> One can make similar arguments about Bokmål and Sami, but people speak Sami. And I would argue that a lot more people speak "pure Bokmål" than Nynorsk.

Very, very few. I used to, as a side effect of being quite asocial and reading a lot as a child, and reinforced by my dads very conservative dialect for western Oslo despite where we were living (half an hour drive out the other side of Oslo; dialects in Norway are very local - in that span you pass through at least one other dialect area). The dialect differences were significant enough that an exchange student in high school who was speaking close to perfect Norwegian toward the end of the year still struggled to understand me.

But even then, I adopted more and more of the regional dialect over time. Unless you're a hermit it's hard not to. And there are basically no place in Norway where the local dialect is pure Bokmål.

There might well be more people who can switch to speak pure Bokmål than Nynorsk, though, because it is the primary written language of far more people, and so its the easiest to slip into if you want to speak "formal" Norwegian. This was more pronounced before, when there was a tendency to see the written languages, and especially Bokmål, as more prestigious, and so you might hold a speech in Bokmål instead of your own dialect, TV presenters favoured "pure" Bokmål or Nynorsk instead of their dielcts etc. That's thankfully changed

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keybored 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What do you know about Bokmål being more prestigious in the past? You don’t respect the other form enough to cognize that it exists.[1] I don’t think that lends itself to a well thought out comparison.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072436

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vidarh 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> What do you know about Bokmål being more prestigious in the past?

Having grown up in Norway and seen first hand how it was treated that way.

> You don’t respect the other form enough to cognize that it exists.[1]

I don't like Nynorsk, sure, but that has zero relevance to the point I made, which was if anything a point of contention for those who do like Nynorsk for decades, and a subject of intense activism.

EDIT: You seem to think that I am suggesting that makes one better than the other, or that it should be that way. Neither is the case - there's a reason I wrote "That's thankfully changed". But it was very much the case up until at least the 1980's that Bokmål was treated more favourably than Nynorsk in all kinds of contexts. E.g. companies expecting communication with customers should be done in Bokmål, for example, was an actual thing.

	▲	keybored an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Having grown up in Norway and seen first hand how it was treated that way. In Oslo. > I don't like Nynorsk, sure, That’s not what respect or disrespect is about. > but that has zero relevance to the point I made, No. The relevance is what I stated, in the next sentence that you did not quote. > which was if anything a What I questioned was its truthfulness. Not what kind of person would say it. > You seem to think that I am suggesting that makes one better than the other, or that it should be that way. I did not state or think that you were making a normative statement. > But it was very much the case up until at least the 1980's that Bokmål was treated more favourably than Nynorsk in all kinds of contexts. ... Being used more including being dictated from some top-down direction does not necessarily have anything to do with prestige and could be entirely prosaic.