Dialect polishing and solidarity with ‘the others’: merchants as language creators in the 19th century

Agnete Nesse

doi:10.1515/jhsl-2023-0054

Article Open Access

Dialect polishing and solidarity with ‘the others’: merchants as language creators in the 19th century

Agnete Nesse

Published/Copyright: October 23, 2024

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From the journal Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics Volume 10 Issue 2

Abstract

In this article, the linguistic choices of a group of young merchants and merchants’ sons are discussed. Living in Bergen in the second half of the 19th century, they wrote Danish and spoke a dialect marked by centuries of dialect and language contact. Most of them had some competence in German, some also in English and French. When Romanticism and nation building became dominating ideas in Norway, the merchants’ European culture and their mixed dialect did not seem appropriate. These men therefore turned their backs on both city culture and city language and started studying Old Norse and rural dialects as part of a movement promoting a language called Landsmål. They formed an organization called Vestmannalaget ‘The Association of Westmen’ in 1868, with the aim of helping to create a new Norwegian standard. In other places in Norway, those working for this new standard language usually had a rural background, and their mission was to promote pride in and the use of their own dialects and their own culture. The Association of Westmen however, aimed to learn a refined version of the dialects of the less privileged classes. This was controversial in the social class to which they belonged, and most of them did not linger on in the Landsmål movement as adults. They were young radicals who paved the way so that others, with closer ties to rural Norway, could take over the linguistic struggle.

Keywords: language construction; national ideology; merchants’ solidarity with less privileged

1 Introduction

Linguistic standardization in Norway in the beginning of the 19th century was focused on writing correct Danish, the language used in Norway since the 16th century. As the 19th century came to an end, standardization involved choosing which of all the available spoken varieties in the country should be used in writing when not just one, but two, new Norwegian written standards were created. In addition to geography and status, etymological, morphological and orthographic considerations played a part in this very intriguing process (Vikør 2018: 329–330). In general, merchants did not play an active part in the Norwegian language creation process. They were generally both conservative and international, not especially interested in new ways of writing. An exception to this is a group of merchants in Bergen, who together with other men founded the first language organization in Norway.

There is extensive literature on Norwegian language politics between 1850 and 1950, focusing on both political, ideological, social, and linguistic matters. My work builds to a large degree on two publications that deal with The Association of the Westmen, Hannaas (1918) and Hubacek (1996a). Hubacek uses Hannaas extensively, but as an outsider he offers a slightly different angle than those researchers who were (or are) deeply involved with language politics. Biographies about the leading language creators of the 19th century, Ivar Aasen (Venås 1996; Walton 1996) and Knud Knudsen (Johnsen 2006) show the lasting interest in the language movement of the 19th century. Oddmund Løkensgard Hoel has analysed both the role of nationalism in the language movement (Hoel 1996) and the relationship between the language movement and the general modernising of the Norwegian society in the late 19th and early 20th century (Hoel 2011). In the latter publication he states that even if the struggle to establish a language based on rural dialects was – and was labelled – national, not all social groups were included. The struggle was centred in the rural parts, with a clear sting toward city culture. It was also based in the lower social classes, especially the farmer class, with a sting towards the members of the upper classes (Hoel 2011: 58). Clearly, this means that the urban, upper-class men that are the protagonists of this article did not fit into the typical language struggler. This makes it interesting to try and investigate both their environment, their background and their ideology in addition to their linguistic practice. My claim is that nationalism and romanticism can be combined with solidarity as important factors for the merchants’ turn to a variety that was not their own.

In what follows, I will first give a brief introduction to the political and linguistic situation in Norway during the 19th century; this is followed by a section on the merchants who played an important part in the language movement. The Section 2 is a presentation on the ideology behind the standardization, including a content analysis of a letter. After this, some of the linguistic choices of the Westmen are presented. An important question is if the ideas that become evident from the content analysis are reflected in the analysis of the linguistic practice. The article ends with a short examination of why the merchants lost their interest in the language movement.

2 The Norwegian language movement(s)

What the different branches of the Norwegian language movement had in common was a desire to achieve a written standard that was clearly different from Danish, and that should be used in Norway. The idea to create an alternative to Danish was based on two concurrent phenomena in European history: the Napoleonic Wars and Romantic Nationalism. In 1814, due to the peace settlement after the wars, the union between Denmark and Norway was dissolved, and a new union between Sweden and Norway was founded (Libæk et al. 2012: 11). The old union with Denmark and the new union with Sweden differed greatly in how independent Norway was allowed to be. Whereas the Danish–Norwegian union meant that both countries were part of the same absolute monarchy, where all official matters were ruled from Copenhagen, the Swedish–Norwegian union was a personal union, where domestic and economic policies were under the control of the Norwegian government and the Storting (Libæk et al. 2012: 13).

Politics and cultural matters did not change concurrently, however, so even though the Swedish–Norwegian union was created in 1814, the very tight cultural ties between Denmark and Norway were not broken, so the situation during most of the century was one where Norway had political ties to the east (Sweden) and cultural ties to the south (Denmark). These ties were increasingly controversial, and a nation building process slowly led to a demand to cut both the cultural ties to Denmark and the political ties to Sweden (Libæk et al. 2012: 19).

The nation building process was influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) ideas of nations, in which the people of a country were believed to share a common soul and a common voice (Libæk et al. 2012: 17; Mæhlum and Hårstad 2018: 288). Soul and voice were expressed through folk culture and dialects; not necessarily in their “raw” form but cultivated into standard language and high culture. In line with these ideas, groups of learned Norwegians claimed that Norway needed a national standard language (Sandøy 2018: 206–210). That Norwegians wrote, and to some degree tried to speak, Danish was considered not good enough. A standard language with its norm based not in Copenhagen, but within Norway, was seen as an ideal situation. Following this, an Ausbau process took place. Kloss defines an Ausbau language like this: “Languages belonging in this category are recognized as such because of having been shaped or reshaped, moulded, or remoulded – as the case may be – in order to become a standardized tool of literary expression.” (Kloss 1967: 29).

