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

I think we delimit many people by having a lot of different languages. I would prefer
that [English as a mother tongue for all]. I think that many, many people would then
achieve far more in their lives, because it is so delimiting. [Inf49, 16.35]
Furthermore, for the majority of the informants it is simply impossible to give a qualified
guess as to their interpretation. Either they give no comments at all, or their comments are of
an ambivalent type. Thøgersen (2005b) presents a more elaborate discussion of the methodo-
logical and social implications of such ‘misunderstandings’.
Rhetorical contextualizations
It would be tempting to write this objection off as a problem of one particular question formu-
lation, specifically with the exact definition of one particular word, ‘mother tongue’. That
would be wrong. Of the approximately 120 questions in the qualitative interview questionnai-
re none (with the possible exception of ‘age’ and ‘sex’) do not allow for some kind of in-
terpretative misunderstanding. We have seen how the interpretation of some words can cause
problems. So can the use of the Likert type scales. Some informants unknowingly flip them
‘upside down’, making positive negative and vice versa, or they read them as nominal
‘yes/no’ type scales rather than ordinal ‘more-or-less’ types. More significantly and more in-
terestingly is how questions that are created ‘de-contextualized’, i.e. without concern of the
social and linguistic context of the question phrases, become contextualized in the course of
the interview as a social event. This contextualization can take place in several ways relating
either to the linguistic context, i.e. in relation to the questions that come before the current
question, or the social, i.e. in dealing with the relationship between interviewer and intervie-
wee and the interviewee’s desire to present himself as logically consistent, multi-facetted, in-
telligent etc.
To illustrate this, the questionnaire poses the following questions to determine the infor-
mants’ attitudes towards the use of English vs. Scandinavian in inter-Nordic communication 52 :
3.5) The inter-Nordic communication should be conducted in Norwegian, Danish or
Swedish.
3.6) It is quite alright and merely an advantage for the inter-Nordic communication to be
conducted in English.
52 As mentioned above, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are closely related, and intercommunication is widely
accepted as feasible, albeit by most lay persons seen as inherently difficult. Faeroese are bilingual in Danish and
Faeroese, Swedish is taught to Finnish speaking Finns due to Finland’s status as officially bilingual, and Danish
(or Swedish or Norwegian) is taught in Icelandic schools, so theoretically the ‘peripheral’ nations are not excluded
from this intercommunication, although the actual state of affairs is a little more moot.
201