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Written by Silje Pileberg (freelance) on November 26, 2025, at 12:02 AM.
You can still be forgotten, even if you're the first letter of the alphabet: Online chatrooms between Norwegian youths are full of dialectal terms, abbreviations, and loans from English, but there is little indication that these tendencies are making their way into school assignments, according to researchers.
Is {"prøva"|"the test"}^[As opposed to prøven, def. sing. of en prøve.] a proper word? This was a question raised by a ninth grader^[Ninth graders are ~14 years old.] in Eastern Norway.^[Eastern Norway consists of the counties of Oslo, Akershus, Vestfold, Østfold, Buskerud, Telemark and Innlandet. It is the most populous region of Norway by far, with the nation's capital and largest city Oslo on the north end of the Oslo Fjord. Eastern Norway also has Norway's biggest lake Mjøsa further inland, and most of Norway's longest river Glomma. Eastern Norway is bordered by Sweden to the east, the region of Agder / Southern Norway to the southwest, Western Norway to the west, and the region of Trøndelag to the north.]
—"Many schoolchildren writing in Bokmål^[Bokmål is the written standard used by up to 90% of Norwegian speakers to write the language. It is strongly based on written Danish, which was the lingua franca / language of the educated upper class during Danish rule over Norway. Knud Knudsen is called the Father of Bokmål.] think that ending words in the letter A is a dialectal thing. A number of them worry that they'll get worse evaluations or even corrections from their teachers if they end their words in the letter A," Unn Røyneland says.
Røyneland is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics and Multilingualism at the University of Oslo (UiO) and knows more about Norwegians' use of language than most people.
Researchers took over class
Røyneland is a part of a big group of researchers who recently examined ninth graders' use of the Norwegian language at three lower secondary schools^[Ungdomsskole, officially known as lower secondary school in English, comprises grades 8~10 or ages 12~16.] in Western Norway,^[Western Norway is the second most populous region of Norway, consisting of the counties Møre og Romsdal, Vestland, and Rogaland. It is a fjord-laden highly coastal region with major cities like Bergen and Stavanger; the former city has Norway's largest seaport and the latter is the "Oil Capital of Norway". Western Norway is also the region with the highest usage of Nynorsk. It borders Trøndelag to the northeast, Agder to the southeast, and Eastern Norway to the east.] Eastern Norway, and Northern Norway.^[Northern Norway is Norway's biggest region by area and Norway's most sparsely populated region. The region consists of the counties of Nordland, Troms and Finnmark, and borders Russia, Finland, Sweden, and the region of Trøndelag. Also a highly coastal region, most of Northern Norway is north of the Arctic Circle. Major cities include Tromsø and Bodø; other notable locations include the picturesque Lofoten archipelago, and the towns of Guovdageaidnu and Kárášjohka, the de facto capitals of the Sámi people, an Indigenous people whose traditional homeland includes all of Northern Norway, much of Trøndelag, northern parts of Sweden and Finland, and the bulk of Murmansk Oblast in the northwest of Russia.] The researchers substituted for the teachers for one week, and gathered in students' assignments as well as Snapchat messages, and conducted interviews and experiments.
Students distinguish between chats, short stories and nonfiction
Joined by fellow researcher Helle Nystad of the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences,^[Nystad is writing a doctoral thesis about digital social communications.] Røyneland has focused on one part of Eastern Norway where the people generally say "{bedrifta stoppa produksjonen|the company stopped the production}" rather than "bedriften stoppet produksjonen". In this part of Norway, Nystad says, young people end nouns and verbs in the letter A when they write to each other on Snapchat, and also sometimes use A-endings in short stories at school.
—"But in more formal nonfiction assignments, the A-endings are completely absent. One student said that she avoided using them because she wanted to get good grades."
There are, however, some exceptions, namely for a small number of nouns where A-endings remain widely accepted, such as {"bygda"|"the village"} and {"elva"|"the river"}^[Indefinite singular forms: bygd, elv. Alternate def. sg. forms bygden, elven.].
Texts in Bokmål becoming more conservative
A quick refresher on the history here: the year 1938 saw major changes in language policy in Norway, as there was at this time a desire to gradually merge Nynorsk^[Nynorsk is the written standard used by up to 15% of Norwegian speakers, mainly in Western Norway, to write the language. Nynorsk was based on the written standard created by Ivar Aasen based on his studies of rural Norwegian dialects. It's a far more radical departure from written Danish compared to Bokmål. Students who use Bokmål must also learn Nynorsk in schools; many Bokmål users have negative attitudes towards Nynorsk. See "Norwegian language conflict".] and Bokmål — the two competing written standards of the Norwegian language — into a common written standard for the whole country. This was known as the Samnorsk^[I want to translate Samnorsk as "Joint Norwegian". The sam- prefix is roughly equivalent to co-, and carries meanings of togetherness, like samarbeid for "cooperation".] policy.
