Bokmål

Bokmål (Urban East Norwegian: [ˈbûːkmoːɫ] ^ⓘ) (UK: /ˈbuːkmɔːl/, US: /ˈbʊk-, ˈboʊk-/; lit. 'book-tongue') is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by around 90% of the population in Norway. There is no countrywide standard or agreement on the pronunciation of Bokmål and the spoken dialects vary greatly.

Bokmål is regulated by the governmental Language Council of Norway. A related, more conservative orthographic standard, commonly known as Riksmål, is regulated by the non-governmental Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. The written standard is a Norwegianised variety of the Danish language.

The first Bokmål orthography was officially adopted in 1907 under the name Riksmål after being under development since 1879. The architects behind the reform were Marius Nygaard and Jacob Jonathan Aars. It was an adaptation of written Danish- commonly used since the past union with Denmark- to Dano-Norwegian, the koiné spoken by the Norwegian urban elite, especially in the capital. When the large conservative newspaper Aftenposten adopted the 1907 orthography in 1923, Danish writing was practically out of use in Norway. The name Bokmål was officially adopted in 1929 after a proposition to call the written language Dano-Norwegian lost by a single vote in the Lagting.

The government does not regulate spoken Bokmål and recommends that normalised pronunciation should follow the phonology of the speaker's local dialect. In Eastern Norway, Urban East Norwegian (Standard East Norwegian) is generally accepted as the de facto spoken standard of Bokmål/Riksmål.

All spoken variations of the Norwegian language are used in the Storting (parliament) and in Norwegian national broadcasters such as NRK and TV 2, even in cases where the conventions of Bokmål are used. The spoken variation typically reflects a speaker's native region.