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

intelligible to Scandinavians. Finnish, finally, is of the Finno-Ugric language family, and un-
related to the rest, although it does have a large amount of Swedish loanwords.
Politically, the area shares a common history. Denmark and Sweden have a long histo-
ry of independence. Finland and Norway were until the 19 th century colonies of Sweden and
Denmark respectively. Iceland was under Danish supremacy until 1944, and The Faeroes are
still a part of the Danish commonwealth. Today, all of the societies share roughly similar so-
cio-political systems, with a strong public sector and a high social security – a system some-
times referred to as the Nordic Model. Equally, the area is perceived as a unity with common
traits that separate it from Central Europe. In fact, the existence of a language political organi-
zation such as The Nordic Language Council can be taken as a sign of the ideological unity of
the Nordic area (Östman & Thøgersen forthc.).
The cultural and political influence from (American-)English is of a similar nature and
mass in all of the communities, in particular of course from the end of the Second World War.
In meeting with the different policies of language and cultural protectionism, however, the
linguistic outcome has been quite divergent.
To give some indication of the linguistic influence on just one community, I turn to
Danish as an example 50 . An influence from English is apparent both in vocabulary and gram-
mar, as well as in more general societal levels. In the case of vocabulary, Jarvad (1999) esti-
mates that app. 30 % of all new words emerging in the period 1945-1998 have at least one
English word element. And MIN’s quantitative investigation of the amount of English loan-
words in everyday texts (Selback forthc.), reveals that app. 1.2 % of the words in national
newspapers have English elements. In the case of grammar we find e.g. a new plural form, viz.
the plural –s. This morphological form is spreading from English loanwords to other words
that seem ‘foreign’, and maybe even to native Danish words. We find new syntactical con-
structions, e.g. imperative with initial adverb possibly modelled on the English ‘please go to
the exit’-type, where traditionally Danish would have: ‘gå venligst til udgangen’ (go please to
the exit). In phonology we find previously unknown sounds like the /ei/ diphthong and the /w/
semi-vowel, at presently restricted to English loanwords (Sørensen 1973, Rathje 2006). And
finally, Danish orthography effectively deals with two systems, a native Danish system and an
(originally) English system, each with its own set of sound-to-letter correspondences. On the
societal level, several academic domains are effectively conducted in English by Danes in
Denmark – at least in their writing (Jarvad 2001). Youth culture is heavily influenced by (lo-
50 Danish is generally regarded as the language with the most significant influence from English, as will be discussed
below. However, similar tendencies can be seen in the other communities as well.
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