Linnaeus ' time – translates as " duck that makes cryc "; common names like the Bokmål krikkand, Danish krikand and German Krickente mean the same.

* Poland, in the languages of Alemannic, Danish, Dutch, German, Low German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian ( both Bokmål and Nynorsk ), Pennsylvania Dutch, Saterland Frisian, and Swedish

Alternative names include wapentake, herred ( Danish, Norwegian Bokmål ), herad ( Norwegian Nynorsk ), hérað ( Icelandic ), härad or hundare ( Swedish ), Harde ( German ), kihlakunta ( Finnish ) and kihelkond ( Estonian ).

The Germanic languages and dialects of Scandinavia are a classic example of a dialect continuum, from Swedish dialects in Finland, to Swedish, Gutnish, Elfdalian, Scanian, Danish, Norwegian ( Bokmål and Nynorsk ), Faroese, Icelandic, as well as many local dialects of the respective languages.

In Nynorsk ( unlike Bokmål ), masculine and feminine nouns are differentiated not only in the singular definitive form ( in which the noun takes a suffix to indicate " the "), but also in the plural forms ( which they would not be in Bokmål ), for example:

Nynorsk, Neo Norwegian or New Norwegian is one of two official written standards for the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål.

Nynorsk is a North-Germanic language, close in form to the other form of written Norwegian ( namely, Bokmål ), and Icelandic.

The Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature was represented, along with other non-governmental language organisations, in the Norwegian Language Council, which regulates the official Bokmål and Nynorsk languages, since its establishment in 1972 until it was reorganized in 2005.

There are, however, a number of spoken varieties of Norwegian that are close or largely identical to written Bokmål, sometimes even in a conservative form similar to historical Dano-Norwegian-notably, the higher sociolect in Oslo and in other Norwegian cities.

The Høgnorsk movement grew out of opposition to the official Samnorsk policy which aimed at evening out the differences between Nynorsk and the other main variety of Norwegian language, Bokmål.