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

I believe we should give far more lessons in Danish, because when one really knows
Danish perfectly, it is easier to move on to other languages. [Danish is] the starting point
for that and the gateway to something new [Inf30, 7.45].
We see how the rhetoric and the presuppositions surrounding Danish on the one hand and the
international languages on the other are perceived in a way that does not bring them into con-
flict. Danish draws on presuppositions about a unique tie between speakers of Danish and the
national, cultural history of Denmark, on ties between identity and mother tongue, the mother
tongue as a prerequisite for cognitive development, and the need of competence in the natio-
nal language. The international languages, on the other hand, are tied to utilitarian use, either
in international (business) communication, as a prerequisite for higher education and well
paid jobs nationally and internationally etc. Thus, promoting of the national language or of the
international languages is constructed in such ways that they do not collide. The two maintain
a ‘one and the other’-status not a ‘one or the other’.
In a way, it is strange to include the different groups of languages in the same compa-
rison, seeing as they clearly draw upon different contexts of rationalization, indeed seeing as
they are measured by different standards. This bears witness to the claim that seeing ‘attitu-
des’ out of the rhetorical or experimental context in which they were stated, clouds some of
the more interesting aspects of the attitudes while also giving misleading results. Exploring
the contexts of oppositions and the various arguments, on the other hand, seems to be a giving
way to analyse (what we think of as) attitudes. The methodological lesson to be learned is that
assuming a priori that the choice is between Danish and English simply misses the far more
interesting rhetorical points of attitude constructions.
English as a sign of modernity, internationalism and being interesting
Next to ‘English as the default language’, the second prevailing presupposition is one that
links the use of English with certain widely applicable qualities. The use of English is seen as
a sign of modernity, internationalism and of being interesting in general. This applies as we
will se both to countries, to subject of language use and to language users. What is particular-
ly interesting is that the connection is not unilateral but bilateral. On the one hand, the percei-
ved amount of English is used to measure the ‘modernity’ of a given country, speaker, or
subject; on the other hand, less intuitively and therefore more striking, the perceived ‘moder-
nity’ of the country, speaker or subject is used to estimate the amount of English used.
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