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

[…] The development over the last 50 years has been so that English is the language you
need to use. [same, 16.08].
Add to this a belief that English is uniquely easy to learn (possibly because it is widely avai-
lable?), and you have good pragmatic, crucially not ideological, reasons for opting for Eng-
lish as the world’s international language after all:
[We] don’t have to invent a new one when there is a language, so to speak, that everybody
can speak, or can relatively easily learn to speak, you know [Inf29, 27.46].
What we get then is a two stage treatment of the utopian vision that everybody should speak
English. Firstly, that it would indeed be good if everyone spoke a common language, second-
ly, that choosing between all the world’s languages, English is probably the better choice. No-
tice how by using this two stage treatment the informants avoid being held accountable for
strong pro-English sympathies. No one in effect argue in favour of the question’s phrasing
(English as a common language). What they do argue in favour of is a common language.
The secondary choice of English is taken as a mere practicality, i.e. a non-ideological choice,
the practical outcome of which is of course the same.
Even more strikingly is it to see how English is treated when other languages are fore-
grounded. Almost universally English is used as the yardstick and stands as a starting point
for any discussion of foreign languages or languages in international communication.
The questionnaire includes a question that asks informants to judge the relative importance of
a list of languages, viz. Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. It probably
comes as no surprise that English gets a straight ‘5’ on a 5-point scale, the other languages
ranging between 2.05 (Russian) and 3.33 (Spanish). A significant reason for the high score for
English is the perception of it as the only truly global of the languages whereas the others are
somehow geographically restricted 53 .
Arabic is damned important for everybody in the Arabic World, it is spoken in many
countries. […] English, well you can only say it is vastly important. French is also in
some countries, but it isn’t global. Russian is a big country, you know… Spanish even
more important…[Inf14, 58.26].
53 As an aside, it is interesting to note how from a Danish point of view German and French receive relatively
high evaluations. Maybe this is an effect of English being set aside as the ‘world language’, which leaves space
for German and French to take the role as ‘European languages’, in a way similar to how Spanish is considered
to be the ‘South American language’ and Arabic the language of ‘the Arabic World’.
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