[3] He was born as Iver Andreas Aasen at Åsen in Ørsta (then Ørsten), in the district of Sunnmøre, on the west coast of Norway.

Gradually, and by dint of infinite patience and concentration, the young peasant mastered many languages, and began the scientific study of their structure.

His Grammar of the Norwegian Dialects (Danish: Det Norske Folkesprogs Grammatik, 1848) was the result of much labour, and of journeys taken to every part of the country.

[8] Aasen composed poems and plays in the composite dialect to show how it should be used; one of these dramas, The Heir (1855), was frequently acted, and may be considered as the pioneer of all the abundant dialect-literature of the last half-century of the 1800s, from Vinje to Garborg.

He lived very quietly in lodgings in Oslo (then Christiania), surrounded by his books and shrinking from publicity, but his name grew into wide political favour as his ideas about the language of the peasants became more and more the watch-word of the popular party.

[10] Quite early in his career, in 1842, he had begun to receive a grant to enable him to give his entire attention to his philological investigations; and the Storting (Norwegian parliament), conscious of the national importance of his work, treated him in this respect with more and more generosity as he advanced in years.

Ivar Aasen holds perhaps an isolated place in literary history as the one man who has invented, or at least selected and constructed, a language which has pleased so many thousands of his countrymen that they have accepted it for their schools, their sermons and their songs.