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

One very obvious reason why some people would be more negative towards the common
use of Scandinavian in inter-Nordic communication is if they do not, or if they do not feel,
that they understand or speak Scandinavian. It is at this point that the results of the recent,
large-scale comparative study in the INS-project (cf. Delsing & Lundin Åkesson 2005) of
how well people in the Nordic countries understand each other become crucial in order to
make sense of some of the results we have received within the MIN-project. Most of the in-
formants in the INS-project were high school students, whereas those in the MIN-project were
of a more divergent background, socially as well as agewise. If there is, as we believe, a cur-
rent evolution, reshaping, or reconstruction of the ideology of the Nordic vis-à-vis global Eng-
lish, the fact that most of our informants are one generation older than those in the INS-
project may have a significant bearing. However, such an evolution will no doubt take place
simultaneously and in parallel in all communities to the extent that a comparison between
youngsters’ competence and grown-ups’ attitudes does make sense.
Table 2 shows a comparison of attitudes towards pro-Scandinavism with INS results, in
terms of informants’ ‘competence’ in Scandinavian languages, in terms of how ‘easy’ Scan-
dinavian languages are, and with respect to how ‘beautiful’ Scandinavian languages are per-
ceived to be. The communities are ranked so that the ones that are most ‘Scandinavian’ are
placed at the far left; that is, the ranks on the question about English in INC have been rever-
sed in order to make them more easily comparable with the other ranks. The variable ‘compe-
tence’ is the mean score (from the INS study) of language competence for all Scandinavian
languages excluding your mother tongue. That is, Norwegian and Danish for a Swede or a
Finland Swede, and vice versa for Danes and Norwegians; for the Faeroes, Icelanders and
Finns, all three Scandinavian languages are included in ‘Scandinavian’. The variable ‘ease’ is
the mean score of the responses to the question ‘How easy is it to understand X?’, where X is
the Scandinavian languages excluding your mother tongue. Similarly, ‘beauty’ is the reported
mean ‘beauty’ of the languages. Societies circumscribed by parentheses show equal or only
minutely different scores between them, i.e. they should be considered of the same rank.
influences from Finnish and English is dealt with in detail in Mattfolk (forthc. a, b) and Mattfolk & Kristiansen
(forthc.).
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