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

contact with Scandinavians. This may not be a surprising result in view of geography and the
linguistic genealogy of the Nordic area, since Finland is quite peripheral geographically, and
since Finnish is genetically very different from the North Germanic languages. Further, their
most immediate contacts with Scandinavian languages would typically be with Swedish spea-
kers in Finland, a contact situation which was not counted as contact with a(nother) Scandi-
navian language in the INS-study. It is worth noting also that the Faeroes are the ones with the
most contact with Scandinavian languages; yet another factor that will affect their rank in
table 2. Even more striking are the Icelanders’ reports of a rather intense contact with Scandi-
navian, since this does not seem to have an effect on their meager competence in the Scandi-
navian languages. This might, however, have to do with the type of informants used in INS.
Iceland formerly belonged to the Danish monarchy politically, and Danish is still taught as a
compulsory language in Icelandic schools. Since the INS respondents were high school stu-
dents, they would have been in contact at least with Danish, but not necessarily with the same
frequency as, say, a Faeroese watching Danish TV on a daily basis.
What we see in table 3 may be a reflection of another split, viz. one of core vs. periphery.
On the attitude scale, the smaller and geographically peripheral societies, the Icelanders, the
Faeroes, and the Finland Swedes, are the more Scandinavia-positive, whereas speakers in the
Scandinavian countries themselves are more negative towards the (rest of) Scandinavia. Here,
the Finnish speakers ranked in-between. It is quite likely that the peripheral societies look to-
wards the more central and larger Scandinavian countries as a regional center, an extended
metropolis to look up to (at least ideologically), to find inspiration from, and even as a gate to
the rest of Europe and the world. At the same time, the Scandinavian countries themselves
would consider their own, influential and central country as the center of their world, and they
would look towards, e.g., Britain, Germany, or the U.S.A. for a central metropolis, rather than
search for such an influential capital in their neighboring Scandinavian countries. In fact,
what we find is the opposite: the other Scandinavian countries may in a ‘national-centristic’
manner be looked down upon as a step removed from the Scandinavian core. Something simi-
lar would be the case for Finland, itself a large nation and as such its own core, but also a core
on a par with Scandinavia as such. That is, whereas the Scandinavians’ scope is the other
Scandinavian countries, the Finns’ is a unified Scandinavia, a larger and more homogenous
entity; something to regard as an equal. Again, this interpretation should be moderated by a
critical look at the INS-informants as compared with the populations at large. In particular in
Iceland, high school students with a formal contact with Danish may show a different senti-
ment towards Scandinavian than what is representative of the population at large. Given the
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