More on language - sub-standard Norwegian non-fiction..

I read an article in Dagsavisen the other day that digs right into the subject of my post about erosion of the Norwegian language a few days ago.

The Norwegian Society of Non-fiction Writers would like the State Library to increase the number of non-fiction titles bought to their book collections each year. The libraries disagree, for the simple reason that the quality of those works is too low. There are simply not enough Norwegian non-fiction works of decent quality written every year.

I do remember from my own university studies that it was a problem to find books about my subject written in Norwegian. Thus, I had to resort to English books. I am not sure I had one single book written in Norwegian on my list of sources used for my thesis. This is the reality for a lot of students and people in academia. There are simply no books, or at least too few books, written on specific subjects.

This, of course, contributes to creating, what the Minister of Culture, Trond Giske, calls a "gap" in our Norwegian language. For many parts of academia, we rely heavily, in some cases almost exclusively, on English literature. Naturally, the vocabulary for those subjects is very influenced by English, and in some cases the English terms are being used. Again, from my own studies, I sometimes had slight problems finding the correct Norwegian translation of specific terms, and was tempted to use the English term.

The State Libraries do have some solutions to this problem, though, that might interest mr Giske. One of these ideas is more grants and scholarships, to enable non-fiction writers to actually get the time necessary to write good non-fiction. Also, they suggest better training and more courses for aspiring non-fiction writers, as well as more focus on advisory to the writers in the writing process from the publishing houses.