Can the transcription tell Bokmål and Nynorsk apart?

Yes. Each is recognised as its own valid norm rather than a misspelling of the other, so kva, ikkje and kyrkje are kept as written on a Nynorsk page and hva, ikke and kirke on a Bokmål one. If a scan mixes both, each stretch can be labelled by norm.

What happens to æ, ø and å?

They are transcribed as themselves. For material written before the å reform, the historical aa spelling is kept as printed; ask for a modernised å alongside it if you want both forms for searching.

Will an 1830s Danish-Norwegian letter come out as modern Bokmål?

No, not unless you ask for it. The default keeps the letter’s own spelling, forms such as Grundloven and selvstændig included, since normalising them would erase the evidence of when the document was written.

Can it separate a quoted historic clause from the surrounding modern text?

Yes. Where a modern Norwegian document quotes older wording, such as the 1814 Constitution’s original phrasing, that stretch can be marked and kept in its own spelling rather than folded into the rest of the page.

Does it split up Norwegian’s long compound words?

No, compounds are transcribed as the single unbroken words they are. If you need them broken into their component parts for indexing, ask for that as a separate, labelled step rather than the main transcription.

Norwegian

Norwegian read in both its written forms

Norway has written itself in two official standards since 1885, so an archive box moves between Bokmål and Nynorsk from one document to the next, and a page from before 1938 may still spell å as aa. Evidano keeps each page in the spelling it was written in and tells the two norms apart rather than levelling them into one.

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Sample pages

Recto of a folded 1833 letter in fine cursive Danish-Norwegian, a dateline at the top right and several close-set paragraphs below — Sample 1. Peter Andreas Munch, then a young Christiania historian, writes to the clergyman and folklorist Andreas Faye on 22 September 1833, in a letter now held by the National Library of Norway. The hand is an even, practised cursive in the Danish-based written language every literate Norwegian used before the nineteenth-century reforms; the sheet’s address panel and red wax seal, folded to the left, are outside this crop.

First page of a 2008 Norwegian parliamentary constitutional proposal, royal coat of arms above the title and two columns of Bokmål body text below — Sample 2. The opening page of Grunnlovsforslag nr. 3 (2007–2008), Dokument nr. 12:3: a proposal by three Storting members to replace the monarchy with a republic. Ordinary modern Bokmål surrounds the wording proposed for § 1, "Norge er en fri, selvstændig, udelelig og uavhændelig Republik", cast in the nineteenth-century spelling of the 1814 Constitution it would amend.

Front page of the newspaper Vikebladet for 21 January 1929, an ornamental masthead over five dense columns of small roman type — Sample 3. The first issue of Vikebladet, a weekly launched at Ulsteinvik on the Sunnmøre coast on 21 January 1929, its masthead declaring the paper "upolitisk". Five narrow columns of small roman type carry a survey of the Norwegian missionary societies’ finances, a farmers’ union proposal on municipal debt, local notices and shopkeepers' advertisements, still set in the pre-1938 spelling that this same year would officially be renamed from Riksmål to Bokmål.

	Mill. kr.
Til rusdrikk	164
Renter og avdrag paa statsskuld	99
Renter og avdrag paa kom. skuld	70
Folkeskolen	73
Fattigstellet	47
Forsvarsutgifter	43
Tobakk	70
Kaffi	65[?]
Sukker	60

Bronze plaque on a snow-capped stone gatepost reading Førde kyrkje with three dated building details below — Sample 4. A cast plaque at the gate of Førde kyrkje in Sogn og Fjordane, photographed in February 2009: "Førde kyrkje, tømmerkyrkje frå 1885, altartavle 1643, preikestol 1672." The wording is Nynorsk throughout, kyrkje for church and frå for from, the form this Vestland municipality uses for its own signage.