In the same article, the opposite development is also discussed, that of dialectizing (Kloss 1967: 35). With dialectizing Kloss explained a process where a language lost its status, for example as a written code, and came to be considered a dialect. Old Norse had been dialectized during the middle Norwegian and early modern period, especially during the 15th and 16th centuries, when writing was increasingly done in Danish (Nesse and Torp 2018: 369–373) and Norwegian came to be equivalent with the Norwegian dialects. The language movement of the 19th century wanted to reverse this dialectizing of Norwegian. The question that aroused was where in Norway the norm should be based, and how the task of reversing the dialectizing in order to make Norwegian a language again, should be performed.

However, not all intellectuals, in Denmark or in Norway, agreed that creating a new, Norwegian standard was the best strategy for the young nation state. In the view of this group, shaping a new Ausbau language to be used in Norway might have led to a cultural separation between Denmark and Norway. This would have been unfortunate for the less developed nation, Norway (Hoel 2018: 471). These warnings about cultural separation did not stop the Ausbau process, which gained broader support later in the century, especially in the teacher seminaries and in the Folkehøgskoler, which were courses for young adults at schools in rural areas (Eskeland 1954: 58–60).

Within the group that wanted a Norwegian language, there was a separation between a Dano–Norwegian and a Norwegian–Norwegian group.^[1] The first advocated a standard built on the spoken vernacular of the higher classes, especially in the cities. This vernacular had similarities across the country, in that it was heavily influenced by Danish. The Norwegian–Norwegian group advocated a standard built on the spoken dialects in rural areas. They used, in varying degrees, Old Norse as a yardstick. Two organizations to promote the Norwegian–Norwegian variety, called Landsmål, were founded in 1868, after a period of work in informal groups. The one in Bergen was called Vestmannalaget, and the one in Christiania was called Det norske samlaget. Not until 1900 was an organization for those in favour of the Dano–Norwegian Riksmål founded in Bergen, called Bergen Riksmålsforening. For the rest of this article, I will only discuss the Norwegian–Norwegian part of the language movement, since it was within this group that the merchants that are the protagonists of this article placed themselves.

Even if the linguistic debate of the 19th century to a large degree took place in the capital of Norway, Christiania, there was a clear tendency for the spokesmen for the rural/Old Norse based standard to be men who had migrated from rural areas. Many of them were “farmer students”, who had their education funded by rich people in the village they were from. They showed their solidarity with the social group they had left by working for an acknowledgement of this group’s language. The most important man in this group, the man who created Landsmål (‘the language of the country’, but also ‘the language of the countryside’), was Ivar Aasen (1813–1896). He came from a peasant family in the western part of the country but was offered financial support to go to university. But he declined in order to retain the ties to his social background. His insistence on being true to his “peasantry” impressed both his nearest followers and outsiders. A son of a wealthy merchant family, Kristofer Janson, wrote:

Aldrig har jeg møt nogen, som har bevaret sin bondskhet midt i de mest civiliserte omgivelser saa som Ivar Aasen. Der sat den geniale lærde sprogforsker saa forlegen og bly som en jomfru og gjemte sig likesom bort i det trange, skitne kottet, hvor ovnen var sprukken og ildsfarlig. Og naar han med sin slitne bulehat og stok under arme snek sig stjaalent langs efter husvæggene, var det som om han bad byen om forladelse, fordi han gik der. (Janson 1913: 44–45).

[I have never met anyone who has retained his peasantry amid the most civilized surroundings as Ivar Aasen has. The ingenious learned linguist sat there as embarrassed and shy as a virgin, and appeared to hide in the small, dirty chamber, where the stove was cracked and dangerous. And when he snuck along the walls of the houses, with his worn-out misshapen hat and his cane under his arm, it was as if he was asking the city to forgive him for being there.]

Aasen did not lack confidence when it came to his language project, however. And the young, resourceful men in Bergen who used language creation as a leisure activity held him in remarkably high regard.

3 The merchants in Bergen who joined the Landsmål movement

Bergen was the second largest city (after Copenhagen) in the kingdom of Denmark–Norway. After the change of unions, Christiania^[2] outgrew Bergen, so that by 1830 Bergen was the second largest city in Norway. Bergen was built on the fish trade. Fish caught and dried in the north of Norway were exchanged for grain, salt, and other products from further south in Europe.

From the second half of the 14th century, this trade was dominated by the Hanseatic League. However, from the 16th century onwards, local merchants involved themselves in the trade, and in 1756 the last Hanseatic merchant left the town, and from that year all merchants belonged to the Bergen bourgeoisie. In 1754, the local merchants formed their own association, with strong resemblances to the Hanseatic Kontor^[3] that had existed since the 14th century. The local merchants called it Det borgerlige Kontor ‘the bourgeois Kontor’.

The local merchants were in fact to a large degree non-Norwegian, and among the non-Norwegian ones, the largest group came from German-speaking areas. Some of them had been trained at the Hanseatic Kontor, and after their exam they joined the local bourgeoisie (Fossen 1979: 685). Fossen concludes that the bourgeois Kontor in most areas was as German as the organization it had succeeded (Fossen 1979: 688). There was one exception to this, however. Whereas the members of the Hanseatic Kontor always wrote in German,^[4] the situation for the members of the new Kontor was more mixed. The treaty of the bourgeois Kontor in 1754 decided that all official correspondence must be written in “the language of the country”, i.e., Danish. This despite the fact that the founding fathers of this Kontor were either German themselves or sons of German fathers. The language choice had two purposes: To distance themselves from the Hanseatic Kontor, and to show their loyalty to the city and the Danish–Norwegian monarchy. In unofficial writing, however, both languages were used until the first half of the 19th century. Several young boys from Bergen preferred to have their testimonies of their merchants’ exams in German as late as in the 1820s (Nesse 2017). This may be interpreted as an act of identity since their forefathers were German, and a pragmatic choice since it eased the way if they wanted to work in Germany. In a friendship book of one of the merchant apprentices from 1819,^[5] about half of the poems are in German, even if the boys who wrote the poems were bilingual. Last, but not least, the families of German ancestry held on to baptism and confirmation in German until the congregation was too small and it became increasingly hard to find a German speaking pastor (Nesse 2007). With the end of German sermons in the German church in 1866, Bergen’s century long history as bilingual was over.

