Learn Norwegian Nynorsk
Read the written standard one man built out of a country's dialects.
Nynorsk · written standard · ~600k users · Lemmatizer: spaCy (Bokmål model) or GiellaLT
Nynorsk is the other Norwegian, built from rural dialects by Ivar Aasen in the 1850s as an alternative to the Danish-derived Bokmål. If you're reading Tarjei Vesaas, watching NRK's west-coast coverage, or you just prefer your Norwegian closer to its roots, you want Nynorsk.
What the big apps miss
A real Nynorsk analyzer, not a Bokmål one
Most tools treat Nynorsk as a spelling variant of Bokmål and hand it the Bokmål model. Laesi does that by default, because it is the one-click install, but it will use GiellaLT's own Nynorsk analyzer instead once you have built it. Either way Nynorsk keeps its own vocabulary database.
The literary Norwegian
Tarjei Vesaas, Olav H. Hauge, Kjartan Fløgstad, Jon Fosse. Some of Norway's most celebrated writers chose Nynorsk.
Regional media and the Vestland
NRK Vestland publishes daily in Nynorsk. Sogn Avis, Bergens Tidende, all readable, all importable.
Is-slottet, opening
Tarjei Vesaas, 1963
Ein ung, kvit panne som bora seg fram i mørkret. Ei jente på elleve år.
Siss. Det var berre Siss på vegen no. Ho var på veg til Unn.
What to read in Norwegian Nynorsk
Nynorsk is one of Norway's two written standards, and like the other one it is written and never spoken. Ivar Aasen built it in the 1850s by walking the country and writing down what people actually said, then assembling a norm out of dialects that four centuries of Danish rule had left with no written form of their own. Roughly one Norwegian in ten uses it as their main written language, concentrated on the west coast and in the inland valleys, but every schoolchild in the country learns both standards whether they want to or not.
That history is visible on the page. Nynorsk kept forms the dialects kept and Bokmål let go: eg where Bokmål writes jeg, ikkje for ikke, kva for hva, and plurals in -ar and -ane where the other standard has -er and -ene. Close enough that reading across is easy, far enough apart that the tools notice. Norway's habit of saving its crime novels for Easter applies here as much as anywhere, and påskekrim now comes in Nynorsk too.
Small gentle creatures having small gentle problems in a valley where very little goes wrong. The standard Nynorsk read-aloud, and the most forgiving thing on this page.
Trille wants to be Lena's best friend and Lena thinks good neighbours is quite enough. A year of escapades on a Sunnmøre fjord that turns serious without ever announcing it. Parr took the Brage Prize for Tonje Glimmerdal.
A parachutist comes down in front of the crowd at the Voss extreme sports festival with her cords cut. Reviewers keep calling the Nynorsk here easy, and they are right.
A television presenter takes a job as housekeeper to a man alone by a fjord, waiting for a wife who does not come back. Very short, very controlled, and it gets worse the whole way.
Look up the content warnings first
An old man at a sawmill finally tells his children what happened to their mother. Short clipped sentences closer to a monologue than a novel. Renberg built his career in Bokmål and switched at forty-two.
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A mother writes about her severely autistic son and the bureaucracy standing between him and help. Furious, funny in places, 150 pages, and contemporary spoken-register Nynorsk.
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A birth at one end, a death at the other, and a fisherman named Johannes in between. Fosse took the Nobel in 2023 and writes only in Nynorsk, in a small vocabulary and sentences that never stop.
Two eleven-year-old girls meet once, and then one walks out to a frozen waterfall and does not come back. Vesaas writes the plainest sentences in Norwegian and puts an enormous amount underneath them.
A gardener in Ulvik who tended apple trees, read most of world literature in the original, and wrote poems often four lines long. Short enough to hold in your head and go round again.
Twenty-odd linked stories about one block of workers' flats in Odda, a smelter town at the end of a fjord. Warm, sexy and slightly unhinged. Heavier on dialect than anything above it.
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A man loses his memory and a newspaper notice asks anyone who knew him to write in. Three volumes of letters from people who did, none describing the same person, several clearly lying.
Vinje walked from Christiania to Trondheim for the coronation and wrote down what he saw in the new written standard. Genuinely hard: 1860s Landsmål is further from modern Nynorsk than anything else here.
Look Norwegian Nynorsk up properly
Wiktionary and Google Translate are built in. Bring in the references serious Norwegian Nynorsk learners actually use.
Recommended dictionaries
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Wiktionary Built in
Laesi asks for the Nynorsk section first and falls back to Bokmål, so lookups land even where the Nynorsk entry is thin.
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Google Translate Built in
Google has one Norwegian and it is Bokmål, so Nynorsk goes in and something Bokmål-shaped comes back out.
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Ordbøkene ↗ Monolingual
Nynorskordboka from Språkrådet, the official norm, with Bokmålsordboka on the same site for comparing across standards.
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Norsk Ordbok Monolingual
The documentary dictionary of Nynorsk and the Norwegian dialects, twelve volumes, covering roughly 1600 to the present.
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DinOrdbok ↗ Translation
The best translation dictionary across the Nordic languages. It also runs Bokmål to Nynorsk and back, and it even works with surface forms.
Analyzers
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spaCy Available
The Norwegian pipeline is trained on Bokmål and does duty for both standards, so it handles the shared core and misses the forms that make Nynorsk Nynorsk.
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GiellaLT Build from source beta
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Stanza upcoming
What each analyzer does, and who builds it, is on the lemmatizers page.
Get Norwegian Nynorsk to read & listen to
Ebook stores, audiobook subscriptions, news, and learner material: bring any of it into Laesi.
