Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee).
The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokmål. School textbooks would be rewritten with only the new grammar. Sometimes with comical results, as rhyming words in children’s would no lenger rhyme («Mons er pen./ Han er ren -> rein.»)
The attempt ultimately failed, and in 1972 Språknemda became Språkrådet (The language council), who maintain the official rules for written Norwegian and who published this article. Merging the two written languages was part of the council’s long term goals until 2002, when it was removed from its mandate.
What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism: When the phone number length increased from 5 to 6 digits, the number of wrongly dialed numbers increased along with it. Internal research at the bureau showed that people would make fewer errors when digits were consistently read from right to left.
Further reading (in Norwegian): - https://snl.no/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten