Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

alization, ‘the ideology of the Nordic’ may present itself as an already well established reper-
toire – hence a ‘third stage of Nordicity’. However, we should not expect the old forms of
‘Nordicity’ to simply be reused. More likely ‘Nordicity’, if at all viable, will be reworked,
rephrased, recontextualized, and re-appropriated in view of the challenges presented by the
late modernity of today. Further, we should not either expect that every Nordic community
uses ‘Nordicity’ to the same extent or appropriate it in the same way. Ultimately, as scholars
we need to approach society on its own terms, non-essentialistically, but historically informed.
In our quest for an explication of the Nordic, we will encounter different manifestations of
glocalization throughout this study – all more or less couched in terms of ideology. ‘Norden’
hosts community members who use languages that belong to very different language famili-
es 29 , communities with very different histories and with different political interests. But histo-
rically, the notion of ‘the Nordic project’ has kept them together. 30
In order to understand where Norden is going today, and whether the Nordic has – or will
have – any relevance for the future, we need to meet the individual on his or her own turf.
How does the individual feel about issues of ideology (without necessarily having an un-
derstanding of the concept as such)? Is s/he pro-Nordic or anti-Nordic; is s/he pro-global or
anti-global (and is that the same as being pro-English or anti-English; pro- or anti-Anglo-
American)? Is his/her view on English as a lingua franca ideologically based (monocultura-
lism vs. plurism; globalization vs. nationalism; purism vs. laissez-faire-ism in language plan-
ning) or not?
The other – even more important – aspect that needs to be addressed is the individual’s
conception of his/her own ‘inter-Nordic understanding’. It is one thing to realize and to point
out the ‘objective’ linguistic differences between the Nordic languages; it is a very different
matter to address the issue of understanding, since here we are not only concerned with ‘ob-
jective’ linguistic factors, but also with a host of psychological factors, ranging from motiva-
tion and general disposition to very particularized, personal experiences.
29 In addition to the languages covered by the MIN-project, there are more than half a dozen Sámi languages in
the area, Inuit speakers on Greenland, not to mention a host of immigrant languages. Although globally speaking
Norden might not host as many large groups of Others as, say, France and Germany, there is no lack of linguistic
heterogeneity in the Nordic communities, starting from traditional minorities like the Roma and users of different
Signed languages.
30 For linguists, as ‘a natural laboratory’, with differences within the similarity.
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