Bokmål, Nynorsk and the Danish-Norwegian page before both

Until 1814 Norway was under the Danish crown, and its clergy, courts and printers wrote Danish; the union with Sweden that followed did not touch the written language, which is why there is no single date at which "Norwegian" properly begins. Two answers to that inheritance now stand side by side as official norms. Bokmål grew out of the Dano-Norwegian usage of the towns, brought closer to Norwegian speech by the spelling reforms of 1907, 1917 and 1938 and renamed from Riksmål in 1929. Nynorsk was built the other way round: from the 1840s the philologist Ivar Aasen travelled the country recording rural dialects and in 1853 published a grammar, and in 1873 a dictionary, of the composite standard he called Landsmål, renamed Nynorsk at the same 1929 reform. Both are taught in every school, both appear in the Storting’s own papers, and a municipality can choose either as its working language, so a twentieth-century Norwegian archive mixes the two without warning.

The two norms share an alphabet of twenty-nine letters, and the last three, æ, ø and å, exist in no English keyboard layout and are the ones an uncalibrated model is likeliest to drop or garble. Å is comparatively new: before the 1917 reform made it standard, and 1938 made it compulsory in schools, the same sound was written aa, a spelling that survives today only in older personal and place names such as Aasen or Aalesund. Consonant doubling is the main vowel-length signal in both norms, so a single or double letter after a vowel can be the only thing that distinguishes two different words, and long compounds are written solid, with no space or hyphen between their parts. Nynorsk keeps a wider range of accepted forms than Bokmål, so kyrkje, kva and ikkje sit on the same shelf as kirke, hva and ikke, and neither spelling is a mistake.

Everyday Norwegian material spans all of this at once. A nineteenth-century letter is written in the Danish-based hand and spelling that came before either reform; a Storting document from this century can quote the 1814 Constitution’s original wording, selvstændig and uavhændelig, inside an otherwise ordinary modern Bokmål page; and a church or trail sign in a Nynorsk municipality reads frå and kyrkje where the same sign further east would read fra and kirke.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Two norms treated as one language

A model calibrated on generic "Norwegian" text has usually seen far more Bokmål than Nynorsk, and quietly corrects kyrkje to kirke or kva to hva, or blends the two into a hybrid that neither norm actually allows. Both spellings need to be recognised as valid outputs in their own right, not as competing guesses at the same word.

Æ, ø, å and the ghost of aa

These three letters sit outside the alphabet an English-trained model expects, so æ is read as a stretched a, ø as an o with a stray mark, and å as a or aa. Material written before the 1938 reform genuinely does spell å as aa, which is correct for its date and needs to be kept rather than silently modernised.

Solid compounds with no natural break

Norwegian compounds are written as one unbroken word, sometimes running to five or six elements, and layout analysis trained on English tends to insert a space wherever the shape of the word suggests one, or to read the whole string as noise. Getting the word right means recognising Norwegian morphology, not just Latin letterforms.

Quoted old spelling inside a modern page

Because Norway’s founding texts are reproduced verbatim in later law, a Storting document from this decade can carry a clause in the 1814 Constitution’s own spelling, such as selvstændig and Regjeringen’s older forms, set beside ordinary contemporary Bokmål on the same page. A transcription that modernises everything indiscriminately erases exactly the distinction the document is drawing.

Who works with this material

Local and family historians

Bygdebok projects and genealogists work through parish registers, newspaper notices and letters that cross the Danish-Norwegian, Riksmål and modern Bokmål or Nynorsk periods within a single family archive. They need names and place names kept in the spelling of their date, since a farm name modernised to today’s form can break a match against the land register.

Municipalities and public offices

Norwegian law lets residents write to their council in either Bokmål or Nynorsk and expects a reply in kind, so offices digitising decades of correspondence need the two norms told apart rather than folded into one. A transcription that keeps kva as kva, not silently turned into hva, keeps that record usable for its own purpose.

Newspaper and archive digitisation

Regional papers such as Vikebladet ran for a century in much the same close-set column layout, moving through several spelling reforms without ever changing their masthead. A project indexing decades of issues needs the reforms themselves to survive the transcription, so a search for aar and for år can be understood as the same word at different dates.