Why is this German-ness relevant for the Norwegian language movement of the 1850s? Several of the merchants active in the Landsmål movement had foreign ancestors, most of them German. Could it be that their interest in Old Norse and Landsmål had something to do with the bilingual background of their families? In Nesse (2017), I argue that the merchants’ interest in creating Landsmål may be seen as a parallel to the decision made in 1754 to avoid German, even if this was the language many of them had the highest competence in. The men of the Landsmål movement of the 1850s were also advocating for a language they themselves called “not our mother tongue, unfortunately” (this statement will be discussed in Subsection 4.2). In both cases, in the 1750s and in the 1850s, the decision to advocate for a standard that you do not necessarily master perfectly can be seen as a way to become more Norwegian.

Since Bergen was a trading town, the merchants were also the town’s elite. Compared to the elite in the eastern part of Norway, who built their wealth on timber, iron works or other early industrial activities, they were not particularly wealthy, but they had the resources to spend time on leisure activities. The same family names are repeated if you look at music, theatre, and the Landsmål movement. Norway’s most famous violinist at the time, Ole Bull (1810–1880), created the first Norwegian theatre in Bergen, where Norwegian, not Danish, was the stage language (Libæk et al. 2012: 20). He visited Vestmannalaget several times, and shared his ideas of how Norwegian folk music could inspire artists like himself (Hannaas 1918: 44).

The sons of wealthy merchants often became merchants themselves. But quite a number of them were given the opportunity to go to university, either in Christiania or abroad, to become pastors, lawyers, or teachers. And it is among this group that we find many of the Westmen. The Grieg brothers are a typical example, both active in the very first, unofficial organization of the 1850s. One of them, John, took over the family business, the other, Georg, became a publisher (Hanaas 1918: 5). In fact, all the publishers in Bergen at the time joined the movement. This may be interpreted as a belief among the publishers that the new language had a bright future. It might be a success, and if that happened, the demand for books in the language would increase. Therefore, it was smart to be on the inside of the movement rather than on the outside. Publisher Georg Grieg was said to have read the Danish grammarian Rasmus Rask already as a 15-year-old (Hubacek 1996a: 313), and he was, according to Nygaard, “selvskreven Correcteur af alt, hvad der i Bergen udkommer paa Maalet” [the natural proofreader of everything written in Landsmål in Bergen] (Koht 1913: 154).

Hanaas (1918) and Hubacek (1996a) differ slightly in how many men they include in the core group that actually established the organization Vestmannalaget in 1868, but they do agree on the importance the merchants played. They also emphasize that some of them belonged to the richest and most powerful families in Bergen: Konow, Grieg, Janson, Prahl, Krohn, Friele (Eskeland 1954: 42; Hannaas 1918: 17–18; Hubacek 1996a: 215–218).

The families of the Westmen did not necessarily approve of the radical, linguistic choice of their sons. Kristofer Janson writes in his memoirs that he lived with his parents in one of the houses that the extended family had in Bergen.

Men da hele min interesse nu var fangen av maalsaken, som mine forældre og alle “fornuftige” folk ansaa for vanvid, der vilde ødelægge hele min fremtid, saa levet jeg ensomt paa mit værelse. Hver gang der i aviserne kom haanende utfald mot maalsaken, blev jeg stukket med det. Man haabet jo paa den vis at kunne trætte mig ut og paaskynde min omvendelse (Janson 1913: 84).

[But since my whole interest was now captured by the Landsmål movement, which my parents and all the “sensible” people regarded as madness that would ruin my whole future, I lived alone in my room. Every time there was ridicule in the newspapers against the movement, I was assailed with it. They hoped in this way to wear me out and hasten my conversion.]

It is not likely that the same negative attitudes would have applied if the young men had taken interest in Latin, or in one of the modern European languages. Those who were to take over the business were often sent to Germany, England, and France to learn the three major European languages and to take care of the family’s business contacts in those countries. The studies of Old Norse could be seen as purely intellectual. But to pursue the language of the peasants, claiming this was the true language of the nation, did not sit well with the more traditionally oriented merchants.

Not only Janson’s parents, but also the media of the time were sceptical of the Landsmål movement and what was perceived as The Association of Westmen’s fanaticism. When Janson’s first son, named Ivar (after Ivar Aasen), was born, the gossip in Bergen was that the baby refused milk, and instead shouted – in broad rural dialect – Eg vil ha nautakjøt ‘I want beef’ (Janson 1913: 86). This joke addressed the merchants’ romantic relationship to rural culture.

4 Vestmannalaget – ideology and praxis

4.1 Nationalism and solidarity

How far were the young merchants and merchants’ sons willing to go in order to show their solidarity with the less privileged? It does not seem like any of them had plans to actually become farmers or fishermen. The leader, Henrik Krohn, did move to the countryside, where he, with the financial help of his mother-in-law, bought a match factory (Hubacek 1996a: 109). The others ended up as merchants in the city, pastors (like Janson) or in the case of Jan Prahl, first a merchant, and later an ophthalmologist in the Netherlands (Hubacek 1996a: 26–28). Prahl is one of the most famous of the Westmen, since he was the one who went furthest in writing close to Old Norse. Even Ivar Aasen felt his book was hard to understand. Prahl is not, however, representative of the norm that The Association of Westmen favoured.

