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

language policies. At the same time, the imagined community is reinforced through the other
three factors. And each of the three other factors affects each other. A language policy to keep
the languages closer to each other affects the comprehension and indeed the idea that mutual
intelligibility is feasible. Mutual comprehension and the ideal of speaking Scandinavian have
in turn often 37 been used as arguments to steer the development of the Nordic languages in the
same direction. In terms of the ‘third stage of (national) romanticism’ mentioned above, we
can even say that this process strengthens ‘the Nordic’ against Anglification.
The choice of language is of course heavily dependent on actual comprehension, but dia-
lectically, comprehension is also affected by the actual use of Scandinavian in communication
with (other) Nordic people, and indeed by whether one communicates with Nordic people at
all. We could have included ‘education’ in figure 1, since it mutually affects several of the
other factors – for instance, education reinforces mutual comprehension and the imagined
community through the choice of perspectives on the teaching of history; at the same time, the
educational system is of course affected by the general ideologies of the society at large. Our
decision not to include the educational system as a separate box in figure 1 is based on our
view that the function of education is first and foremost a tool for reproducing ideologies that
exist in the society; thus, it typically does not bring in any new perspective into the system.
As depicted in figure 1, the system is a very dynamic one, and it is also a very fragile one.
As one factor changes, all the other factors are affected, and these in turn affect the first factor,
and so on. To this already unstable system we now add ‘globalization’. This external factor
changes the reality that the ideology of the Nordic exists in, e.g., by introducing English as a
‘practical’ alternative to Scandinavian in inter-Nordic communication. At the same time glo-
balization introduces new rhetorics into the ideology of the Nordic, forcing the Nordic to rein-
terpret itself and to justify itself against the demands of rationality and current market values.
This situation, with the concomitant need to redefine traditional ideologies in the face of mo-
dern marketization and the processes it releases, is what we understand by the term glocaliza-
tion – and this is how it should be understood in figure 1. Glocalization itself stands in a
complex relationship to globalization. Although glocalization as a phenomenon in several
senses can be seen as a reaction against globalization in an attempt to appropriate the percei-
ved aggressiveness of globalization, glocalization has also taken on characteristics of its own
and it has become a complex actor – as such – in late modernity.
37 For instance at the Stockholm meeting mentioned above, and in the collaborative work in the language coun-
cils ever since.
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