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

do not speak English, and thus that they wish for inter-Nordic communication to be conducted
in Scandinavian. These typically are also the informants who describe inter-Scandinavian
communication as least troublesome. Many of the other informants, i.e. informants who say
that they speak English to some extent, describe inter-Scandinavian communication as rather
more troublesome – without this necessarily leading them to discard Scandinavian 36 . And this
is so despite the fact that they have a limited view of what this communication involves.
Again and again, Danish is brought up as the most problematic to understand; i.e., Swedish
and Norwegian informants describe Danish as rather incomprehensible, and say that English
is much easier to use in communication with Danes; cf. (4) from the Swedish material. The
Danish informants in turn counter this by describing how Swedes, and to a smaller extent
Norwegians, do not understand them, and hence, they too argue that English is easier in
communication with Swedes and Norwegians.
(4) När man har varit i Göteborg o sprungit på nå danskar så blir det bara (,) det går
inte. Ta det här på engelska. Eller om man varit över till Danmark, så vill ja inte
göra mig svensk utan ja gör mig engelsk turist o börjar prata engelska direkt. (…)
För att ja tycker det är så svårt å förstå (.) ja det blir så jobbigt. Så då tar jag hellre
till engelska.
‘When one has been to Gothenburg and run into some Danes – well, it simply
won’t work. Do it in English. Or if one has been to Denmark; then I do not want
to be Swedish, but I make myself an English tourist and start to speak English
straight away. Because I find it so difficult to understand; it’s so much work.
Then I rather go for English.’
However, these views do not necessarily lead these informants to discard Scandinavian in in-
ter-Nordic communication. But the views do affect their arguments for using Scandinavian.
Phrased differently, when English is established as the more ‘pragmatic’ language to use in
inter-Nordic communication, another set of arguments must be used to argue for using Scan-
dinavian; such arguments are rather less ‘practical’ and more ‘ideological’.
The most basic Scandinavian argument for using Scandinavian is that ‘we are able to’.
Being a Dane – so the argument goes – means that you by default are able to understand
Norwegians and Swedes, and vice versa, and therefore we should use these languages. If it
were not for the fact that this argument is often paired with stating that it would be easier to
use English, we might be justified in calling this a practical argument, too. However, what we
36 One could speculate that the expectations of what can be accomplished in communication with someone with
whom one does not share a language might have an effect here. If one is highly proficient in a foreign language
and communicates in it on a regular basis, one will have rather higher expectations of the outcome. If one speaks
only one’s mother-tongue, one may not have as high expectations as to what can be accomplished in interlanguage
communication
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