The Westmen’s solidarity was directed towards culture and language, and not followed by changed living conditions. Norwegian–Norwegian pastors preached in Landsmål for the farmers in the countryside (Hubacek 1996a: 85), and Norwegian–Norwegian authors wrote romantic novels in the new language – where rural virtue was praised in contrast to urban decadence. Decadence or not, most of them lived in the city, in secure conditions. This may seem a contradiction, but on the other hand, it was a refinement of the rural dialects they promoted, not the rural dialects themselves. Their solidarity was connected to helping the underprivileged, not becoming a part of their social group.

The Westmen’s own Bergen dialect is never mentioned as a possible norm for Landsmål. Most likely, they did in fact speak the vernacular. According to Larsen and Stoltz (1911–1912), the sociolinguistic situation differed from other Norwegian cities, in that the divide between upper-class speech and lower-class speech had been almost non-existent. A formal speech for use in church and other official domains was accessible for those (men) in high position (Hoel 2018: 436), but privately, they all spoke a dialect. This dialect was, as mentioned, influenced by immigration through centuries, by people speaking German, Danish and different Norwegian dialects. With its two-gender system (as opposed to three genders in rural dialects), monophthongization of Old Norse diphthongs, reduction of vowels in unstressed endings from a, i, u > e (Nesse 2021), and other features common to Danish, the Bergen dialect did not stand a chance in the competition to become the norm of Landsmål. Thus, those interested in the Bergen dialect were not members of Vestmannalaget. In the preface of a collection of Bergen dialect words (Køster 1865), local patriotism is expressed by praising the international melting pot that Bergen had always been, and criticism is directed towards The Association of Westmen and others from the Landsmål movement. Køster does not approve of a dialect view where the value of a dialect is simply its connection to Old Norse. He stands out as an early anti-purist, claiming that the dialect gennem Tiderne er bleven beriget med adskillige Ord af fremmede Indvandrere eller Maghthavere ‘has been enriched over time by several words from foreign immigrants or rulers’ (Køster 1865: 1). Of foreign immigrants, Germans were the largest group, and the rulers were Danish. Since German and Danish were the two languages that the purism of the Landsmål movement was mostly directed against (see Subsection 5.5), it is no wonder that the Westmen were not proud of their own dialect.

The first leader of The Association of Westmen was Henrik Krohn, who was older than most of the others. He wrote and published journals in Landsmål from 1865 on and was the one who came up with both the name Vestmannalaget and the preamble (Hoel 2011: 30–32). In 1867 Krohn wrote this in a poem dedicated to Ivar Aasen:

Hav daa Takk, som atter gav	[Have Thanks [to you], who again gave
meg dat slengda Barnamaalet;	me the cast away child’s speech;
no dat skin som bjarta Staalet,	now it shines like the glimmering steal,
du hev gnikat Rusti av.	you have polished the rust away]^[6]
(Krohn 1867: 6)

The stanza uses a very powerful metaphor in that language is compared with steel, an important material in the modern world. The rust can be compared with the category decay used in the content analysis (see Subsection 4.2), and must in fact allude to linguistic simplification, at least if the child’s language is to be read as the Bergen dialect. Due to language contact, the Bergen dialect has a simplified grammar, and it may be this simplification that is the rust that needed to be polished away. The negative attitude to their own dialect may also have contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for orthophone spelling, a linguistic theory that had some followers, both among the advocates for Landsmål and among the advocates for Dano–Norwegian (Hubacek 1996a: 294, 297).

Krohn was the only one of the merchants in The Association of Westmen who actually left the city and moved to the countryside. Janson writes that he and Krohn practiced speaking Landsmål, and that it felt natural to do so in Sogndal (where Krohn had moved to) hvor den friske dialekt duret som en musik i vore øren bestandig [where the fresh dialect always hummed like music in our ears] (Janson 1913: 86). However, Janson also admits that it could be too much. Krohn could not, according to his friend, meet a local farmer along the road without lecturing them on what a treasure they had in their dialect (Janson 1913: 86).

Not only the language should be polished, according to Krohn. The demolition of stave churches, the decreased use of traditional dress, and the neglect of folk tales in favour of the modern novel were all signs of how a renewal of the pride in national culture was long overdue (Hubacek 1996a: 133). Janson thematises this in his novel Han og ho ‘He and she’ (1868) where the pure, national culture of the countryside meets the artificial culture of the city. The novel has a “home – homeless – home” motif, where the heroine Agnes, a country pastor’s daughter, is tempted by the shining life of the city, with balls, flirting, romantic novels and modern songs. But under the guidance of a wiser man, she finds her way back to (a purified) Norwegian rural culture. In the preface of the book, Janson admits that the use of Landsmål will probably be controversial, since he lets all the characters speak Landsmål, including those who live in the city. This had not been done before. But fyre deim, som no drøyma um og tru paa ei Tid, daa dat norske Maalet og skal verda rødt i Byom [for those, who now dream about and believe in a time, when the Norwegian language will also be spoken in the cities] (Janson 1868: 1), the book can bring pleasure. The book became very popular, though mostly in the Danish translation by Janson’s wife Drude, of which 12 editions were published while Janson was alive, and 2 after he died (Hubacek 1996a: 272).

Janson writes that his interest in the Landsmål movement was not just that he found Landsmål strong and beautiful. It was also due to the anger he felt when he experienced how the farmers were treated when they came to the city (Janson 1913: 96–97). Any street boy could mock them, and the farmers looked at their own life and their own language as second rate. Looking back at the 19th century, Janson in 1913 concludes that the Landsmål movement did actually help to heighten the self-esteem of the farmers.