Students of Norwegian language history

Coursework on the Bokmål-Nynorsk split works from primary material: an 1830s Danish-Norwegian letter, Aasen’s own Landsmål writings and a Storting document quoting the 1814 Constitution’s wording beside modern prose. None of that comparison holds if the transcription quietly normalises the older spelling to match the newer.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Say which norm to expect

Tell the prompt whether the page is Bokmål or Nynorsk, or that it may switch between the two, and ask for the spelling to be reproduced as written rather than corrected to the other standard. That one instruction is what keeps kyrkje from becoming kirke.

Step 2

Set a rule for æ, ø, å and aa

Decide whether å should be kept as å or, for material that predates the 1917–38 reforms, whether the older aa spelling should be preserved as written or given alongside a modernised form. Fix the rule once and it applies across the whole batch.

Step 3

Flag the document’s date

A page from 1833 needs to be read as Danish-Norwegian, not corrected towards modern Bokmål, while a modern Storting document that quotes the 1814 Constitution needs both spellings kept apart on the same page. Naming the date range in the prompt stops the model from levelling the two together.

Step 4

Test on a mixed page first

Before running a full archive box, try a page likely to hold more than one register at once, such as a form that quotes older law or a scan that pairs a Nynorsk sign with a Bokmål caption. If the norms come back distinguished there, the more uniform pages need only a spot check.

Frequently asked questions

Can the transcription tell Bokmål and Nynorsk apart?: Yes. Each is recognised as its own valid norm rather than a misspelling of the other, so kva, ikkje and kyrkje are kept as written on a Nynorsk page and hva, ikke and kirke on a Bokmål one. If a scan mixes both, each stretch can be labelled by norm.
What happens to æ, ø and å?: They are transcribed as themselves. For material written before the å reform, the historical aa spelling is kept as printed; ask for a modernised å alongside it if you want both forms for searching.
Will an 1830s Danish-Norwegian letter come out as modern Bokmål?: No, not unless you ask for it. The default keeps the letter’s own spelling, forms such as Grundloven and selvstændig included, since normalising them would erase the evidence of when the document was written.
Can it separate a quoted historic clause from the surrounding modern text?: Yes. Where a modern Norwegian document quotes older wording, such as the 1814 Constitution’s original phrasing, that stretch can be marked and kept in its own spelling rather than folded into the rest of the page.
Does it split up Norwegian’s long compound words?: No, compounds are transcribed as the single unbroken words they are. If you need them broken into their component parts for indexing, ask for that as a separate, labelled step rather than the main transcription.

Related scripts and pages

Swedish and Danish-Norwegian PalaeographyThe Latin and Gothic hands Denmark, Norway and Sweden shared before their national languages split apart.Danish-Norwegian Parish, Court, and Administrative Gothic, c. 1700–1875The Gothic cursive that this letter’s more official cousins were kept in, before Norway had its own written norm.Swedish and Norwegian Transitional Gothic-Latin Hands, c. 1750–1900The mixed Gothic and Latin cursive of the same decades as Munch’s 1833 letter, in Sweden as well as Norway.Icelandic Image to TextThe other Nordic written language, and the one that has changed the least since the Middle Ages.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your Norwegian documents

Upload a letter, a form or a photographed sign, say whether it is Bokmål or Nynorsk, and check the first page before running the rest.

Norwegian read in both its written forms

Sample pages

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Bokmål, Nynorsk and the Danish-Norwegian page before both

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Two norms treated as one language

Æ, ø, å and the ghost of aa

Solid compounds with no natural break

Quoted old spelling inside a modern page

Who works with this material

Local and family historians

Municipalities and public offices

Newspaper and archive digitisation

Students of Norwegian language history

Getting the best transcription

Say which norm to expect

Set a rule for æ, ø, å and aa

Flag the document’s date

Test on a mixed page first

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your Norwegian documents

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