In Bokmål, it was mandatory for ~1,000 feminine nouns to be inflected with a final A in the definite singular, including words like {"hytta"|"the cabin"} and {"høna"|"the hen"}^[Indefinite singular forms: hytte, høne. Variant def. sg. forms hytten, hønen.]. Bokmål users were also free to choose between writing {"han kastet ballen"|"he threw the ball"} and "han kasta ballen".
With time, however, the Samnorsk policy fell out of favor, and some number of variant forms were removed from the Norwegian language's two written standards in the 2000s.
Although Bokmål and Nynorsk still retain many words with official variant forms today, many users of these standards do not know that these variant forms still have official approval. Røyneland and Nystad notice that this especially applies to Bokmål users.
—"Even spellcheckers like Microsoft Word don't know of these variant forms. These programs are very homogenizing: the vast ocean of Bokmål texts have stylistically become more uniform and conservative," Røyneland says.
Juggling different writing styles with ease
At all three schools, the researchers see that the way the youths write varies based on the recipient: Snapchat messages to friends often use dialectal terms, especially in Northern Norway. Interrogatives and pronouns especially tend to be written dialectally: {"ka hadde dekan te middag?"|"what did you guys have for dinner?"} rather than "hva hadde dere til middag?", for instance.
Youths in all three locales tend to cut out "silent" letters, spelling {"det"|(it, that, the)} as just "d"; and they also use a lot of repeating glyphs such as "mmmmm" and "!!!!!", acronyms such as "lks" for "liksom"^[Liksom is hard to give a single-word gloss for; it has many different meanings. It can mean things like "(just) like", "in some way", "yeah, right!", "pretend/fake", "supposedly", or it can serve as a somewhat emphatic discourse marker.], and loans from English in sentences like {"han e clueless"|"he is clueless"}.
Girls use emojis more often than boys. However, girls mainly use emojis when writing to adults rather than to peers; they do this in order to appear nice and polite.
Although there are some exceptions, the researchers see overall no indication that the youths' chat-speak is "ruining" their writing in assignments.
—"Young people have separate norms for writing in online chatrooms versus writing in school assignments; there's no question about it. They have a big repertoire, as it were," Nystad says.
Students in the East and North don't know Nynorsk
Although many things are the same between the schools in the East, West, and North, there are also many differences: Nynorsk users in Western Norway, for instance, are better at Bokmål than Bokmål users in Eastern Norway are at Nynorsk. Bokmål-using schoolchildren in Eastern and Northern Norway in fact struggle to distinguish Nynorsk forms of words from dialectal terms.
Røyneland, who uses Nynorsk, finds it interesting that the students in Eastern Norway, whose dialect is relatively close to the written Bokmål standard, make the same considerations as she does when they adapt their language use for the target audience of their writings.
—"There have been many situations where I've asked myself whether my Nynorsk could be misunderstood, stigmatized or judged by the reader. The students we've studied know that they're going to be evaluated, and this awareness has an effect on the words they use and what forms of words they use. Even when writing for school assignments they switch between different writing styles," she says.
"Flaska" at home and "flasken" at school
One student said that she used the form {"flaska"|"the bottle"} at home, but "if I had written that on a Norwegian [test], I think the teacher would've called it wrong and corrected me."
Another said that ending words in the letter A looked silly and unserious: "When I'm talking with a girl-friend it's supposed to be a little unserious," the student said.
—"This just shows that there are different norms for writing out in the field," Nystad says.
If there's anything Nystad and Røyneland are worried about, it's that language use constantly adapting itself for the reader will have an effect on our idea of what's correct and incorrect.
—"We could imagine that using the A-forms in chats in Eastern Norway strengthens the impression that these forms are dialectal, and as that happens it could weaken the A-forms' position even more in formal Bokmål," Røyneland says.
About the project
The "Multilectal literacy in education" (Multilektal skrivekunne i opplæringa) project is financed by the Research Council of Norway and is a joint project between several institutions, led by prof. Øystein A. Vangsnes of the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the Arctic University of Norway.
