ESR: Is Danish Dying?

#2 and #3 are true, not sure if they are a sign of death. As a (Danish) kid I found Norwegian (bokmål) far easier to read than Danish.

#4: I don't believe the ads are significant, and certainly not English street signs in areas a tourist may visit.

However, the last example is what Danish linguists consider the greatest threat to the language: Domain loss. Danish is really to small a language for specialized domains. When I write about my work, I use English, as the majority of people who might potentially be interested are from outside Denmark, and those Danes that might be interested can all read English. A generation ago similar texts would likely be in Danish, but a generation ago there was far less international collaboration.

[ Domain loss in Denmark is nothing new, Latin, French and German have all been dominating various domains earlier. The German dominance was far greater than English today, before the rise of nationalism Danish was merely a peasant language, and even for the peasants German words replaced Danish to a large degree. ]

ESR == Steve Sailer

No matter what he's writing about there will always be a mention of how he can see situations more clearly than other people, but only because he's fearless in the face of the overbearing political correctness to which other people succumb.

He's just so unafraid of thinking "taboo" thoughts.

It's gramatically different from Danish, and has words from Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic. As far as I know it's confined to immigrant communities, but that might change.

Not sure how this fits in with the idea that Danish is dying.

More info here http://dialekt.dk/multietnolekt/ (article in Danish)

I spend a bit of time in Germany and while I can't speak to phoneme shifts in German because I can't speak the damned language yet, there's pseudo-English all over the place in advertising, street signs, tourist info. But for the advertising really is pseudo-English and sometimes translations are pretty desperate. At the very, very least 10% of Germans have English good enough to hold an intelligent conversation in.

ESR is putting too much weight on his personal experience. Most of the Germans I know are CS/Comp Ling or Psychology students and they use lots of English texts in their undergraduate courses and in the computery ones the Masters are all in English. But English is a domain specific language for them. But that's not a language shift. German's not going anywhere. Hell, German dialects aren't going anywhere, most of the Deutschsprecher countries are heavily diglossic, I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't similar.

I think the post could have been written about any of the Germanic languages and it'd be just as wrong.

Interesting article. I myself am Danish but living in Miami. I left about 20 years ago but was back in Copenhagen for a couple of years recently. I did see a big change in Danish, in particularly with the use of English.

In the 80’s it was not all that cool to talk English all the time. It was only a few of us in the hip hop community and programmers who got a way with it. This has changed, but not in the way you might think. I think even on the street someone would be thought of as a poser if he used nothing but English.

What Danes do, do is import English words and make them their own. A lot of this I think comes from the hip hop community which has gone mainstream in Denmark in the period I was away. My 2 favorite examples of English words that have become Danish is Slice and Fck. Slice was new to me when I returned to Denmark. It means a slice of pizza. In Danish you can leave of Pizza and you can’t use “slice” for anything else unless you’re talking about servers.

Fck has become such a common use in Denmark, that I don’t think people even realize that it isn’t Danish. It is used by just about everyone younger than 40 all the time, to such extent that Danes travelling to the English speaking countries routinely and unwittingly cause offence.

So my point about these words is that while they both come from English, they have now become absorbed with changed meaning into Danish. So when I’m in a 7/11 in Copenhagen saying “give mig et slajs” I’m not actually talking English, just modern street Danish.

This absorption of new words reminds me of when I lived in Panama, where words have been imported whole sale from Jamaican and American English to the local Spanish language. The word “Man” for example means “Person” and not “Male”, which caused me never ending confusion when I heard people talking about “la man” and I thought they were talking about some guy.

My theory about what has happened in Denmark is that it is an extremely egalitarian society. Elitist language snobs are frowned upon. There was also a period (say the 80s) where very few decent TV or movies where made in Denmark. So my generation who grew up then absorbed everything we could from American and English culture. The growth of Hip Hop in Denmark has I’m certain also had a huge influence. In the 80s though there were lots of Danish groups singing in English, now I think the majority sing/rap in Danish.

I’m very interested in these kinds of changes to culture all over the world. I wrote this article about how globalization doesn’t homogenize music and food, but rather create lots of interesting new micro fusions. It’s kind of related to this debate and uses Denmark, the Philippines and others as examples.

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/09/18/why-globalizati...