4.2 A letter from Nygaard to Aasen: a content analysis

Marius Nygaard (1838–1912) was the son of a Bergen merchant. As the case for many of his friends, his was an international family. His father was Danish, his grandfather on his mother’s side was German, and he himself married an English-Norwegian woman (Nygaard 1938). Nygaard studied philology and worked in various schools throughout his career (Hubacek 1996a: 55–60). Even if he was not an active member of The Association of Westmen, he was a close friend of many of the members, and the one who taught them Old Norse. He held courses, both in Old Norse and in Landsmål, when he was a young student in Bergen. A letter written by the young Nygaard to Ivar Aasen in 1859 is considered by Hubacek to express the official programme for The Association of Westmen.^[7] In this letter, Nygaard^[8] discusses the possible choices in relation to the different linguistic levels. We will come back to some of the linguistic examples in the Section 5.

The method applied here is a simple form of content analysis (cf. Harwood and Garry 2003; Krippendorff 1980). The meanings that are communicated in the text, are divided into categories relevant for the problem in question. I started out with ten categories, but later reduced them to eight. One category, loan words, is not mentioned by Nygaard, and it also did not seem helpful to divide between values expressed by biological metaphors and by other expressions of values. The eight categories that are presented below, are A) important languages (1. Danish, 2. Landsmål, 3. Old Norse 4. Modern dialects), B) Change and system (5. Decay, 6. The Language internal need for restoration, 7. Linguistic consistency) and C) social considerations (8. Learning and knowledge). In this way, it is possible to go beyond what is actually expressed in the letter and arrive at an understanding of the attitudes of the writer.

Danish is mentioned only twice, but the two statements point clearly to the ambivalence Nygaard represented: Danish is his language, but it is no good in Norway: First he writes som vi jo virkelig gjøre paa Dansk ‘as we actually do in Danish’, after that he writes that the influence from Danish must be eradicated: Paavirkning af Dansken, som maa udryddes .
Landsmål is mentioned seven times. Twice Nygaard addresses Aasen, calling it ‘your standard’: Deres Normalform, Deres Form. Once he calls it Nynorsk, this is the name Landsmål was to receive officially in 1929 (Rambø 2018: 573–574). The last four times he uses ‘Norwegian’: Norsk. Calling this variety Norwegian was important for the Landsmål movement. This reduced the majority language in Norway to Un-Norwegian – i.e., Danish or half Danish. The majority population, however, has in the same way used the term Norsk for Dano–Norwegian.
Old Norse is mentioned twenty-seven times in the letter. Nygaard’s diverse ways of referring to Old Norse shows how important the continuity was for the Westmen. In addition to the term Oldnorsk he uses det gamle Sprog ‘the old language’, før ‘before’, den gamle ‘the old’, and he refers to how certain features were written in the literature of the Middle Ages: skrevet saaledes i Sagaerne.
Modern dialects are mentioned twenty-three times in the letter. Three times, the expression is of an evaluative nature. The other times when modern dialects are mentioned, Nygaard shows concern to have support in the modern dialects for the forms he suggests be used in Landsmål. Expressions like hensyn til Sprogets nuværende Forholde, ‘consideration to the present conditions in the language’, der, hvor alle Sprogarter ere enige, ‘there, where all dialects agree’, hvor alle Dialekter bestemt paastaa, ‘where all dialects insist on’, Berettigelse efter Dialekterne ‘justification according to the dialects’ show that there was a true concern to use the dialects as pattern. Also, he calls the dialects Sproget ‘the language’, and it is clear that Sproget is neither Landsmål, Dano–Norwegian nor Old Norse. This means that the claim that he was more concerned with Old Norse than with the dialects, is not correct.
Decay is mentioned five times. The words he uses describe linguistic features that have led the dialects away from Old Norse, and states that it is the task for the Westmen and the other men in the Landsmål movement to heal this decay: Afvei ‘detour’, forvansket eller tabt ‘distorted or lost’, er bleven forkvaklet ‘has been distorted’, Forfaldstilstand ‘condition of decay’, Sygelighetstilstand ‘morbidity’.
The Language internal need for restoration is mentioned twice, and gives a biological picture of a language, that – if the right nurturing is given – will heal itself: om det skulle blive Trang for det ‘if a need for it should occur,’ som Trangen vil skaffe Indpas med Tiden ‘that need will secure access in time’.
Linguistic consistency is used as an argument twenty times, including four instances where inconsistency is mentioned as unfortunate. Nygaard had a very keen eye for linguistic patterns, as we will see in Section 5. And he was no supporter of linguistic variation, his programme can be summed up in the phrase Hvad der især fremkalder Agtelse for et Sprog, er jo dets Consekventse ‘what especially brings forth respect for a language, is its consistency’.
Learning and knowledge is the most relevant category when it comes to the concept of solidarity. In this category, Landsmål is treated as a variety that not only the merchants in Bergen, but also the “people” themselves will need some time to understand, get used to and learn to use. Nygaard touches upon these themes as often as twenty-three times. The words forstaa and skjønne, both meaning ‘understand’, dominate. There are also a couple of instances of feil and gal, both meaning ‘wrong’. These words are applied in arguments for certain spellings that may lead to another reading pronunciation than what was intended. There is also some optimism hidden within this category; twice a hope for better linguistic times is expressed: siden, naar Kundskab til Oldnorsken og Dialekterne bliver mere udbredt ‘later, when the knowledge of Old Norse and the dialects becomes more widespread’ and indtil Folk bedre havde lært at skjønne den ‘until people have learned to better understand it [Landsmål]’. The paragraph that most of all describes the mixed feelings towards Landsmål deserves to be quoted at full length, since it shows the humility towards the task at hand:

Det har kostet os utrolig Møie ved de forhaandenværende Hjælpemidler at sætte os ind i dette Sprog, som vi desværre ikke kunne kalde vort Modersmaal, og havde ikke Interessen været saa stor, havde vi vel ogsaa forlængst opgivet Arbeidet. Og naar vi tænke at kunne virke noget for denne Sag, paakommer os ofte en Følelse af, at vi ikke ere competente Kjæmpere for den, at vi maaske gjøre mere galt end godt. Men det er tungt at tro dette, derfor vilde vi ogsaa nødig tro det (Nygaard to Aasen 1859, quoted in Hubacek 1996b: 243).