Det Norske Samlaget publishes in Nynorsk and nothing else, about a hundred titles a year across fiction, children's books and translation. If a book exists in Nynorsk there is a good chance it came from here, and the catalogue is the fastest way to find out what does exist.
The main place to buy a contemporary Norwegian ebook or audiobook outright. Check the product page for what protection a title carries, since it varies by publisher.
Reviews and recommendations of Nynorsk books, sorted by genre and reading level, run by Nynorsk kultursentrum. The problem it solves is the real one for this standard, which is not finding a dictionary but finding out what has been published at all.
A free Nynorsk news site aimed at young readers. Short pieces on ordinary subjects in the standard as it is actually written now, which is a very different exercise from working through Vesaas.
The same operation writing for children. Simpler vocabulary, shorter sentences, and no assumed background. Start here and graduate to the main site.
The only national newspaper published in Nynorsk, weekly, and a genuinely good one. Articles are available as audio as well as text, which makes it one of the few places you can read and listen to the same Nynorsk sentence.
Norway's public broadcaster, the Norwegian NPR and PBS. Its charter requires a quarter of output in Nynorsk, a bar it clears on television and has never cleared online.
Språkrådet's grammar exercises and mini-grammar for the standard, free, with a placement test. Built for Norwegian schoolchildren who have to learn their second standard rather than for foreigners, which turns out to be close enough to the same problem.
A children's magazine published in Nynorsk since 1887, which makes it the oldest in the country. Comics, stories and puzzles, and about the gentlest Nynorsk in print.
Roughly 270,000 books published in Norway up to the year 2000, free to read. Access needs a Norwegian IP address, and anything still in copyright is a page image in a browser rather than a file.
Free EPUB of the Norwegian classics in scholarly editions rather than raw OCR. The texts keep their original spelling, so expect forms that are no longer standard.
Norwegian-owned, and the one to check first for Norwegian-language titles. Nynorsk is a minority of the catalogue, but Parr, Fosse and Ravatn are there.
Audiobooks and ebooks by subscription. Nothing is sold individually.
The same shape as Storytel, with a different catalogue.
Curated by the Laesi team · last reviewed 2026-07-30
Watch and listen in Norwegian Nynorsk
NRK's adaptation of Maria Parr's books, filmed on Runde with children speaking Sunnmøre dialect at the author's insistence. The dialogue is dialect and the subtitles are Nynorsk.
NRK has been visiting people who live in impossible places since 2002, one household an episode, and the title alone tells you which standard it is written in.
A boy zombie and his friends, from NRK Super. Children's television is slow, over-enunciated and repetitive by design, and that is exactly why it works on adults three weeks into a language.
Ninth-century villagers with twenty-first-century management problems. Every scene was filmed twice, once in Norwegian and once in English, so the two versions are a parallel text with faces attached.
Look up the content warnings first
An NRK teen drama released in real time, clip by clip, and remade in seven countries. Fast, slangy, unscripted-sounding Oslo teenage speech, so one of the harder things here.
Look up the content warnings first
A Netflix series. A teenager in a Western Norwegian town turns out to be carrying something older than he is, and so does the industry poisoning the fjord. Some spoken Old Norse turns up.
A Netflix series with Nesbø himself as showrunner, adapting Marekors, the fifth Harry Hole novel. Tobias Santelmann plays Harry and Joel Kinnaman plays Tom Waaler. I would read through Snømannen before starting it.
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The 2022 film of the Egner book, in CGI and miniatures rather than Flåklypa's stop-motion. Slow dialogue, small vocabulary, and a good deal of it is songs you can look up once.
Reodor Felgen builds a racing car with a hedgehog and a magpie for a pit crew. Stop-motion from 1975 that has sold about five million tickets in a country of five million people.
Julie is nearly thirty and keeps starting over. Renate Reinsve took Best Actress at Cannes for it. Ten out of ten, and the conversational Oslo speech is about as useful as film dialogue gets.
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Two sisters and the film-director father who left. Cannes Grand Prix in 2025, then Best International Feature in March 2026, the first Norwegian narrative feature to win an Oscar.
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Found-footage mockumentary about the civil servant whose job is culling trolls, complete with paperwork. Handheld and improvised-sounding, so subtitles on.
Oslo on a hot summer day, the dead wake up, and three families have to decide what to do about them. Adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own Swedish novel. Very quiet, and long stretches carry no dialogue.
Look up the content warnings first
Medical students, a cabin in Finnmark, and the Nazi platoon that froze to death up there in 1945. Campy, gory fun, and the sequel Død snø 2 is more of the same. Fast, shouty dialogue.
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Petanque, middle-aged men, and a tournament nobody should care about as much as they do. Broad, dialect-heavy, and considerably funnier than the premise deserves.
In April 1940 the Norwegian gold reserve left Oslo ahead of the invasion on a convoy of lorries, and this is the dramatisation.
Nynorsk grammar explained on video for people who have to learn it, which mostly means Norwegian teenagers sitting their second-standard exam. Free, and the back catalogue does not expire.
Features, for Norwegian Nynorsk specifically
Nynorsk shares Laesi's Norwegian infrastructure with a few things worth calling out.
See everything Laesi does →-
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Separate vocabulary per written standardDon't want your Nynorsk progress polluted by Bokmål? Laesi keeps them as separate languages under the hood.
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Every spelling tracked separatelyNynorsk permits variant forms, and the norm has been tightened since, so an older book and a new one can spell the same word differently. Each surface form you meet carries its own level, so the two stay tracked as what they are rather than silently merging.
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spaCy + Wiktionary comboLemmatization through spaCy, definitions through Wiktionary, with a fallback chain behind it so lookups still land when the Nynorsk section of an entry is thin.
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