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

present in our interpretation of the Nordic. The central Scandinavian countries group together
in their responses to all three of our questions, and they tend to do the same in the other data
we have looked at. Apparently the Scandinavian countries have something in common other
than the genealogy of their languages: at least they seem to have a common ideology at some
level, and their language skills ensure fairly easy communication. We suggested above that
the more peripheral societies, the Faroese and the Finland Swedish, look at Scandinavia with
rather more positive sentiments than one might initially expect. In the central Scandinavian
area, by contrast, the inter-Scandinavian sentiments are rather cooler than what might be ex-
pected from the relative ease Scandinavians have in understanding each other as compared
with the ‘peripherals’. The case of Finnish-speaking Finland, overall, is about as cool as could
be expected given the linguistic genealogy of Finnish and Scandinavian. Finally, we find that
the Icelandic group variously with the Faeroes and the Swedish-speaking Finns as rather pro-
Scandinavian or with the Finns as rather anti-Scandinavian depending on which question (and
which informants) are analyzed.
We will proceed by elaborating on both projects, the theoretical as well as the comparati-
ve sociolinguistic. In the subsequent chapters we will sketch out some of the factors which
may be involved in the dialectics of the ideology of the Nordic, and we will also trace the dis-
courses of the Nordic ideology with a special focus on the core vs. periphery dichotomy as
this is expressed in the interactive interviews.
6. In search of ideology in “the interactive” part of the interview
So far in this study on the Nordic project, we have seen where it came from and how it has
changed over the decades and what, in quantitative terms, it looks like today. On the basis of
the quantitative results in terms of the responses to three interview questions, it seems clear
that the choice of language in the seven Nordic speech communities with respect to inter-
Nordic communication and understanding is particularly constrained by two factors: first, and
maybe obviously, whether and to what extent people actually do understand each other or
speakers from the neighboring communities; and secondly, ideology. Since the results so far
show that there is no simple way of consolidating the results we have received with a strong
view of the still-strong-and-standing notion of Nordicity, we now turn to ideology.
We approach ideology through close readings of the responses to the three questions from
the approximately 200 interactive interviews presented in chapter 4. For detailed analyses and
fuller excerpts of the remaining over one-hundred questions, we refer to the forthcoming pub-
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