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

3. The Nordic project today
With the earlier stages of how and why a notion of ‘the Nordic’ was created and how it has
been upheld as a back-drop, we need to look at what it is today, both objectively and subjecti-
vely. What is it that the Nordic project might have to offer in view of the globalization and
glocalization of today?
In 1972 Øivind Maurud made a large-scale investigation of the extent to which Swedes,
Norwegians and Danes understand each other, and what their attitudes were towards each
other. Maurud’s (1976) study was recently followed up by a pan-Nordic linguistic project on
inter-Nordic understanding (the INS-project), headed by Lars-Olof Delsing, which in addition
investigated the understanding of non-Scandinavian Nordic speakers’ understanding of the
Scandinavian languages. The results of that study (Delsing & Lundin Åkesson 2005) will be
made extensive use of in chapter 5, since they indirectly offer a way for us to find a respec-
table tertium comparationis for the MIN-study of Nordic attitudes towards the local, the glo-
bal, and the Nordic.
Another major study of these issues is Grünbaum (2000), where the notion of the core
Scandinavian similarities is explicated in an ideologically very unambiguous manner as ‘det
omistliga’: the features in the respective Scandinavian languages that need to be retained (lit.
‘that cannot/are not allowed to be lost’) in order for their speakers to be able to continue spea-
king their own mother tongues when they communicate with other Scandinavians. As we see,
the crucial point here is not a simplex question of how close the Nordic (or Scandinavian)
languages are to each other, but more precisely and functionally, how easy it is to understand
each other.
Finally, we should mention the recent activities towards enhancement of the national lan-
guages in the Nordic communities. Language policies in the form of Programs for Action ha-
ve recently been published for Swedish (Mål i mun, 2002), for Finland Swedish (Tänk om …,
2003), for Danish (Sprog på spil, 2003) and for Norwegian (Norsk i hundre, 2005). For a sy-
nopsis, see Lindgren (2005). An overview of the issues at stake and in particular of how the
national language councils over the last 100–150 years have reacted to influences from
foreign languages and cultures can be found in Sandøy & Östman (2004).
Whatever the outcome of detailed analyses of opinion poll data, of interview data, or of
experimental data, it is clear that the object of this study, the ideology of the Nordic, is a mul-
tifaceted thing, something that is constrained by an abundance of different variables and pa-
rameters. We will here try to open up some of the avenues that lead to a deeper understanding
of this ideology by taking both a quantitative and a qualitative look at the explicit views that
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