Ivar Aasen

Ivar Andreas Aasen was born on August 5, 1813, on a small farm in Ørsta, Sunnmøre. An orphan farmer's son with virtually no formal schooling, he taught himself botany, Latin, and Old Norse through tireless independent study.

Commissioned by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, Aasen traveled across the valleys and fjords of western and central Norway from 1842 to 1846, meticulously recording dialect grammars and vocabularies. He published his seminal Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatikk (1848) and Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog (1850), synthesizing an authentic Norwegian written language known as Landsmål (later Nynorsk). In 1885, Parliament granted it equal legal status with Danish-influenced Riksmål.