[It has cost us incredible effort with the available aids to get acquainted with this language, which we unfortunately could not call our mother tongue, and had the interest not been so great, we would probably have given up the work long ago. And when we think we can do something for this cause, we often get the feeling that we are not competent fighters for it, that we may be doing more wrong than good. But it is discouraging to believe this, and we are therefore also reluctant to do so.]

To sum up the content analysis, we can suggest that in this letter Nygaard evaluates Old Norse as important, but that other considerations must contribute in finding the best form for the new language. Combining the different factors were not always easy. For example: How does the idea of decay go together with the willingness to follow the direction of the dialects? Nygaard’s answer would be that if two different dialects had different forms, one could be perceived as decay, and the other as “the language”. In addition to this, Nygaard saw consistency as a condition for a good language, and if the dialects were not consistent in the grammatical or phonological patterns, this must be fixed.

His humble attitude at the end of the letter may also shed light on his preference for consistency: when one tries to learn a language variety that is not one’s own, consistency helps in the learning process. In the Section 5, we will turn away from the ideology for a moment and look at some linguistic details. A central question is if it is possible to see a link between ideology and form.

5 Linguistic characteristics

5.1 Limitations

Not all linguistic choices discussed by the Westmen can be presented here. I will pick a few linguistic features to illustrate which questions occupied them, and how the ideology came to be concretized into linguistic facts. I base this mainly on two texts: The letter from Nygaard to Aasen (1859) analysed in Subsection 4.2, and the novel Han og ho (1868) by Kristofer Janson, which was translated into Danish by his wife Drude with the title Han og hun (Janson 1889). Since neither of the Merchants who joined The Association of Westmen used Landsmål in accounting books and similar merchant writing, other text types must be used. Fiction is a good alternative, and Janson is one of those who had the potential to be influential. Eskeland (1954: 47) considers Janson to be the most important of the early novelists who wrote Landsmål, and also believes that novels, poetry and songs opened people’s hearts to the new language, more so than learned, linguistic articles.

5.2 Graphemes

Most of the Westmen agreed that only those graphemes that were used in Danish should be a part of Landsmål. Nygaard writes that he had no intention of changing the aa as grapheme for the Old Norse á (/ɔ/), even though á would be more letvindt ‘convenient’. Using the á never became common, though some within the Landsmål movement did in fact use it. Instead, both types of Norwegian (and eventually Danish) followed Swedish in introducing the grapheme å for this phoneme in the 20th century. Janson (1868) did not experiment with any other graphemes than those used in 19th century Danish, and that people were used to.

5.3 Phonology

Even if the dialect differences in Norwegian are quite substantial in the consonant system, Nygaard primarily writes about the vowel system in his letter to Aasen. This may be because the consonant system was seen as more straightforward, or at least that the changes from Old Norse and to the dialects were easier to understand and explain. One example of the choices of consonants can be Old Norse barn ‘child’ that in the rural dialects was pronounced /ba:n/, /ba:dn/, or /ba:ɳ/. The word was written barn in Landsmål, since the other forms could easily be explained as assimilation, differentiation and retroflexion – linguistic processes in the dialects that developed after Old Norse.

The vowel system was more complicated. The use of e versus æ, u versus o and what vowel to write in the many unstressed endings seems to have needed several discussions, and the young student Nygaard has an impressive grasp over the development from Old Norse (and earlier) to modern dialects. For example, the distribution of e and æ was much debated both in Norway and Denmark among grammarians (Nesse 2022: 104–105). The relationship between grapheme and phoneme was not simple in any variety, and The Association of Westmen followed Ivar Aasen in restricting the use of æ (more or less) to those instances where there historically had been an i-umlaut from á. Danish, on the other hand, had (and still has) a wider use of the grapheme æ than Norwegian. Janson mainly follows the careful use of æ. In words like Smaavækjorna ‘little girls’ and Skjækerna ‘a part of a horse sleigh’, the æ historically comes from an á. He also uses æ in Æventyr ‘tale, adventure’, but since this word is a French loan word, exceptions from the i-umlaut-rule could be made, also by Janson and by Aasen.

5.4 Morphology and syntax

The morphological level was unquestionably the most challenging one, since Norwegian had taken a great step from a more synthetic to a more analytic language type during the Late Middle Ages, notably from the 14th to the 16th centuries (Mørck 2016: 443).

How much of the rich morphological system of Old Norse could be reconstructed without losing too many potential users of Landsmål? Three genders for nouns, which were to be reflected in articles, determinatives, and adjectives, was one obvious candidate. Danish had seen a merger between the masculine and feminine nouns, but in Norwegian dialects (except from the one in Bergen), the three genders were retained.

Case was a trickier question. Old Norse had four cases, the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Most Norwegian dialects had only one case left, but some did distinguish between two forms – one a reflection of the old nominative/accusative forms, and the other a dative form. The dilemma was clear: the difficulty in learning the case system, even if it was only with two cases distinguished, might be too great and might frighten potential users away from Landsmål. On the other hand, since there were people who knew the system, teaching it to others might be possible. For those who knew German, like the Bergen merchants, the similarity of the systems would help the learning process.

Ivar Aasen’s plan for Landsmål was to introduce it to society, first in some domains, later in others. Also features like the two-case system he found could be introduced little by little. Hubacek (1996a: 228) cites a letter where Aasen writes that he had considered using more old forms (like the dative) in alvorlig skrift ‘serious texts’, like the Bible. For Nygaard, this was a Besynderlighed ‘peculiarity,’ since no other languages had a grammatical category that was to be used sometimes, when it felt convenient, and at other times not.^[9] As we saw in Subsection 4.2, Nygaard placed strong emphasis on consistency (Hubacek 1996b: 242), and this half use of the dative was not in line with his ideals. Janson seems to be happy with the inconsistency. He has only a few instances of dative, like (p. 8) paa Veggjom ‘on the walls’.

