Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

24 Language Planning and Education
recognised by parliament in 1885 to have equal validity with Dano-Norwegian
and renamed Nynorsk (New Norwegian) in 1929. Today, despite the unfavourable
prognostications of some of Aasen’s contemporaries (see Linn 2004: 228), who
believed it to be too much of an artificial contrivance, 4 Nynorsk persists as one of
Norway’s standard languages – albeit a lesser used one than its competitor.
This competing standard, the product of a second line of nineteenth-century
language reform, emerged from an alternative conception of Norwegian nationhood,
one that looked to the urban, middle-class culture of the time rather than the distant
past as a more relevant resource for the construction of a modern Norwegian identity
(see Vikør 2000: 113). In linguistic terms, the implication was that the Norwegianised
Danish spoken in the towns rather than Aasen’s rural dialects was an appropriate
foundation for a modern written Norwegian standard. What was needed, therefore,
were adjustments to the existing Danish standard to mark it as more distinctively
Norwegian: the replacement, specifically, of foreign lexicon with ‘native’ Norwegian
vocabulary, and orthographic changes that would more authentically reflect the
everyday pronunciation of educated, middle-class Norwegians. Leading this reform
programme, or more precisely one faction within it, was the teacher Knud Knudsen
(1812–95), whose work is generally acknowledged as laying the basis of a Dano-
Norwegian that received recognition in the official revision of the standard of 1907
and that was subsequently renamed Bokmål (book language) in 1929.
By the early twentieth century, then, there were two standard languages in
Norway, a situation sufficiently uncomfortable as to encourage attempts at a
rapprochement between Bokmål and Nynorsk, from which, it was hoped, a single
fused standard would emerge. The story of these ultimately unsuccessful endeavours,
fascinating though they are, lies, however, beyond the scope of this chapter, since the
main aim of this thumbnail sketch has been to bring out the contrast with English,
this lying primarily in the more obvious nationalist motivation driving Norwegian
standardisation, the more direct and self-conscious LP involved, and in the more
overtly political character of the process.
There is, however, a further reason for citing the Norwegian case here, which is
that it was one of the sources for Haugen’s (1966c) elaboration of a model of
language planning, since refined (Haugen 1983), which continues to be influential.
The model, in its original form (Haugen 1966c/1972: 110), identifies four processes
involved in developing a standard language: (a) selection of norm, (b) codification of
form, (c) elaboration of function and (d) acceptance by the community.
Selection here refers to the choice of one or more dialects to serve as the basis of
the standard, and is exemplified in the Norwegian case by Knudsen’s preference for
the speech of the urban middle class over rural dialects as the basis of a new
Norwegian standard. Codification, of which we have already spoken, involves
stabilising, or fixing, the form of the language through the production of normative
grammars and dictionaries: Aasen’s 1864 grammar and 1873 dictionary would
be examples here. Elaboration, sometimes referred to as ‘cultivation’, aims at an
expansion of the language’s functional range, allowing it to serve, for example, as a
medium of scientific and technical discourse. Typically, this requires the develop-