Språklige varieteter eller språklige rariteter?<br>Om bruk av valgfrie former i norsk bokmål

Abstract

The Norwegian language allows many variant forms, both in its morphology and orthography. The background is that for many years the goal of official language policy was to combine the two standards Bokmål and Nynorsk into one common standard, called Samnorsk. Now this goal is abandoned, but still standardized dictionaries have to account for all variant forms without showing preference for any of them. This rule creates many problems for lexicographers, and with the introduction of better marking and explanation of stylistic and dialectal variation it might better be abolished, especially when variant forms have undergone semantic split.