Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 229

THE SCAND. COMMUNITY OF LANGUAGE 223
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greater than that of the German-speaking area from Switzerland
to Holstein and East Prussia, which has nevertheless achieved a
perfectly unified literary language. Instead, the 12 million people
of the Scandinavian area created 6 different literary languages:
1) Danish, 2) Swedish, 3) Norwegian “book language” (“bok-
mál”), 4) neo-Norwegian (“nynorsk”), 5) Faeroese, and 6) Ice-
landic, a fact which is, of course, connected with the histories
of the countries in question, and the age-long dissentions between
them.
Three of the six literary languages are old and reflect an
unbroken tradition going back to the middle ages, viz. Icelandic,
Swedish, and Danish. The three others are younger, being in
fact products of the last century. Icelandic is the oldest Scan-
dinavian literary language. During the middle ages it was far
and away the most important of them, being the vehicle of an
extremely rich and artistically very valuable literature. The
language spoken in Iceland has preserved its archaic character to
a surprising extent till this very day, both in morphology, voca-
bulary, and syntax. This, together with the isolated geographical
position of the island, has resulted in the virtual separation of
Iceland from the Scandinavian linguistic community. A Nor-
wegian, a Swede, or a Dane cannot understand spoken or written
Icelandic without previous study. The same applies to Faeroese.
In spite of the close kinship which exists in other respects, we
are therefore compelled to leave Iceland and the Faeroes out of
account when discussing the present-day linguistic community of
Scandinavia.
From the Reformation till about 1900 Danish was the literary
language of Norway, though with a Norwegian pronunciation
and with certain Norwegian features as regards vocabulary, in-
flection, and idiom. The present Norwegian “book language” is
the result of a further “Norvagization” of this Dano-Norwegian
language brought about especially by the spelling reforms of 1907
and 1917- The other literary language in Norway, the “neo-Nor-
wegian,” is a creation of the poet and philologist Ivar Aasen from
about 1850, on the basis of the dialects of western Norway. The
latest spelling reform, that of 1938, has resulted in the further
approximation to each other of the two written languages which
exist in Norway, and the ultimate goal of this process appears
to be the complete fusion of them into a unified Norwegian
language in a not too distant future.
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