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

Tekst 8
Coming to terms with English in Denmark
- Discursive constructions of a language contact situation
Background
In 2001, The Nordic Language Council initiated a large scale comparative investigation of the
impact on the Nordic speech communities sustained from the contact with English (Graedler
2004). The project known as MIN, Moderne Importord i Språka i Norden (Modern Loan-
words in the Nordic Languages) deals with several aspects of the impact from English 48 . The-
se can roughly be grouped as aspects of influence and aspects of attitudes. In relation to the
first group we find comparisons of the amount of loanwords in the languages (Selback
forthc.), the amount of neologisms to substitute for the loanwords (Guðrún Kvaran forthc.),
and the degree of adaptation of loanwords into the loaning language’s orthography, morpho-
logy and phonology (Omdal forthc.). In relation to the second, we find telephone surveys
(Kristiansen & Vikør 2006), reaction experiments (Kristiansen 2006) and, my focus, qualita-
tive interviews.
The Nordic area offers a unique experimental setting for investigating the effect of different
language policies on language change and language attitudes. This is due to the national lan-
guages of the area sharing a lot of similarities, the area sharing a long common history, and in
recent times sharing similar linguistic influences, while for historical reasons the language
policies have been quite divergent.
The area is comprised of seven language communities and six languages 49 . Danish,
Norwegian and Swedish (spoken both in Sweden and in Finland where it holds official status
alongside Finnish) are very closely related, in fact so closely that did they not have long tradi-
tions as ‘state languages’, they would probably be regarded as dialects of the same language.
The three countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are often referred to as Scandinavia, and
thus I follow Vikør (2000) in referring to the three languages as Scandinavian. Icelandic and
Faroese are related to Scandinavian, but maintain more of the traditional grammar of the
common Nordic language of the middle ages, i.e. North Germanic, and are not immediately
48 More information about the project can be found at http://moderne-importord.info.
49 The term language community refers to a political unit, not e.g. a community of practice or of language norms.
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