
ESR: Is Danish Dying? - mdemare
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=965
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abrahamsen
#1 (rapid evolution) is not a sign of language dying, it is a sign of language
living. Only dead languages don't evolve.

#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. ]

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megaduck
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing!

From my (limited) experience, it feels like small European languages are
particularly susceptible to domain loss from English. Since they all share a
common alphabet and the phonemes are "close enough", it's often trivial to
grab a word or phrase from English when there isn't a proper native
substitute. The technical fields are obviously going to go first, but other
fields will follow as the world changes.

English is a highly predatory language. It absorbs foreign vocabulary
extremely easily, and the grammar is remarkably flexible. If a language
doesn't cover some conceptual territory, odds are that English will step in to
fill the gap. I can easily envision a world where most people eventually speak
some kind of English creole.

Oddly, the only major language (100 million+ speakers) I've seen that's
resistant to English invasion is Chinese. The pictographic writing system,
coupled with its monosyllabic tonal nature make it really hard for Chinese
speakers to use unmodified foreign vocabulary. English has grabbed a number of
Chinese words, but the transfer has been almost entirely one way.

I'm sure there's other languages that are incompatible with English, but
they're in a distinct minority. I think the rest are going to experience at
least some domain loss to English.

~~~
eru
What about the Japanese?

~~~
jibiki
Japanese has tons of English words, even for some pretty basic concepts (チャンス,
タイプ, etc.)

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davidmathers
_Most linguists think it’s Just Not Done to say that a speaker population is
evolving its own language out of existence_

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.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
I think you underestimate his ego. What you describe is true, but it's not
all. For example, he's also smarter than all physicists:

<http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=690>

Oy! For relief, I suggest his epic spanking in the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

[http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.1/1909.h...](http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.1/1909.html)

Which is actually a good thread to understand kernel development.

~~~
davidmathers
_I think you underestimate his ego._

You're right. Painfully right.

"Eric realizes that if he’d had a bit more courage and self-discipline, and
moved from mathematics into physics rather than programming, he would have
been rather likely to have invented decoherence theory himself and become a
physicist renowned for kicking the props out from under the Copenhagen
Interpretation."

From the followup:

"I just turned 51. That means, in order to believe that I could do really
strong and original physics work now, I’d have to start with a justified
belief that I’m as talented as Hawking or Einstein. This is almost certainly
not the case. I would say “certainly”, except that my general track record of
creativity and insight is far enough off the mean to raise just the tiniest
smidgen of realistic doubt about this. And I was, after all, ahead of the
physics literature on something conceptually important at least once - even a
lot of physicists never manage that."

One reads such words, and what can one say but... "esr."

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arihelgason
Another interesting development in the Danish language is the rise of
'multietnolekt' (multiethnolect) - a type of ethnolect that's emerged among
multicultural communities.

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)

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barry-cotter
No, but it is undergoing domain loss. Dialects with their very own army and
navy don't disappear.

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.

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pelle
I wrote this comment on ESR's site but it's in the moderation queue:

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 F _ck. 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.

F_ck 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...](http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/09/18/why-
globalization-wont-make-everything-the-same)

~~~
silvestrov
Another example of word import in Danish: the word "shopping" (in Danish:
"købe ind") is now used when shopping for fun stuff (girls/gays buying
clothes) while the danish word is used when shopping for groceries.

So "jeg skal shoppe" (I have to shop) is shopping for fun, while "jeg skal
købe ind" means "I have to buy groceries".

~~~
eru
Same in German.

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dot
so it's come full circle. anglo saxons that 'invaded' england originated from
denmark.

