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

The final line of arguing I found it relevant to point to is the frequent wish that things
remain the way they are. This of course could be seen as a deeply felt content with the Danish
language policy the way it is today. However, I interpret it largely as a result of the interview
as a social and linguistic event – and something which, like the presuppositions, needs to be
studied in local context in order to reveal its full significance.
All of these objections against quantitative reasoning align to argue that we need to address
the questions of attitudes to language policy in new ways that accept that people may not have
preconceived positive or negative language policy attitudes; rather they construct attitudes on
the spot by drawing on arguments that pull in different directions. That is, rather than viewing
people as pro or against English we should try and come to terms with what are the reasons
they raise for being one and/or the other.
In other words, I believe we need to get away from posing the question as one of being
pro or anti-English, or from posing the question as if English is universally in opposition to
Danish. Sometimes English is in opposition to Danish, often it is not. Sometimes, for example,
the question will be one of linguistic diversity vs. linguistic uniformity. In this dilemma, Eng-
lish can play the role of the ‘killer language’ that eradicates linguistic diversity. It can also
play the role of the proponent of linguistic diversity, e.g. in kids’ use of English in code swit-
ching, where an insistence on Danish would be the proponent of linguistic uniformity. English,
thus, is both a killer language and a provider of linguistic freedom, and so is Danish. We need
to in some way conceptualize this and understand the ways in which they are both, rather than
posing one against the other.
This is what I have tried to give my contribution to.
222
[11.517 ord]
Jeg skylder en stor tak til Dafna Yitzhaki for nyttige kommentarer til en tidligere version af
denne artikel. De fejl der stadig findes, står naturligvis for egen regning.