Christian Kølle

Christian Kølle (15 August 1736 – 30 January 1814) was a Norwegian educator.

He was born in Kristiania as a son of government official (kanselliråd) Jens Kølle and his wife Catharine Hermine Juell. He attended the Christiania Cathedral School, enrolled as a student in 1755 and graduated with the cand.theol. degree in 1760. He applied for various clergical positions in Denmark, but was never appointed, supposedly because of closeness with the Moravian Church. He instead worked as a private tutor, in Kråkstad, Fjære and Arendal. In 1770 he bought the farm Snarøen and ran his own boarding school.

Kølle wrote several of the textbooks used in his school. In some of these books, he employed linguistic ideas that preceded many actual language reforms in Norway. He emphasized "purely Norwegian" words in books, and argued for more phonemic orthography in the written language. In an anonymous work released in 1785 he introduced the written feminine grammatical gender in Norway, unheard of in the Danish written culture of the day, but often used orally. He also introduced a precursor to the letter "å" instead of "aa". Following the model of the letter ø, which was an o with a slash through it, he chose the character ⱥ (a with a slash through it), to replace aa. Although he preferred to use ⱥ, he used å or aͤ (a with superscript o or e) when this type was not available.

His principles were attacked by J. J. Vangensten in Norway's first newspaper Norske Intelligenz-Sedler, and by Jens Kragh Høst in the Danish Kiøbenhavnske Efterretninger om lærde Sager, both in 1796. A rebuttal by Kølle was printed in both publications in 1797. He was a predecessor of later language reformers, including Rasmus Rask and Knud Knudsen. The letter å eventually became introduced in Norwegian in 1917, and written feminine grammatical gender also became a reality.

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