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

It is difficult to give a broad estimate, because Danish is massive in primary schools,
while if you attend university, there aren’t a lot of Danish course books. So I reckon it
depends where you are in the system, you know [Inf 21, 5.05].
Another aspect is of course what is meant by the ‘size’ of a language. Is it the formal instruc-
tion in the use of a given language, then indeed English may weigh as much in the curriculum
as Danish, seeing as classes in Danish deal with a lot that has not to do with the use of the
language; reading literature and discussing cultural phenomena, as well as working with gene-
ral linguistic competences that cannot be connected with one language rather than the other. If
on the other hand all use of a language in the school setting contributes to the ‘size’ of the
language in the primary school, Danish must far outweigh English. However, being used as a
medium of instruction, ‘a tool’, apparently does not add as much to the size of the language as
being the target.
If you have Danish as a subject, of course emphasis is put on it, in spelling, punctuation
etc. But when it is math, it isn’t, then Danish is just a tool [Inf 22, 9.40].
We turn now to the arguments given for promoting and upgrading the list of languages in the
educational system. The languages fall neatly into three categories with three distinct sets of
arguments. Firstly, there is the national language and the mother tongue for the large majority
of the students, Danish. Secondly, there is the group of ‘international’ language (with variant
degrees of ‘internationality’ as discussed above). And thirdly, there are the two neighbouring
and closely related languages, Swedish and Norwegian 55 . If we first look at the numerical
evaluation, we find English and Danish on the top of the list (4.69 and 4.67 respectively),
German and French (3.16 and 2.94 resp.), Swedish, Spanish and Norwegian (2.53, 2.45 and
2.25 resp.), and finally Russian (1.86). This comparison hides the fact that informants some-
times arrive at similar scores for completely dissimilar reasons.
If we turn to the international languages first we find a familiar picture. The five ‘international
languages’ listed fall naturally in two groups, viz. English vs. ‘the rest’. The need for English,
and hence the desire to upgrade it is universally accepted. English is essential both nationally
and abroad.
[English] you need to manage in the world as it is, with all of the communication on the
internet and things like that. They need English. [Inf36, 14.40].
55 Due to space constraint I will focus on the international languages vs. Danish and refer to Thøgersen (forthc.)
for a treatment of Swedish and Norwegian.
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