A related, more conservative orthographic standard, commonly known as Riksmål, is regulated by the non-governmental Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature.

[7] It was an adaptation of written Danish- commonly used since the past union with Denmark- to Dano-Norwegian, the koiné spoken by the Norwegian urban elite, especially in the capital.

The name Bokmål was officially adopted in 1929 after a proposition to call the written language Dano-Norwegian lost by a single vote in the Lagting.

[6] The government does not regulate spoken Bokmål and recommends that normalised pronunciation should follow the phonology of the speaker's local dialect.

In The Phonology of Norwegian, Gjert Kristoffersen writes that 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 [sic], with the capital Oslo as the obvious centre.

[10][12] Norwegians used Danish primarily in writing, but it gradually came to be spoken by urban elites on formal or official occasions.

Although Danish never became the spoken language of the vast majority of the population, by the time Norway's ties with Denmark were severed in 1814, a Dano-Norwegian vernacular often called the "educated daily speech"[citation needed] had become the mother tongue of elites in most Norwegian cities, such as Bergen, Kristiania and Trondheim.

Although compelled to submit to a dynastic union with Sweden, this spark of independence continued to burn, influencing the evolution of language in Norway.

[12] Haugen indicates that: "Within the first generation of liberty, two solutions emerged and won adherents, one based on the speech of the upper class and one on that of the common people.

The term Riksmål (Rigsmaal), meaning National Language, was first proposed by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in 1899 as a name for the Norwegian variety of written Danish as well as spoken Dano-Norwegian.

The 1907 reform documents do not mention the language by name, but the term Riksmål eventually caught on and was adopted by the Ministry of Church and Education in the years leading up to the 1917 spelling reform, appearing in its 1908 publication Utredning av spørsmaalet om et mulig samarbeide mellem landsmaal og riksmaal i retskrivningen ("Investigation of the question of a possible cooperation between Landmål and Riksmål with regards to orthography").

In line with these plans, the 1917 reform introduced some elements from Norwegian dialects and Nynorsk as optional alternatives to traditional Dano-Norwegian forms.

This meant the removal of many traditional Dano-Norwegian forms in Bokmål, a decision that was harshly criticised by the Riksmål movement for being too radical and premature.

While it criticised the adoption of Nynorsk spellings, it initially also expressed support for making the orthography more phonemic, for instance by removing silent h's in interrogative pronouns (which was done in Swedish a few years earlier).

Since the official Samnorsk policy was abolished, Riksmål and Bokmål have converged, and The Academy currently edits an online dictionary that covers both.