Ivar (Andreas) Aasen

Philologist, lexicographer, and writer, born in Sunnmøre, W Norway. A fervent nationalist, he was the creator of the ‘national language’ called Landsmål (later known as Nynorsk, ‘New Norwegian’), based on W Norwegian dialects. It eventually achieved recognition alongside the official Dano-Norwegian Riksmål (‘language of the realm’) in 1885.

Ivar Andreas Aasen (August 5, 1813 – September 23, 1896) was a Norwegian philologist and lexicographer.

Aasen was born at Åsen in Ørsta (then Ørsten), in the district of Sunnmøre, on the west coast of Norway. Gradually, and by dint of infinite patience and concentration, the young peasant became master of many languages, and began the scientific study of their structure.

About 1841 he had freed himself from all the burden of manual labour, and could occupy his thoughts with the dialect of his native district, Sunnmøre; Aasen's famous Dictionary of the Norwegian Dialects appeared in its original form in 1850, and from this publication dates all the wide cultivation of the popular language in Norwegian, since Aasen really did no less than construct, out of the different materials at his disposal, a popular language or definite folke-maal (people's language) for Norway. With certain modifications, the most important of which were introduced later by Aasen himself, but also through a latter policy aiming to merge this Norwegian language with Dano-Norwegian, this language has become Nynorsk ("New Norwegian"), the second of Norway's two official languages (the other being Bokmål, the Dano-Norwegian descendant of the Danish language used in Norway at Aasen's time). An unofficial variety of Norwegian more close to Aasen's language is still found in Høgnorsk ("High Norwegian").

Aasen composed poems and plays in the composite dialect to show how it should be used;

Aasen continued to enlarge and improve his grammars and his dictionary. He lived very quietly in lodgings in Oslo (then Christiania), surrounded by his books and shrinking from publicity, but his name grew into wide political favour as his ideas about the language of the peasants became more and more the watch-word of the popular party. Aasen holds perhaps an isolated place in literary history as the one man who has invented, or at least selected and constructed, a language which has pleased so many thousands of his countrymen that they have accepted it for their schools, their sermons and their songs.

Ivar Aasen-tunet, an institution devoted to the Nynorsk language, opened in June 2000. Their web page includes all of Aasens' texts, numerous other examples of Nynorsk literature (in Nettbiblioteket), and some articles, also in English, about language history in Norway.

Wikisource has an original article from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica about: Aasen, Ivar

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.