Purism and nationalism in orthography

A comparative analysis of the Norwegian and Slovak spelling reform adopted during World War II

Abstrakt

The linguistic situation in interwar Norway and Czechoslovakia had several parallels. The official languages in both countries existed in two varieties: Norwegian in the form of Bokmål and Nynorsk, and the Czechoslovak language in Czech and Slovak versions. At the same time, both countries adopted spelling norms during this period to gradually unify the language variants into one. In Norway, this process took the form of a mutual approximation of Bokmål and Nynorsk, while in Czechoslovakia, it primarily involved bringing Slovak closer to Czech. Both the Norwegian spelling reform of 1938 and the Rules of Slovak Orthography of 1931 caused controversy. Moreover, in both cases, the new rules were adopted during the Second World War, at a time when both Norway and the newly established Slovak Republic were Nazi Germany’s allies. This article focuses on the impact of political changes on spelling reforms and, through comparative analysis, seeks to identify the elements, approaches, or ideas that connect the new rules despite the different linguistic natures of the analysed languages.