Ordbøker over norske bygdemål frå før 1814

Resumé

Before 1814, Norway was part of the Danish realm, and the written standard
language was Danish, while the spoken dialects were Norwegian, derived from Old
Norse and very different from Danish, not least in the vocabulary. There were
published four Norwegian dialect dictionaries before 1814 (in 1646, 1749, 1780 and
1802), most of them by clergymen who wanted to aid their Danish-speaking
colleagues in their understanding of local speech. They are discussed and compared
in this article together with two unpublished 18th century manuscripts which in size
and quality deserve the name “dictionaries” (they have been published in the 20th
century). All these dictionaries are “pre-scientific”, but a development is discernible
from a more encyclopedic type to a more purely lexicographic type. This may have
to do with a genre differentiation resulting from the development of more
specialized works on different aspects of Norwegian nature and society.