Why did Norwegians create "landsmål"?
I dont see why they need to create that artificial language clearly.
I know Norwegians would like to purify their Norwegian language and got rid off Danish influence on that language.
But today, I really dont think Norway needs it because most people in Norway speak bokmål which has been heavily influenced by Danish.
"Landsmål" was the 19th century name of the Norwegian language form which today is known as Nynorsk.
The creation of Landsmål/Nynorsk by the very skilled autodidact linguist Ivar Aasen was a democratic project. He was a peasant boy himself and he wanted to give his fellow peasants a literary language that was based on their own speech, so that they did not have to learn the semi-foreign Danish language if they wanted to read, write, study and engage themselves politically. He wanted to take the literacy monopoly away from the upper class.
Ivar Aasen proved that the dialects of the peasants were direct descendants of Old Norse, and not just corrupted Danish, as people usually thought. But Aasen's driving force was not hatred of Danish or purism, but the construction of a Norwegian literary language based on the speech of most Norwegians. Therefore he rejected demands from upper-class linguists, who wanted him to make him go so far back to Old Norse that the language would have been just as difficult for the peasants as Danish.
No Norwegian speaks Bokmål, just as nobody speaks Nynorsk. They are only literary forms. Everybody speaks dialects, but the dialects of the two biggest cities, Oslo and Bergen, are very similar to Bokmål. Even though most Norwegians use Bokmål for writing, most of them speak dialects which have features of both Bokmål and Nynorsk. And therefore many people apart from those relatively few who actually use Nynorsk as their primary written language, appreciate Nynorsk as the true Norwegian language, as "målet hennar mor" = the tongue of Mum!
The previous Guest is mine.
Personally, i just doubt whether it is just a politics factor.
i know at that time, Swedish King was "Karl XIV Johan" and "Oscar I".
Did they ever encourage the creation of Nynorsk?
Neither of the Swedish-Norwegian union kings Karl Johan and Oscar I experienced the spread of Nynorsk. No doubt they might have been positive towards the establishment of a national Norwegian language, as Karl Johan was anxious to cut off Norway's traditional ties to Denmark and his son, Oscar I, was a liberal monarch. But it was not an issue in their time.
The official break-through of Nynorsk, the 1884 law that made Landsmål/Nynorsk equal to Danish/Riksmål/Bokmål in school and state, was a direct result of the victory of parlamentarian government and the establishment of the first Liberal/Left government. And at that time, the king, Oscar II, was a staunch conservative who strongly disliked parlamentarism, liberals and thus probably also Nynorsk, not at least because many Nynorsk people were the strongest oponents of the Swedish-Norwegian union.
Nynorsk is spoken in Northern and Western Norway.
Bokmal is spoken in Eastern and Southern Norway.
Mons is either a foreigner who still hasn't grasped the compexity of the Norwegian language landscape or he is one of those arrogant, urban Norwegian who lives in the aberration that he doesn't speak a dialect and that Nynorsk is just for faraway farmers.
Målet hennar mor
Målet hennar mor me vil aldri, aldri gløyma!
Kor det gjeng i verdi til, det vil tunga gøyma!
Der me fekk i moderarv alt det beste hjarta tarv.
Harald åtte inkje stål betre til sitt yrke;
Olav og ved dette mål bygde opp vår kyrkje;
tunga tala, borni log; folkelukka aldri dog.
Skal så Noreg standa enn, då lyt, fram for stålet,
Noregs kvinnor, born og menn leggja hug til målet.
Tynest tunga, døyr me fleir, standa aldri oppatt meir.
Me som her ei mor hev ått opp i desse dalar,
å me veit, me veit det godt, kor så hjarta talar
veit at målet hennar mor hev for oss dei rette ord.
Andres Reitan