Norwegian Spelling For "Norway"

I don't collect Norwegian stamps, but not long ago I bought something from a dealer and it was shipped from Norway, and I noticed that the spelling of the country had changed. Ever since the very first issues with the name of the country on the stamps (the actual first one, Scott #1 didn't have it)the King Oscar stamps of 1856-57, the name of the country was spelled Norge, and almost everybody who has collected stamps to one degree or another has probably seen at least a few of them, but some time in the 20 teens I believe the Norwegian Post Office started spelling the name as "Noreg", i.e. with the G and the E reversed. I don't have a recent Scott catalogue so I don't know when it actually started, or what percentage have it, but I looked at a random selection on ebay from the last 5 years or so, and some stamps have the Norge spelling and some have Noreg. It seems to me that nothing is more fundamental to a country's cultural identity than the way it spells its own name, so why is there this variation? Is it some sort of concession to an ethnic minority that uses a different spelling? I'd love to know why.

I'm not an expert on Norwegian Language. But, as far as I know, "Norge" is the traditional Norwegian Language ("Norsk") spelling for the country's name, while "Noreg" is on the language called "Nynorsk" (= New Norwegian).
It was a mixture of Norwegian and Danish spoken by the Danish civil servents and their descendency. As Norway was a Danish posesion fron the XIV century to 1815, these people form a sizeable minority on the country's population. Thus, the alternance of both name.

It can be an explanation.

I have friends in Norway, and have been there a few times. It's been explained to me thus:

Norway has 2 official written languages: Bokmål (book tongue) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian).
Bokmål is the main language for most Norwegians with Nynorsk being a minority,

Public bodies are required by law to use both written languages and a minimum of about 20 percent (if I remember correctly) nynorsk.

I would guess that a similar percentage applies to stamps as they are issued by a public body?

Thanks to both Maiden and Cursus for the explanations, I had a feeling it was something to do with languages used in Norway. This of course is a very familiar phenomenon to anyone who knows Belgian stamps and Finnish stamps. On Belgian stamps, the names Belgique and Belgie have appeared on almost every stamp since 1891, and they represent the country name in the two official languages: French and Flemish, respectively, and on Finnish stamps the name of the country also appears in the two official languages: Suomi (Finnish) and Finland (Swedish). And this brings up an interesting paradox that I have long puzzled over: how a country can be called so many different names depending on who is calling it, I mean you can't get much more different than Suomi and Finland, then there's Schweiz, Suisse, and Svizzera for the country that English-speaking people call Switzerland, or Pays Bas for the Netherlands. It must be very confusing for map-makers. Incidentally, if you drive around Helsinki, which I did a couple of years ago, it's quite true that many of the signs are in both Swedish and Finnish, which helped, because I'd already spent a few days in Sweden, and so could pick out a few Swedish words, but Finnish was totally impenetrable to me!

Not long after posting my previous comments, by an interesting coincidence I was browsing on youtube and came across a video on the North Germanic languages of the Norse nations, and out of curiosity started watching it, and lo and behold, it discussed this very topic: the two languages of Norway, Bokmol and Nynorsk!

Belgium has three official languages--German is the third, but spoken by less than 1% of the population.

Robert

"Independence 150 years" trilingual stamp from Belgium