Ernst Jahr
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748637829
- eISBN:
- 9781474400855
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637829.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
This book conveys insights into the social and political motivations and driving forces behind Norwegian language planning. Norwegian language development from 1814 has, since Einar Haugen’s book ...
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This book conveys insights into the social and political motivations and driving forces behind Norwegian language planning. Norwegian language development from 1814 has, since Einar Haugen’s book Language conflict and language planning: the case of modern Norwegian (1966), been one of the most celebrated examples of language planning in the world. This book not only tells the rest of the story till 2014, but also introduces a new analysis of the Norwegian development altogether, drawing heavily on the development and results of sociolinguistic and language contact research. The year 2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Norwegian nation following centuries of Danish rule. This book thus gives an account of that entire 200-year period, and analyses how Norwegians defined, fought over and developed their own independent Scandinavian language (with two written standard varieties, Bokmål and Nynorsk), differentiating it from Danish and Swedish, through language planning. Nearly two centuries of Norwegian language planning and conflict have encompassed an extraordinary and politically motivated sociolinguistic experiment (1938) which led to decades of intense linguistic struggle and which has had no parallel anywhere in the world. It contributes to language planning theory as well as to the rapidly emerging field of historical sociolinguistics.Less
This book conveys insights into the social and political motivations and driving forces behind Norwegian language planning. Norwegian language development from 1814 has, since Einar Haugen’s book Language conflict and language planning: the case of modern Norwegian (1966), been one of the most celebrated examples of language planning in the world. This book not only tells the rest of the story till 2014, but also introduces a new analysis of the Norwegian development altogether, drawing heavily on the development and results of sociolinguistic and language contact research. The year 2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Norwegian nation following centuries of Danish rule. This book thus gives an account of that entire 200-year period, and analyses how Norwegians defined, fought over and developed their own independent Scandinavian language (with two written standard varieties, Bokmål and Nynorsk), differentiating it from Danish and Swedish, through language planning. Nearly two centuries of Norwegian language planning and conflict have encompassed an extraordinary and politically motivated sociolinguistic experiment (1938) which led to decades of intense linguistic struggle and which has had no parallel anywhere in the world. It contributes to language planning theory as well as to the rapidly emerging field of historical sociolinguistics.