Plural forms of verbs were a bit easier to introduce than the dative, since these forms (to some degree) were still used in Danish. This meant that those who did not have plural forms of verbs in their spoken language still had a competence in the system. Since neither Danish nor Norwegian dialects had a division of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person within the singular and the plural, this Old Norse system was not reintroduced. In Janson’s novel Han og ho, all irregular verbs have different endings in the singular and plural, while the regular verbs have the same ending in both singular and plural. For example, Janson (1868: 19) writes dei leikade og sprungo ‘they played and ran’, where the regular verb leika has the common -ade ending and the irregular verb springa has the plural ending o (and a change of vowel). The singular form was sprang or sprakk. To use plural forms only for irregular verbs has been a common pattern in those Norwegian dialects where plural endings have been retained.

A syntactic feature that divides Danish from Norwegian is where the possessive is placed in the sentence. In Danish, the possessive is placed in front of the noun, in Norwegian, the most common place for the possessive is after the noun. In Janson’s Han og ho/Han og hun, we find kveikte Lampen sin ‘lit his lamp’, and tok so Fader sin i Armen ‘took her father by the arm’ in the Landsmål edition, where the Danish translation has tændte sin Lampe and tog sin Fader i Armen. However, Janson is not consistent in placing the possessive behind the noun.

5.5 Lexis

One cannot write about The Association of Westmen and their linguistic choices without mentioning the determinatives/pronouns dan ‘that’ (masculine and feminine), dar ‘there’ and dat ‘that’ (neuter). Both dan, dar, dat and den, der, det exist in Norwegian dialects. The variants with the vowel a resemble the Old Norse forms þan, þar and þat the most. The t in dat/det is silent in all spoken varieties, but a deletion of this t was not discussed. Ivar Aasen ended up with preferring the forms den, der and det, and warned The Association of Westmen several times that they should give up the forms dan, dar and dat and start using den, der and det. Otherwise, people could be scared away from Landsmål, since the forms with a were so old fashioned. Why these three small words came to be a symbol of the backwardness of The Association of Westmen may be hard to understand; Eskeland (1954: 49) claims that frequency may be a reason: Since these are frequent words in the language, they are seen several times on each page. Another point is that the critics missed their target. Dan, dar and dat were the only dialect forms in the rural dialects surrounding Bergen and are still used in some dialects today (Sætre 2022: 59).

The reason the Landsmål texts written by the Westmen and others in the Landsmål movement up until the Second World War can be hard to understand is not because of dan, dar and dat, and not because of the many grammatical categories. Different endings and dissimilar categories do not necessarily make the text less intelligible. The problem is their lexical creativity. Not only in writing fiction, but also in linguistic literature, the aim to create a new language resulted in a search for rare dialect words, and sometimes new creations. The dictionary Norsk Ordbok (1939) can be used to find out if the difficult words in the texts were new creations or if they did in fact exist in one or more dialects. A few examples from the first pages of Han og ho will suffice.

p. 15 Hugsnikja ‘a flirt’ (Danish translation has Kokette). This word has no dialect examples in the dictionary, but several of the men of the Landsmål movement, not only the Westmen, used it in their texts. The word is composed of hug ‘mind’ and snikja ‘sneak’, so it means someone who sneaks into your mind.
p. 16 Sprikestakken ‘the crinoline’^[10] (the Danish translation has Krinolinen) also seems to be a created word. This is no surprise since the phenomenon it denotes was not commonly used with rural dress. The last part, stakk, means ‘skirt,’ and sprike means ‘spread’.
p. 18 Ranglæta ‘contrariness’ (the Danish translation has Vrangvillighed). The dictionary has Janson’s texts as source, in addition to a number of dialects. So, this is an actual dialect word that he has tried to introduce into Landsmål. It is composed of rang ‘awkward, stubborn’ and læta ‘sound, voice’.
p. 18 gartande ‘jokingly’ (the Danish translation has spøgende). This word was, according to the dictionary, relatively widespread in the western dialects, and it has several different meanings. But with the meaning ‘joke’, the Westmen Janson and Krohn are the only literary sources. The form is a present participle of the infinitive garta.

Like most members of the Landsmål movement, The Association of Westmen sought consistency on the graphemic, phonological and grammatical levels. Their method was to find bits and pieces of Old Norse structures in remote dialects in rural Norway and develop these into a firm structure with little or no variation. Thus, new grammar was not created, it was just a “polished” version of what already existed. The discussion of the linguistic features shows that the ideology and the linguistic practice for the most part were in line with one another. The social and linguistic starting points were the dialects. The next step was a restoration of Old Norse. When dialects and Old Norse were combined, a certain degree of simplification was needed in order to ensure that the ordinary people of Norway were able to learn the new language, and that they would accept it. New vocabulary was to be created with traditional word forming elements. The only place where the results of the content analysis and the linguistic analysis diverge is in the inconsistent use of the dative that Janson applied.

On the lexical level, the Westmen went a bit further. Existing dialect words could be used in new compounds and a reactivation of Old Norse word-forming elements could further lead to new vocabulary. Neither Old Norse nor the rural dialects had all the words needed to describe the modern world with crinolines and other fashionable items. And with a fierce purism against Danish and German, a lot of word creation had to be done. The most eager word maker was Knud Knudsen (1812–1895), an opponent of the methods of the Landsmål movement. He created Dano–Norwegian (called Riksmål until 1929, when it was renamed Bokmål), and he wanted a more Norwegian vocabulary. His book Norsk og unorsk – eller fremmedords avløsning ‘Norwegian and Un-Norwegian – or the replacement of foreign words’ (Knudsen 1881), contains more than one thousand words (Sandøy 2000: 13). The men of the Landsmål movement generally approved of this book, even if they did not approve of Knudsen’s Dano–Norwegian, which was neither Danish nor Norwegian in their eyes, and thus an impure variety. There was one difference, however, since Knudsen points out that he is interested in replacing all kinds of loan words. The Landsmål men primarily wanted to get rid of Danish and German words, and used words of Latin and Greek origin freely, apparently because Latin and Greek “fitted the Norwegian language structure” better than Danish and German. Even if this is obviously wrong, it is an interesting argument for a very specifically directed purism (Langer and Nesse 2012). Eskeland (1954: 51) interprets the creation of new words in a pedagogical way. It was, he claims, a felt need to distance the new standard as much as possible from Danish, in order to unlearn Danish, that they were accustomed to writing.

