Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.
These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.
Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.
Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
Since the majority speak some dialect of bokmål, and most courses teach it, that's what you end up with.
I watch some series in Norwegian, e.g. Ragnarok. I understood most of it, though some of the dialects were kinda hard to understand.
But it seems a moot point, basically nobody in any language speaks the "high" language, but some kind of dialect version of it.
When teaching Norwegian to foreigners there's really only one practical way of doing that - use an artificial "spoken" bokmål so that the students can actually match speech to written words. That's just a crutch in order to learn the language (after you're done the real learning starts). That doesn't mean that "spoken" bokmål (or nynorsk for that matter) is real outside the learning institution.
English, say, also has many spoken forms but more or less one written form.
If you learn written English and then move to the Highlands or Australia you are also in for some heavy learning.
If I remember correctly from Norwegian classes growing up, Bokmål is heavily influenced by written Danish. Nynorsk was based on dialects people spoke outside of the bigger cities. Nynorsk however is more of an amalgamation of dialects, and can not be said to be spoken by anyone. Your estimation is in the neighborhood of native writers of Nynorsk I believe.
Probably they had that one Norwegian employee who struggled with it in school and came to hate it as a result (you'll find plenty of them in this thread).
But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then.
So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing.
What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.)
Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.
I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time.
The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve"
* 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits
* 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes)
* 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform)
(the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread)
vs. "trettifem":
* 2000-2024: 2587
* 1950-1999: 5728
* 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform)
(You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)