Norwegian is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

Proto-Norse is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic during the first centuries AD in what is today Southern Sweden.

At the same time, the beginning of the Viking Age led to the spread of Old Norse to Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.

Viking colonies also existed in parts of the British Isles, France (Normandy), North America, and Kievan Rus.

The economic and political dominance of the Hanseatic League between 1250 and 1450 in the main Scandinavian cities brought large Middle Low German–speaking populations to Norway.

[5] In the late Middle Ages, dialects began to develop in Scandinavia because the population was rural and little travel occurred.

Norway entered a union with Denmark in 1397 and Danish, over time, replaced Middle Norwegian as the language of the elite, the church, literature, and the law.

Knud Knudsen proposed to change spelling and inflection in accordance with the Dano-Norwegian koiné, known as "cultivated everyday speech."

Ivar Aasen, a botanist and self-taught linguist, began his work to create a new Norwegian language at the age of 22.

In 1899, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson proposed the neutral name Riksmål, meaning 'national language' like Landsmål, and this was officially adopted along with the 1907 spelling reform.

After the personal union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905, both languages were developed further and reached what is now considered their classic forms after a reform in 1917.

However, opponents of the official policy still managed to create a massive protest movement against Samnorsk in the 1950s, fighting in particular the use of "radical" forms in Bokmål text books in schools.

That rise culminates in the final syllable of an accentual phrase, while the utterance-final fall common in most languages is either very small or absent.

[citation needed] The diacritics are not compulsory, but may in a few cases distinguish between different meanings of the word, e.g.: for ('for/to'), fór ('went'), fòr ('furrow') and fôr ('fodder').

As a result, the development of modern written Norwegian has been subject to strong controversy related to nationalism, rural versus urban discourse, and Norway's literary history.

[14] For instance, a Norwegian whose main language form is Bokmål will study Nynorsk as a mandatory subject throughout both elementary and high school.

Examples are Setesdal, the western part of Telemark county (fylke) and several municipalities in Hallingdal, Valdres, and Gudbrandsdalen.

There is also an unofficial form of Nynorsk, called Høgnorsk, discarding the post-1917 reforms, and thus close to Ivar Aasen's original Landsmål.

Out of the 431 municipalities in Norway, 161 have declared that they wish to communicate with the central authorities in Bokmål, 116 (representing 12% of the population) in Nynorsk, while 156 are neutral.

Variations in grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation cut across geographical boundaries and can create a distinct dialect at the level of farm clusters.

[21] The only exceptions are the dialect of Bergen and a few upper class sociolects at the west end of Oslo that have completely lost the feminine gender.

In Nynorsk, nouns ending in -ing typically have masculine plural inflections, like the word dronning in the following table.

The enclitic -s in Norwegian evolved as a shorthand expression for the possessive pronouns sin, si, sitt and sine.

[citation needed] Norwegian adjectives, like those of Swedish and Danish, inflect for definiteness, gender, number and for comparison (affirmative/comparative/superlative).

Inflection for definiteness follows two paradigms, called "weak" and "strong", a feature shared among the Germanic languages.

This means that nouns will have to agree with the adjective when there is a copula verb involved, like in Bokmål: være ('to be'), bli ('become'), ser ut ('looks like'), kjennes ('feels like') etc.

[33] In June 2022, the Language Council of Norway (Språkrådet)[34][35] started including hen in both Bokmål and Nynorsk Norwegian standards.

In contrast, Nynorsk and most dialects use the same set of pronouns han ('he'), ho ('she') and det ('it') for both personal and impersonal references, like in German, Icelandic and Old Norse.

In Bokmål, however, due to its Danish origins, one could choose to always write the possessive first: min bil ('my car'), but this may sound very formal.

Norwegian has five closed classes without inflection, i.e. lexical categories with grammatical function and a finite number of members that may not be distinguished by morphological criteria.