T h e influence of English on the languages in

the Nordic countries

KARIN AIJMER, GUNNEL MELCHERS

English has a special position in the world as a global or international

language. This global English is sometimes described as a "lingua
franca"; it is used by a large number o f speakers in Europe and
internationally. It functions as a life-line for the tourist and as a
language for communication in the sciences, transport and business
world and is important for cultural exchange.
An important aspect of the increasing dominance of English in the
"expanding circle" is its effect on other languages. T h e influence of English
on other languages has given rise to much heated debate. What happens to
other languages if English comes to dominate the linguistic scene? English
has spread into and partly taken over domains such as popular music and
entertainment, fashion, sports, advertising and trade. Massive borrowing
has taken place on all levels of languge. T h e rise of English has resulted in
a concern with issues such as the loss o f particular domains and the
maintenance and preservation o f the domestic language. As one
contributor to this volume suggests with regard to the language situation
in the Scandinavian countries, "language death in Scandinavia should by
no means be ruled out" (Gottlieb).
As Stig Johansson has pointed out, "considering the frequency and
the heat of debate, there have been surprisingly few major studies that
systematically survey the use of English in Scandinavia and the influence of
English on the Scandinavian languages, although there has been a
tendency in recent years to pay more attention to the topic"(2002: 90).
There are also differences between the Nordic countries which need to be
described. It has, for instance, been suggested that Norwegian has been
more influenced by English than Swedish (Graedler & Johansson
1995:271). T h e aim in this special issue o f Nordic Journal of English Studies
is to bring together a number of original contributions by scholars dealing
with the role o f English in the Nordic countries and the possible effect o f
English on the languages spoken there.

N O R D I C JOURNAL OF E N G L I S H STUDIES. SPECIAL ISSUE. V O L . 3 No. 2 l

 The influence of English on the languages in the Nordic countries

The collection of articles reflects the rich spectrum of ongoing work

in this field. T h e articles not only describe the English impact in the
vocabulary of the Nordic languages but also deal with broader issues such
as attitudes to English loan words and the language policies in the different
countries, the threat of English in a more global world, interlanguage
phenomena such as transfer in professional writing or "Finglish" in
Finnish advertisements.
The spread of English looks different across languages and attitudes
towards the English influx vary depending on factors like social class,
education and age. Large-scale projects facilitating the comparison between
speech communities are now underway. Anne-Line Graedler presents the
Nordic project "Modern loanwords in the Nordic Countries" including
Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish in Finland and Swedish
in Sweden. T h e new project has the purpose to investigate the volume of
loanwords, their adaptation to the domestic language, native substitute
forms and standardisation. It is also concerned with attitudes towards
loanwords and substitute forms.
Jacob Thøgersen deals with the issue whether some Nordic populations
are more purist than others. Attitudes to the influx of English were
investigated by the use of questionnaires. Another issue discussed in this
contribution is whether a society's official purism (as in Iceland) or laissez-
faire attitude (as in Denmark or Sweden) is the official language policy or
represents the educated elite's self-image.
Most observers agree that the English language has a more important
position in Denmark than in the other Nordic countries. As Henrik
Gottlieb shows, modern English loans tend to retain their spelling and
morphological endings. Gottlieb proposes a model of Anglicisms
distinguishing for example between code-shifts and loans. Moreover he
shows that some loans which seem to be unnecessary in fact fill a void in
the lexical field.
Philip Shaw shows that academic writing by Danes writing in English
may be structured differently from "Anglos" writing in their native
language. For example, the placement of adverbials is influenced by
Danish when Danes write in English. However, according to Shaw,
Danish writers "want English to be a foreign language for them" and write
in English as spoken by native speakers of English.
We also need historical studies taking into account changes over time.
Within the framework of the Swedish project O R D A T , Mall Stålhammar

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 Karin Aijmer, Gunnel Melchers

has investigated the influx of English loanwords on the Swedish vocabulary

1800-2000. The focus is on their diachronic distribution on the basis of
when they first appeared in the Swedish vocabulary and their frequencies
in different domains of use. As for the development in quantitative terms it
is shown that there is a steady increase of loanwords over the whole period
with a peak after the Second World War.
T h e construction den förste att gå studied by Magnus Ljung is a so-
called "construction loan" where a grammatical construction has been
copied using Swedish linguistic elements. T h e study is particularly
welcome, since previous work on this type of borrowing is virtually
negligible. Ljung shows on the basis of data from Swedish newspapers that
the construction is growing in frequency. Anders Lindström's article deals
with the influence of English on spoken Swedish with regard to word
formation and segmental phonology. .In the Xenophones production
study the aim was to identify "foreign" speech sounds. O n the basis of this
study and studies on other spoken corpora it is shown that English
influence on Swedish can be a problem for speech and language
technology applications.
In Iceland there is a well established interest in the national
language and the official policy has been that of keeping the language
free from loanwords. In the last decades English influence on the
language, especially the vocabulary has grown considerably with an
increased interest in the phenomenon as a result. In her article G u d r u n
Kvaran deals with Icelandic language politics and the impacA of
language purism. It is shown that in order to be accepted into the
borrowing language a word has to fulfil a number of criteria involving
for example phonological and morphological rules. In Asta
Svavarsdöttir's article, lexical borrowings are looked at in connection
with the age of speakers in an apparent-time study. T h e article also
reports on a study based on a collection o f personal diary entries by a
number of Icelanders. T h e results confirm the claim that younger
people use more words from English than older and that the choice of
words is also different.
We also need studies of English in particular domains. T h e study by
Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta is an in-depth study of English in
advertisements on the yellow pages of the Helsinki telephone directories
over the past fifty years. It is found that some of the new names and
coinages are in a language imitating English but not quite what native
speakers would use.

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 The influence of English on the languages in the Nordic countries

References:
Graedler, Anne-Line and Stig Johansson. 1995. Rocka, hipt and snacksy: Some
aspects of English influence on present-day Norwegian: In Melchers, G. and
B. Warren (eds). Studies in Anglistics. Stockholm Studies in English LXXXV.
269-287.
Johansson, Stig. 2002. Review article: English influence on the Scandinavian
languages. In Nordic Journal of English Studies 1: 89-105.