The Age of Social Democracy by Francis Sejersted;Madeleine B. Adams;

Author:Francis Sejersted;Madeleine B. Adams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

AN UNSUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION DRIVE

In Norway “[t]he school became the foremost laboratory for a Pan-Norwegian language as an instrument of national integration,” writes Slagstad.31 This laboratory experiment was unsuccessful, however. The struggle over language became one of the most bitter of the entire Social Democratic period in Norway, a reminder of how important language is as a mark of identity.

During Norway’s Danish period, up to 1814, the Norwegian written language became Danish, and this continued into the twentieth century. With Henrik Ibsen in the lead, most of the writers from Norway’s golden age wrote in Danish. But from the mid-nineteenth century a struggle arose to create a Norwegian written language that was an alternative to Danish. This mother-tongue movement was part of the radical democratic popular movement at the end of the nineteenth century. It led to the development of two official languages in Norway, landsmål and riksmål (respectively, the language of the countryside and of the realm, later referred to as nynorsk [new Norwegian] and bokmål [book language]). In this early phase the struggle over language was about which of the two forms of language represented the nation. Indeed the actual differences were so slight that people on both sides of the language divide could relatively easily understand one another. This offered the possibility of amalgamation into a common language—Pan-Norwegian. Following the war, the language dispute was over the legitimacy of Pan-Norwegian.

The language of the countryside had its basis in the dialects of what were called the countercultural regions on Norway’s west coast, or Vestlandet. These were areas in which the labor movement had had difficulty obtaining a foothold. Social Democrats had not been particularly engaged in the language issue. Nevertheless, they took up a powerful initiative in favor of Pan-Norwegian. The man behind this drive was one of the foremost integration ideologues in the labor movement, history professor Halvdan Koht. Koht originally belonged to the Liberal, or Venstre, Party, but early on he joined the labor movement and was a central figure in preparing the ideological basis for the development of the Labor Party into a unifying national party that was able to build on the inheritance of the radical Venstre. A Pan-Norwegian language was for him a natural step in the direction of national integration.

Pan-Norwegian was to be founded on “the basis of the people’s tongue,” as was the common saying. This implied combining common forms from both of the official languages with features taken from the eastern Norwegian “folk tongue.” The political aim was thus an administrated amalgamation of the two official languages. Pan-Norwegian policy began with the radical orthography reform of 1938 and was continued after 1945 through the active promotion of language norms at school.

The reaction was powerful. It found organized expression through the “Parents’ Reaction against Pan-Norwegian” in 1952, organized by the users of riksmål, the literary, Danish-influenced language. A petition campaign was organized, and the names of 400,000 opponents of Pan-Norwegian were collected. This long and bitter struggle came to an end in

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