6 The merchants lose their interest in Landsmål

Hubacek claims politics can best explain why the merchants lost interest, both in supporting and in using Landsmål. One of the reasons for the success during the early days was that the organization was apolitical (Hannaas 1918: 208–210; Hubacek 1996a: 281). During the second half of the 19th century, political parties emerged in Norway, and three parties were founded during the 1880s: Venstre ‘Left’ and Høire ‘Right’ in 1884, and Det Norske Arbeiderparti ‘the Norwegian Labour party’ in 1887. Towards the end of the century, the Landsmål movement became more closely connected to the political forces fighting for parliamentarism, democratization and dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden, issues where Venstre wanted change and Høire wanted stability. This led many conservative members to leave The Association of Westmen (Hubacek 1996a: 108).

The Venstre party paid back the support from those advocating Landsmål: already in 1885, the Norwegian parliament decided that Landsmål should be given equal rights to Dano–Norwegian, and from 1892 it was possible for school boards to define Landsmål as the language of instruction in the schools in their districts (Haugen 1966: 38–39). More people had started using Landsmål, and others may have thought, like Janson (1913: 259), that he was not needed as a “snow plough” anymore (confirmed by Eskeland 1954: 45). The “farm born” teachers and authors could take over the cause, and the original Westmen could concentrate on other activities.

The Bergen merchant families had several ties to the group of civil servants who formed the backbone of the Høire party. Both the merchants and the civil servants, who formed the elite of Bergen society saw that if servants, farmers, and fishermen should be granted better opportunities to rise socially, this would happen at the expense of the elites (Hubacek 1996a: 281–282). Therefore, most of the merchants voted for Høire.

Another factor that might be taken into consideration in order to understand why the merchants left The Association of Westmen, is that the merchant-Westmen combination first of all was a one-generation phenomenon. Apart from Henrik Krohn, who was older than the others, most of the merchant Westmen belonged to the same generation, born between 1830 and 1849 (Hubacek 1996a: 216). In addition to the linguistic issues, they developed the organization into a popular social centre. Their economic strength also gave them the opportunity to contribute to restoration of culturally important places for the national identity, such as the palace in Bergen (called Håkonshallen) (Eskeland 1954: 55–56; Hannaas 1918: 69–75). Hannaas (1918: 87–91) describes the meetings as so popular that Krohn was worried about the members. Were they all really dedicated to the Landsmål cause, or did they just join for the party? In 1872 there were six hundred members, and each member was allowed to bring two women to the meetings (Hannaas 1918: 90; Hubacek 1996a: 213). But after this peak, the organization lost members. When the merchants gave up, rural immigrants took over the organization (Hannaas 1918: 130; Torp and Vikør 2003: 169), and the linguistic base in the west Norwegian dialects was strengthened. Since the west Norwegian dialects in many respects were more conservative than the dialects in the east and north, The Association of Westmen were known to fight changes that led Landsmål to accommodate more to east Norwegian and/or Dano–Norwegian (Eskeland 1954: 64–65), a struggle that continued in the 20th century.

7 Concluding remarks

Around 1850, a group of men, many of them young sons of merchants or themselves young merchants, became interested in linguistics. Living in Bergen, the second largest city in Norway, with a bilingual Norwegian–German history that was fading out, they might have fought to revitalize German as a mother tongue in Bergen, in solidarity with their family traditions. They might also have fought for a Dano–Norwegian variety that resembled their own dialect, the vernacular of Bergen with all its language contact features and international vocabulary.

Instead, they used their resources to the benefit of the Norwegians of “the other” – the farmers and fishermen who lived in the countryside, and who were both poor and poorly educated. There were two reasons for this: One was solidarity with people whom their families had earned their money from, a radical hope that they should gain more self-respect and pride. This point is exemplified by the novel Han og Ho (cf. Subsection 4.1 and Section 5), which both in form and content elevates the peasants. Not only their language, but also their culture is presented as better than the language and culture of the urban upper class, to which the author belonged. Another reason was the common assumption of the time that Old Norse, which had been replaced as a written language by Danish at the time of the Reformation, was – in a corrupted state – hidden in the rural dialects of the peasants. The task of The Association of Westmen and other ideologically convinced men was to cleanse and polish these dialects in order to give them back to their users in a refined form, a standard language called Landsmål.

By analyzing both an early letter that discusses the motivation, and actual linguistic practice, this article has shown that the dialects of the people were indeed important for the merchant Westmen, but that their solidarity with the people was combined with the romantic idea of refining the folk culture.

However, learning and developing a new standard is no simple task, and as the group that had started The Association of Westmen grew older, many of them left Bergen and the movement. They had served as “snowploughs”, and by the 1880s the Landsmål had received quite high official status in Norway. It was time to let others fight on, preferably people who came from the rural areas and had their political affiliations to the left.

In this article, I have tried to analyse different texts on and by the Bergen merchants and merchant sons who were involved in the Landsmål movement, in order to better understand their motives. After all, it is puzzling that members of the elite with a prestigious spoken and written language variety abandoned their own language in favour of learning, developing and using the variety of the underprivileged, even if the enthusiasm did not last more than a couple of decades.

Corresponding author: Agnete Nesse, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, E-mail: Agnete.Nesse@uib.no

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Received: 2023-04-23

Accepted: 2024-05-20

Published Online: 2024-10-23

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2023-0054

Keywords for this article

language construction; national ideology; merchants’ solidarity with less privileged

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BY 4.0