Challenges facing Danish as a medium-sized speech community

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Challenges facing Danish as a medium-sized speech
community with a focus on Copenhagen

• Marie Maegaard
• Associate professor
• Department of Dialectology the Lanchart Centre
• University of Copenhagen
• mamae_at_hum.ku.dk

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Denmark and Copenhagen

• Population in Denmark 5,500,000
• Covers an area of 43.000 km2
• Population in greater Copenhagen
• 1,700,000
• Language Danish
• Danish as a foreign language is taught
• in Greenland, the Faroe Islands and
• in Iceland

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The Danish state From absolute monarchy to
democracy

• In 1660 the king Frederik III declared Denmark an
  absolute monarchy
• A very centralised power in Copenhagen
• The language of the capital became the prestige
  norm, the rigsmål
• The almueskolelov (law for school for the poor)
  (1814) meant that all children in Denmark could
  and should attend school, at least for a certain
  period of time.
• This created a much larger group of literate
  persons in Denmark, and the literacy produced
  standard norms, norms of the rigsmål
• Up through the 19th and 20th century local
  dialects disappeared as people began to speak the
  standard language, the rigsmål

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In Copenhagen

• Two varieties High Copenhagen
• and Low Copenhagen
• The city grew increasingly but on
• limited space, and became more
• and more densely populated
• Finally, in the 1850s, the fortification
  earthworks of the city came down and the city
  expanded quickly into the surrounding areas
• In 1849 the king Frederik VII gave over the
  governing power to the people and the democratic
  grundlov was accepted as the basic laws on
  which Danish society should be governed ?
  constitutional monarchy
• By the mid/end of the 19th century the two
  varieties stood as strong as ever, but since then
  the distinction between them has diminished

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Copenhagen 2010
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Definitions of Dane, immigrant and
descendant according to the official Danish
authorities

• A person is Danish if at least one parent has
  Danish citizenship and is born in Denmark. Thus,
  it is of no importance whether the person
  him/herself has Danish citizenship or is born in
  Denmark.
• If the person is not Danish, the person in
  question is
• Immigrant, if the person is born abroad.
• Descendant, if the person is born in Denmark
• It is apparent from the above that an immigrant
  is a foreigner born abroad, while a descendant is
  a foreigner born in Denmark.
• It is also apparent that it is of no importance
  to the statistical definition, whether foreigners
  hold Danish citizenship or not. Consequently,
  immigrants and descendants remain immigrants and
  descendants, respectively, even if they gain
  Danish citizenship.
• (The Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and
  Integration Affairs, 2009 41)

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Immigration to Denmark
(Source The Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and
Integration Affairs, 2009)
Dias 7
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Age of Danes, Immigrants and Descendants
(Source The Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and
Integration Affairs, 2009)
Dias 8
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Immigrants from non-Western countries
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Languages spoken in Copenhagen

• abkhasian - akan (fante and twi) - albanian -
  amharic - arabic - armenian - assyrian
  azerbadjanian - azeri - bahdini - bambara -
  bengali - berberic - bosnian - bulgarian -
  burmese chin - danish - dari - edo - english -
  esperanto - estonian - farsi - finnish - french -
  frisian - fulfulde (peul) - faroese georgian -
  greek - gujarati - hakka - hassaniya - hausa -
  hebrew - hindi - dutch - belarussian - igbo -
  indonesian - irish - icelandic - italian -
  japanese - cabylic -catalan - khazaki - khmer -
  kikongo - kirundi - korean - krio croatian -
  kurmanji (kurdish) - lettish - lingala - litauisk
  - luganda - mandarin - makedonsk malinké -
  mandinka - min - moldavian - nepalesian -
  norwegian - oromo (galla) - pashto
  polareskimoic - polish - portuguese - punjabi -
  rohinga - romani - rumanian - russian - serbian -
  sindhi - singhalesian - slovaki - slovenian -
  somali - soninké - sorani - sorbic - spanish -
  swedish - susu - swahili - tagalog - tamil -
  tatarish - thai - tigré - tigrinya - czech -
  turkmenian - twi - turkish - german - ukrainian -
  hungarian - urdu - uzbekian - westgreenlandic -
  vietnamese - wolof - wu - yue - zaza
  eastgreenlandic
• (After Risager 2009)

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Languages spoken in Copenhagen

