10 Facts About Ivar Aasen

Ivar Aasen is best known for having assembled one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, Nynorsk, from various dialects.

The younger Ivar was brought up to farmwork, but he assiduously cultivated all his leisure in reading.

Ivar Aasen single-handedly created a new language for Norway to become the "literary" language.

Ivar Aasen composed poems and plays in the composite dialect to show how it should be used; one of these dramas, The Heir, was frequently acted, and may be considered as the pioneer of all the abundant dialect-literature of the last half-century of the 1800s, from Vinje to Garborg.

Ivar Aasen continuously enlarged and improved his grammars and his dictionary.

Ivar Aasen lived very quietly in lodgings in Oslo, surrounded by his books and shrinking from publicity, but his name grew into wide political favour as his ideas about the language of the peasants became more and more the watch-word of the popular party.

Ivar Aasen continued his investigations to the last, but it may be said that, after the 1873 edition of his Dictionary, he added but little to his stores.

Ivar Aasen holds perhaps an isolated place in literary history as the one man who has invented, or at least selected and constructed, a language which has pleased so many thousands of his countrymen that they have accepted it for their schools, their sermons and their songs.

Ivar Aasen died in Christiania on 23 September 1896, and was buried with public honours.

Ivar Aasen published a wide range of material, some of it released posthumously.