17
votes
New gender-neutral pronoun is likely to enter the official Norwegian language within a year, the Language Council of Norway has confirmed
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- New gender-neutral pronoun likely to enter Norwegian dictionaries
- Authors
- Weronika Strzyżyńska
- Published
- Feb 2 2022
- Word count
- 414 words
I'm really curious, as an outsider, what influence the Language Council of Norway actually has on the Norwegian language. Our English dictionaries take a descriptivist approach, welcoming new words as they arise organically in common use. I presume there are no languages for which some governing body can declare a word "official" and it be any more than a symbolic gesture. So a more meaningful declaration would be something like a new edition of a popular style guide, or a change in the rules the government follows when writing official forms and documents. What I'm asking is, how important of a headline is this exactly?
L'Académie Française est entrée dans le salon de discussion.
But sometime their new words fail to much traction (e.g. Mél as a remplacement for e-mail)
Hahahah. Amen :)
Mél was such an idiotic idea anyway. For the non-french-speakers among us, it's like if the Oxford Dictionary decided to claim "Bon Appétit" was no longer something you should say in English, and replace it with the much-more-correctly-written-and-pronounced "bawnapp it-it".
Well, yes and no but ultimately yes.
For me looks similar enough to a contraction of message électronique which is close enough to "courrier électronique" (the literal translation of e-mail). And having it as an homonyme of "mail" (which is the most used word referring to email where I live) is a nice bonus.
... but this still manage to look like both like a cop out ("everybody is saying /meɪl/ anyway") and some sort of righteous jealousy toward Québec (the much more used "courriel" word comes from there; "Comment osez-vous inventer des nouveaux mots !? Nous sommes l'Académie Française !") ).
It didn't even occur to me it could be a contraction of "message électronique". It's that bad.
Courriel is a perfect word. France has severe NIH syndrome. God forbid we get some canadian words into our language, jeez.