• abkhasian - akan (fante and twi) - albanian -
  amharic - arabic - armenian - assyrian
  azerbadjanian - azeri - bahdini - bambara -
  bengali - berberic - bosnian - bulgarian -
  burmese chin - danish - dari - edo - english -
  esperanto - estonian - farsi - finnish - french -
  frisian - fulfulde (peul) - faroese georgian -
  greek - gujarati - hakka - hassaniya - hausa -
  hebrew - hindi - dutch - belarussian - igbo -
  indonesian - irish - icelandic - italian -
  japanese - cabylic -catalan - khazaki - khmer -
  kikongo - kirundi - korean - krio croatian -
  kurmanji (kurdish) - lettish - lingala - litauisk
  - luganda - mandarin - makedonsk malinké -
  mandinka - min - moldavian - nepalesian -
  norwegian - oromo (galla) - pashto
  polareskimoic - polish - portuguese - punjabi -
  rohinga - romani - rumanian - russian - serbian -
  sindhi - singhalesian - slovaki - slovenian -
  somali - soninké - sorani - sorbic - spanish -
  swedish - susu - swahili - tagalog - tamil -
  tatarish - thai - tigré - tigrinya - czech -
  turkmenian - twi - turkish - german - ukrainian -
  hungarian - urdu - uzbekian - westgreenlandic -
  vietnamese - wolof - wu - yue - zaza
  eastgreenlandic
• (After Risager 2009)

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Ideology and mother-tongue teaching

• In December 2003 the EU parliament discussed a
  report from the EU Centre for Observation of
  Racism (EUMC), that criticised the Danish
  government for abandoning the law that ensures
  children from non-EU countries free mother-tongue
  education.
• The minister of education responded to this
• It hasnt been clearly proven that mother-tongue
  teaching leads to better integration. I think it
  is the job for the public school in Denmark to
  teach the children Danish. That is the language
  that we speak in Denmark, and it gives the pupils
  the best opportunities for succeeding both
  academically and socially

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Mother-tongue teaching in Copenhagen

• At the institutional level, the City Council
  states
• The Municipality of Copenhagen recommends
  mother-tongue teaching because it supports the
  identity development of the child and the
  acquisition of the additional academic and
  linguistic knowledge in school. Mother-tongue
  education is an offer for every bilingual pupil
  from 1st to 9th grade.
• At the moment, the Municipality of Copenhagen
  offers mother-tongue education in the following
  languages
• Albanian, Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Finnish, French,
  Faroese, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Chinese,
  Kurdish, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,
  Serbian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Tigrina,
  Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese

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Attitudes towards linguistic minority pupils

• Editorial, 25th of October 2006, Jyllandsposten
• The so called bilingual pupils do not alone have
  problems in elementary school those, who enter
  the gymnasium, also have serious problems there.
  It seems strange, that people, who master two
  languages, should have larger problems than
  those, who only master a single one.
• The notion bilingual does of course not really
  cover the reality. It expresses how linguistic
  entrepreneurs and other influential circles
  abstain from calling things by their correct
  name. Bilingual really means zerolingual that
  the student neither masters his or her mother
  tongue nor the language spoken in the country the
  parents of the pupil have migrated to by their
  own decision.

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The City School

• The community of practice constituted by the
  four 9th grade classes at the City School (15-16
  years old)
• A school with 850 pupils
• 30 bilingual children
• School district includes children from lower or
  middle socio-economic backgrounds

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Ethnography

• Participant observation and interviews through
  seven months
• Participated in classes, breaks, sports days,
  school parties and so on
• Data field notes, diary notes, audio-recordings
  of interviews (64), self-recordings with specific
  pupils
• Focus
• Which social categories and practices are
  socially meaningful to the pupils?
• Which linguistic resources do they use?

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Networks in class 9 D(boys and girls)
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Networks in class 9 D(boys, girls, foreigners
and Danes)
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Phonetic features
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Variation girls, boys, foreigners and Danes
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Linguistic minority kids leading linguistic
change?

• The categories foreign girls and foreign
  boys play an important part as poles in the
  social and linguistic space in the City School,
  and possibly in other similar communities.
• They use existing variation in new ways, and new
  variation that has not previously been reported
  in linguistic studies, and they do this in
  combinations with other practices that are
  socially meaningful in the community.

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The Øresund region

• The distance between Copenhagen and southern
  Sweden (in particular Malmö and Lund) has
  decreased with the Øresund bridge
• Built 10 years ago (finished in July 2000)
• 20,000 commuters each day, 13,000 Swedes

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Tourism and language - English

• Copenhagen as tourist goal and conference city
• Every year 6,000,000 overnight stays in the city
• The official visitors website, Wonderful
  Copenhagen, (www.visitcopenhagen.com)
• Language
• Our mother tongue is Danish, which is closely
  related to both Swedish and Norwegian.
• However, most Danes speak English
  well, especially among the young
  generation. German and French are also taught in
  school, so when you visit Denmark you will have
  no problems language-wise.

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Visitors to Copenhagen
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Summing up challenges facing Danish

• Uniformitivity and normativity as major
  ideologies little tolerance and openness
• Negative attitudes towards bilingualism and
  bilingual speakers unless English is the other
  language
• Low interest in learning other languages than
  English
• Problems regarding a broadly represented
  literature