> Two types? As in slang?
Nope, two official written languages. Norway spent a lot of time under Danish rule, and during that time Danish was the written language in Norway. After Norway became independent again, the Danish language used in Norway was gradually transformed to be closer to how people spoke (particularly how people spoke in the cities, and even more particularly, how they spoke in Oslo). However, not all were happy about this, and wanted a written language based on original Norwegian. A man named Ivar Aasen set out to create such a language by travelling the country collecting words. He created a language which was mostly based on rural dialects (with special emphasis on the western dialects), which he (probably correctly) considered to be more true to the original Norwegian language. Anyway, long and tedius story made short, we now have two official written languages, "bokmål" which is the norwegianized Danish, and "nynorsk" is the one based on Aasen's work. They are both legally equal, any official documents must be available in both, and everybody in Norway understands both. I use the one called "nynorsk", as it is closer to my dialect. Besides, it is approximately two orders of magnitude more masculine than the other. :-P
And that concludes today's lesson on Norwegian language history (an immensely boring subject in many ways).
Kay
