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

In one question the questionnaire asked informants to estimate the amount of English loan-
words in the Nordic countries. The main reason for this question is to gauge whether ‘ordina-
ry’ Nordic people share the linguistic ‘common type’, as expressed in Lund’s hypothesis of
linguistic consciousness mentioned above, viz. that Iceland and Norway are the more purist
nations and Denmark and Sweden the least. Strikingly, an important scale for measuring the
relative English influence is a completely un-linguistic stereotypical image of the nations and
their people. There is, as we will see, not much agreement on the image of the peoples, there
is however great uniformity in coupling the images to English influence. See e.g. the follo-
wing three examples all referring to Swedish and Swedes, used to argue for a relatively high
proportion of loanwords (the first excerpt), and for a relatively low proportion (the second and
third excerpt).
The Swedes are very international compared to the Norwegians. They have these giant
companies, and there everyone speaks English [Inf32, 44.00]
They are not as international, they want it in Swedish translation [Inf25, 49.35].
I think they are a little more conservative. I think they want to stick with their Swedish
[Inf26, 45.25].
Now obviously all three excerpts could be taken to refer to the use of English as an internati-
onal language in the businesses, rather than to loanwords. It is perhaps revealing that very few
informants are able to keep the distinction between these in linguistic theory quite distinct
areas of concern. We may take this as a further methodological lesson when confronting in-
formants with language political questions.
However, the same result is arrived at in the following excerpt that groups Norwegian
and Swedish together and deals more narrowly with loanwords.
I imagine Norwegians and Swedes probably translate [i.e. construct neologisms] for
almost all new words, because they want to use their own language. They have a blind
faith in authorities those people, so I guess all of it is translated. [Inf43, 40.55].
Finally, the next excerpt is interesting because the informant explicitly confesses to arriving
indirectly at the amount of English loanwords through impressions about the peoples or nati-
ons: Internationality, modernity and finally geographical isolation.
I am influenced by my prejudices here, because I am thinking ’how international are
these countries?’, and then I believe Swedish is like we, and Norwegian as almost like
we. Then comes Iceland… are they more or less…? The Faeroes are a little old fashio-
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