I think what goes for "German" has even more internal differences.
I recommend "Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular" by Don Snow.
That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…
But conversely, you'll if anything be more likely to find people with negative attitudes to Nynorsk, with at least some proportion of people who resent having to deal with a language only used by 10%.
Neither nynorsk or bokmål are spoken languages.
My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spoken language.
What you will find though is that there are a couple of scenarios where people will kind of speak the written form. One is, or at least used to be, newscasters on TV. They used to have rules which limited the kind of speech used, for reasons. And, as the news were essentially read from a script.. you speak it like it's written. Be that Bokmål or Nynorsk. And that's where you will find spoken Bokmål (or Nynorsk).. when reading aloud. And, as I mentioned in another comment.. when teaching people Norwegian. In the beginning you kind of speak the written form, otherwise the student would be totally confused.
I don’t have any first-hand knowledge, but according to Wikipedia on Bokmål it looks like it can be spoken as well (Wikipedia uses a phrase “spoken Bokmål”), but without a universally agreed-upon and regulated pronunciation. Isn’t it similar to English in this sense?
I believe /u/Tor3's point is that Norwegians would read and pronounce nynorsk and bokmål the same regardless of the differences in the writing.
> Isn’t it similar to English in this sense?
It is. I don't pronounce English words differently when they're written with e.g. British or American spellings.
Nynorsk is a mix of lots of various spoken dialects. No one really "speaks" nynorsk, but for many it's closer to how they speak than bokmål would be, but it's still not 1:1 for them. The only way you really would "speak" nynorsk if you're reading a play or something written in it.
That almost certainly means "a moderate Oslo dialect, neither Stovner or Frogner", and it's probably not nearly as close to written Bokmål as you think (unless you learned Norwegian as a second language).
That's why I hate reading it so much. I swear every time i read an article or something in Nynorsk, there's at least one word in there I've never seen in my life, that sounds like something a Sunnmøring spat out during a stroke.
A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used.
People write Cantonese in private of course, but that usage is not uniform at all since there is a lot of slang (especially swearing words) for which more than one popular way to write it down exists. Quite often the characters chosen for that purpose had different meanings originally. Some particularly novel or distinctive words and idioms are even partly written in Latin letters, like 快-D.
Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.
> People write Cantonese in private of course
It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas!
> that usage is not uniform
Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn’t know offhand how they would even do it about a purely spoken turn of phrase.
A government regulating it by teaching it in school and actively using it in public would be a strong criteria. Alternatively, an established body of literature that serves as a model (that's how written Italian evolved).
> It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas
Yes, that's also what I said. However, any official announcements or documents are quite unlikely to use it.
Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know they have to keep it strong.
What makes it more interesting is that the non-phonetic, semi-ideographic nature of the writing system means no direct unambiguous translation between sound and written symbols—so that you may actually struggle to write down certain turns of spoken Cantonese, even if you are a native speaker!
Another difference is that, unlike Nynorsk (which began as “New Norwegian”), Cantonese is old—at least on par with or arguably older compared to languages used for writing in the same area.