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

eing interviewed about something you did not believe yourself an expert of, and finding your
every word scrutinised, driven to its logical (but probably ‘unreasonable’) extreme and
thrown back at you in a way that you didn’t recognise but which was still considered your at-
titude. What would you do to stop this head on confrontationalism? Whatever you or I would
do, the informants here choose one of two strategies. One is to play along with it. That is what
we have seen from the informant in the excerpt about ‘changing your mind’. He apparently
accepts that he should hold a generalisable opinion, and tries to pose himself as such and ar-
gue his case. The other strategy is to always choose the less remarkable of two options. The
conversational rule is simple and probably universal: If you disagree with something or you
find something wrong in the way things are conducted, you must argue your case – at least
you make it an arguable matter that others can question. If you agree or claim that things are
fine the way they are, it is considerably less likely that you will be asked to argue your case.
Which of the two strategies are chosen, correlate highly with social background. The higher
status informants argue their case, the lower status opts for being remarkably unremarkable.
We thus have a number of tendencies that lead to the same result, viz. a wish for things to re-
main the way they are. On the one hand stands the norm of being reasonable, non-radical,
normal and unmarked. On the other stands an interactional strategy that keeps unwanted ques-
tions away by opting for the unremarkable, generally accepted middle-of-the-road answer.
There is nothing in the tendency of opting for the unmarked which points in any speci-
fic direction concerning loanwords. As we have seen, the ‘status quo’ argument can be used
equally to argue for less English and for leaving the English influence as it is. In other words,
we cannot use this tendency to deduce that the informants are pro or counter English loan-
words. What we can deduce is that placing the informants in a situation where they must ar-
gue against the current state of affairs and in favour of some future, utopian, vision of a better
language society is probably going to turn out pretty disappointing.
Conclusion
I have tried to argue a qualitative approach to understanding the language policy questions of
national language vs. English vs. other international languages in a Nordic (specifically Da-
nish) context. This argument necessarily takes the large amount of quantitative analyses as its
starting point. ‘Necessarily’ on the one hand, because quantitatively is how we are used to
thinking about attitudes. ‘What do you think about English?’. ‘Do you regard the influence
from English positively or negatively?’. ‘Necessarily’ on the other hand, because the filling in
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