Its members are elected for life on the basis of scholarly, literary or artistic merits.
The academy publishes the main dictionary of Norwegian, Det Norske Akademis ordbok ("Dictionary of the Norwegian Academy", www.naob.no), is responsible for regulating the written standard known as Riksmål ("National Language") and has a literary and cultural purpose.
The academy was founded in 1953 by several notable Norwegian authors and poets, among them Arnulf Øverland, Sigurd Hoel, A.H. Winsnes, Cora Sandel and Francis Bull.
They disagreed with the official language policy aiming to merge Bokmål with Nynorsk and protested against what they called state discrimination against the dominant Norwegian written standard Riksmål.
These include Nordic studies, German, English and French languages and literature, history, philosophy, law, political science, poetry et cetera.