Etymology

Bokmål

Today it means: One of the two major written standards of Norwegian, literally meaning “book language”. Full definition →

Norwegian Bokmål bokmå ← Old Norse mál ← Proto-Germanic *maþlą
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European*bʰeh₂ǵosder.?
  2. Proto-Indo-European*bʰeh₂g-der.?
  3. Proto-Germanic*bōks
  4. Old Norsebók
  5. Danishbog
  6. Norwegian Bokmålbok
  7. Proto-Germanic*maþlą
  8. Old Norsemál
  9. Norwegian Bokmålmål
  10. Norwegian Bokmålbokmå
  11. English todayBokmål

Borrowed from Norwegian bokmål (literally “book language”). The equivalent Old Norse bókamál was used in this sense as a name for Latin, as it was the primary language used for writing of biblical work in much of the Middle Ages. The modern Icelandic name for Norwegian Bokmål is bókmál. When dialect research in western Norway was pioneered by Ivar Aasen in the 1850s, bogmaal took on the meaning of written standard language, as opposed to spoken dialects and Aasen's synthesized landsmaal. The two Norwegian languages, standardized in 1907, changed names in 1929 from landsmål to nynorsk, and from riksmål to bokmål.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.