Harald Bjorvand is a Norwegian linguist.

He was born in Askim

Askim

is a town and a municipality in Østfold county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Askim. Askim was established as a municipality on 1 January 1838 ....

, and graduated from the University of Oslo

University of Oslo

The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

 in 1970. He was a research fellow

Research fellow

The title of research fellow is used to denote a research position at a university or similar institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a principal investigator...

 at the same institution from 1972 to 1974, amanuensis from 1974 to 1987, associate professor from 1987 and professor from 1990. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1988 with the thesis Holt og Holtar. Om utviklingen av det indoeuropeiske kollektivum i norrønt på sammenlignende grunnlag.

His fields of specialty are general comparative language history

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

, general Indo-Germanic linguistics

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

, all archaic Germanic languages

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

 (Old West Norse, Gothic

Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

, Old High German

Old High German

The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

 etc.), and Germanic linguistics in general, including runes

Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

, morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

 and etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

.

His most famous work is a new etymological dictionary

Etymological dictionary

An etymological dictionary discusses the etymology of the words listed. Often, large dictionaries, such as the OED and Webster's, will contain some etymological information, without aspiring to focus on etymology....

(Våre Arveord "Our inherited words") for Norwegian, which is a collaboration with Fredrik Otto Lindeman, another linguist professor in the Indo-Germanic field.