Rozhľady: Purism and Nationalism in Language Norms: A Comparative Analysis of the Norwegian and Slovak Spelling Reform Adopted during World War II

Abstract The linguistic situation in interwar Norway and Czechoslovakia had several parallels. The official languages in both countries were represented by two written standards: Norwegian in the form of Bokmål and Nynorsk, and, in Czechoslovakia, Czech and Slovak – separate but closely related languages that were officially referred to as the Czechoslovak language. At the same time, both countries adopted spelling norms during this period to gradually unify the language variants. 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, during the Second World War, both Norway and the newly established Slovak Republic – at that time Nazi Germany’s allies – introduced revised spelling rules: the Norwegian Spelling Reform of 1941 and the Rules of Slovak Orthography of 1940. This article focuses on these wartime reforms and explores the impact of political changes on language planning. Through comparative analysis, it seeks to identify the elements, approaches, or ideas that may connect the new rules despite the different linguistic natures of the analysed languages.