Would you enter an establishment offering fifty shades of skrei?*
If you would, is that still English?
Who decides who gets a piece of the English (fish?) pie? Who is English for? “Native” speakers, scholars, professionals, politicians? Or children, teenagers and gamers?
It was an absolute delight to discuss all these questions and more at English as a Lingua Nordica last month in Turku/Åbo. That’s where I got my signed copy of English in the Nordic Countries from Elizabeth Peterson, who gave a keynote about her book. I’d already read it as an open access PDF, but some books are worth having on paper, because you might lend them or refer to them again. This is one.
As Lønsmann says in chapter eight, the real question is not about the amount of English, but how it is used, and with what consequences.
The authors take time to define what they mean by Nordic. They trace the shared roots and language contact between English and its Nordic cousins, from the Vikings and the Danish kings of England. In one volume, it’s not possible to deal with the whole tangle of tongues in the neighbourhood, from Faeroese to Icelandic to Saami languages to Kven. But they’re named, and linked, and that’s a start. The first part is great on critical perspectives, like Johann Strang’s on English in the Nordic language system. The second part, with the case studies, is great fun. I particularly enjoyed Pietikäinen and Gühr’s chapter on the role of English in Nordic multilingual families like mine.
What struck me most from our discussion of the book was that for many people, the idea of English as a Nordic language is still challenging. The threat English presents to Nordic languages in some domains, particularly academia, is real, I think. But the opportunity it presents to increase understanding and communication is also real. It’s a classic move to say that there’s a third way, seeing English as one linguistic resource of many. But what I particularly liked about this book was how it connected the social to the linguistic. If there is a Nordic model of social equity, can that extend to anticolonialism and generosity with language? Is it possible to use English in the Nordic countries as one of a repertoire of many languages, to make as many people as possible flourish and feel at home?
There are lots of issues to debate here. For two perspectives, see two recent government reports in Finnish with English and Swedish summaries: English alongside Finnish national languages: towards flexible multilingualism (2023), and Finnish as the language of inclusion: report on the state of the Finnish language in Finland in the mid-2020s (2024). If you write, translate, edit or otherwise work with English, these reports and this book raise important questions for you to think about. How do you use English, and with what consequences?
* skrei is Barents sea cod. Read Hiss’s chapter in the book to find out more…
Ridge Writing Retreats 