Ivar Andreas Aasen

Ivar Andreas Aasen (; 5 August 1813 He is best known for having assembled one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, Nynorsk, from various dialects. When he was eighteen, he opened an elementary school in his native parish. In 1833, he was tutored by Hans Conrad Thoresen, the husband of the eminent writer Magdalene Thoresen, in the parish of Herø (now Herøy Municipality), where he learned basic Latin. Aasen gradually mastered several languages and began to scientifically study their structure.

Career

When Aasen travelled to Bergen in 1841, he met Bishop Jacob Neumann, who would publish excerpts of his work in the Bergens Stiftstidende ("Bergen Diocese Newspaper"). The rector of Trondheim, Fredrik M. Bugge, would eventually find Neumann's articles while visiting Bergen, and persuaded the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters to provide financial support to cover his expenses as he travelled across Norway. The society agreed, providing him with a generous annual grant of 120-200 speciedaler. In 1842, Aasen began receiving an additional stipend enabling him to give his entire attention to his philological investigations. After certain modifications, including a policy

Throughout most of his career, Aasen lived quietly in lodgings in Oslo (then Christiania), where he moved in 1847, In 1864, Aasen published , the definitive grammar of Nynorsk, and in 1873 he published the final version of his dictionary, now titled . He continued researching the Norweigan language until his death, but wrote little after this.

Legacy

Nynorsk

Landsmål, standardised by Aasen, later evolved into Nynorsk , emerging as the second of Norway's two official languages (the other being Bokmål, the Dano-Norwegian descendant of the Danish language used in Norway in Aasen's time). An unofficial variety of Norwegian closer to Aasen's language is still found in Høgnorsk . Since the early 2000s, linguist Kenneth Katzner considered Nynorsk as on equal footing with Bokmål, as Bokmål tended to be used more in radio, television, and most newspapers, whereas Nynorsk was used equally as much in government work, and approximately in 17% of schools.

Nynorsk is both a written and spoken language.

Ivar Aasen-tunet

, an institution devoted to the Nynorsk language, opened in June 2000. The building in Ørsta was designed by Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn. Their web page includes most of Aasen's texts, an "internet library" dedicated to other examples of Nynorsk literature, and articles about linguistic history in Norway.

The Language Year 2013

Språkåret 2013 (The Language Year 2013) celebrated Ivar Aasen's 200th anniversary, as well as the 100th anniversary of Det Norske Teateret. The year's main focus was to celebrate linguistic diversity in Norway. In a poll released in connection with the celebration, 56% of Norwegians said they held positive views of Aasen, while 7% held negative views. On 5 August 2013, Bergens Tidende, which is normally published mainly in Bokmål, published an edition fully in Nynorsk in memory of Aasen.

Nynorsk Day and Nynorsk Week Nynorskdagen (Nynorsk Day) falls on the 12th of May every year. It commemorates the day of , the law making Landsmål/Nynorsk an official language of Norway alongside Danish (later Bokmål). Noregs Mållag, the main organisation for Nynorsk, encourages people and organisations that typically do not use Nynorsk to write in the language on this day. Several companies, notably Vipps and Ruter, have released Nynorsk language support for their mobile apps on the 12th of May. In 2025, Noregs Mållag announced Nynorsk Day would be expanded into a Nynorsk Week from the 6 to the 12 of May.