Маъсул муҳаррир: Филология фанлари доктори, профессор: Г. Х. Боқиева Тақризчилар

1350-1520:
In 1349 the Black Death came to Norway's west coast. The plague wiped out almost one half of the population, and many of the dead were priests and monks who'd been called to pray for the dying and then caught the pest. With many monks gone there were only a few literate persons Left, and no-one to preserve the written Norwegian language in years to come:
Shortly after the plague, the Swedes took over rule of the nation, and then some years later the Dano-Norwegian Kingdom was founded. The Danish and Swedish rule of Norway influenced the Norwegian language heavily. In the larger town, such as the town of Bergen on the west coast of Norway, many hanseatic merchants came to trade goods and hence the local dialect of Bergen was influenced by German. The dialects of all major cities that received visitors from abroad picked up foreign words.
Most of the traditional Norwegian fairy tales come from this period. People were superstitious and many of the folktales sought to explain natural phenomena with trolls and witches. The folk­tales were written down in the mid 19th century.
1520-1830
Danish became the official language of Norway, but the common citizens continued speaking their dialects. All documents had to be written in Danish, and the upper class of Norway tried their best to speak Danish as it was considered a finer language (what could be finer than what the King spoke?). The upper class comprised a total of 2% of the population.
Danish was taught in schools: the children had to speak and write Danish as long as they were at school. The children faced a problem when they had to describe the Norwegian nature in Danish - the Danes simply didn't have the adequate words. For instance, at that time, there weren’t any Danish words for tall mountains, the closest one was hill.
The union with Denmark came to an end in 1814. On the 17th of May Norway got its own constitution. Shortly after, the nation started a union with Sweden again.
1830s:
The big issue was what to do with the language? The way the writers, politicians and journalists saw it, the country had three options:
I. Keep the Danish.
2. Norwegianize the Danish - changing the spelling so the words looked more like the way the Norwegians pronounced them and adding special culture-specific words to the written language.
3. Make an entirely new written language based on the Norwegian dialects.
Option no 1 was rejected, but the two others were both set into practice.
The Norwegianized Danish would later be known as "Bokmal" (or Dano-Norwegian) and the other as "Nynorsk" (or New-Norwegian).
1840s:
Mr. P. Ch. Asbjomsen and Mr. J. Moe traveled from village to village in the 1840s. Every placed they stopped they would ask one of the locals to tell a fairy tale, and then the two writers would write down the story. When Mr. Moe and Mr. Asbjomsen wrote down the fairy tales, they encoun­tered a problem: The stories had been told in a local dialect. Should they write it in Danish or in the dialect that it was told? Writing it in a dialect would make it incomprehensible to anyone who was accustomed to Danish.
The solution the two gentlemen came up with was this: They wrote the stories in a rather radi­cal form of Danish, making the sentence structure more Norwegian and keeping culture specific words. Their work soon became a huge part of the work to norwegianize the Danish. Keeping the culture- specific words was also important to rebuild Norwegians cultural identity - of which after 400 years of Danish rule there was little Left.