English and Globalisation in Denmark: A Changing Sociolinguistic Landscape

The project investigates the current role of English in Denmark, including the presence of English in the everyday lives of people, language attitudes and ideologies in relation to English, and the use and symbolic meaning of English among young Danes.

In recent decades, the sociolinguistic landscape in Denmark has changed. Danish remains the dominant national language, but English has become widespread as a lingua franca – in the educational sector, in the workplace, in popular culture, in social media and in many other aspects of everyday life in Denmark. The project will analyse the use of and attitudes to English among people in Denmark combining a large-scale survey, focus group interviews and a linguistic ethnographic case study. Theoretically, the project aims to develop the notion of sociolinguistic change by theorising the interconnections between social change, changing language practices and changing language attitudes and ideologies.

 

The project sets out to explore the following research questions:

RQ1: To what extent is English present in the everyday life of Danes across Danish society?

RQ2: What language attitudes and ideologies exist among Danes in relation to English?

RQ3: How and with what symbolic value is English used among young Danes?      

RQ4: How can we theorise the interconnections between changing language practices, changing language attitudes and ideologies and ongoing societal change?

In order to answer these questions, the project includes four work packages.

WP1 (Jacob Thøgersen, Dorte Lønsmann & Janus Mortensen) is a large-scale quantitative survey investigating reported use of English, perceived competences in English and attitudes and ideologies of English. Thanks to the availability of data from a previous study (Danskerne og det engelske sprog, Preisler 1999), the project includes a longitudinal comparative perspective.

WP2 (postdoc Kamilla Kraft, Dorte Lønsmann) is an ethnographically grounded focus group study investigating language attitudes and ideologies of English in Denmark.

WP3 (PhD student Marianne Haugaard Skov, supervised by Janus Mortensen and Dorte Lønsmann) is a linguistic ethnographic case study focusing on the use of English among young Danes. The aim of the study is to explore how young Danes use English as part of their everyday interaction, e.g. how English is deployed as part of constructing specific styles, personas, social relationships and communicative genres, and what symbolic value English has for the participants.

WP4 (Dorte Lønsmann, Janus Mortensen, Jacob Thøgersen, Kamilla Kraft, Marianne Haugaard Skov) provides the larger frame for the project and aims expand on the theory of sociolinguistic change, specifically the interconnection between societal and linguistic change.

In addition to the four work packages, Aisara Yessenova’s PhD project (which is funded by the PhD Council for Educational Research) is affiliated with the English and Globalisation in Denmark project. Aisara’s PhD project is a linguistic ethnographic case study of multilingual 8th graders’ writing strategies in English and Danish. The study compares how young Danes write in a school context with their writing outside school, e.g. on social media.

 

 

Conferences

  • AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference), Houston, 16 March 2024. Janus Mortensen and Dorte Lønsmann. Panel: “Mediatisation and sociolinguistic change: English as a meaning-making resource in a non-Anglophone context”.
    • Marianne Haugaard Skov and Janus Mortensen: Being a main character – when online styles go offline
    • Kamilla Kraft: What is Twitter? Making sense of new media and English
    • Aisara Yessenova and Dorte Lønsmann: From English language learner to global language user: Multilingual adolescents’ self-perceptions of their linguistic identity in a Danish school
  • IPrA (The 18th International Pragmatics Conference), Bruxelles, 9-14 July 2023. Marianne Haugaard Skov, Janus Mortensen and Dorte Lønsmann. Panel: Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries.
    • Janus Mortensen and Dorte Lønsmann: Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries – setting the scene
    • Jacob Thøgersen, Dorte Lønsmann and Kamilla Kraft: ”In Denmark we speak Danish. No, we speak English in Denmark”: Ideologies of English in Denmark
    • Marianne Haugaard Skov: Ideologies of English among Danish high school students
  • 8. Symposium om sprog og interaktion i digitale medier, University of Southern Denmark, 26 April 2023. Marianne Haugaard Skov. ”Meget af det kommer nok også fra TikTok” - En etnografisk undersøgelse af unges brug af engelsk og sociale medier.
  • The 4th & 5th JACET ELF SIG International Workshops, Waseda University, Tokyo, 25 February 2023. Janus Mortensen. From EFL to ELF - The case of Denmark.
  • MUDS Møde om udforskningen af dansk sprog, Aarhus, 13 October 2022. Jacob Thøgersen. Danskerne og det engelske sprog. Dengang og nu.
  • ALAPP (The 12th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice), 15-17 September, 2022. Dorte Lønsmann and Jacob Thøgersen. English in Danish workplaces: Increasing presence and changing attitudes.
  • FINSSE-10, Jyväskylä, 19 August 2022: Jacob Thøgersen, Dorte Lønsmann and Janus Mortensen. English in Denmark – a changing sociolinguistic landscape? Preliminary report on a large-scale questionnaire study.

Presentations

  • Book launch for the book Engelsk i Danmark – What’s the story?, 22 November 2024.
  • English as an everyday language in Scandinavia. Dorte Lønsmann. Presentation at Lund University, 30 October 2024.
  • English as a language of inclusion in Nordic workplaces? Dorte Lønsmann. Keynote at NorPol Closing Conference, 24 October 2024.
  • Engelsk og globalisering i Danmark – et sprogligt landskab i forandring. Dorte Lønsmann, Janus Mortensen and Jacob Thøgersen. Presentation at Sprogense language festival, 16 September 2023.
  • Engelsk i Danmark – dengang og nu. Dorte Lønsmann, Jacob Thøgersen, Janus Mortensen, Kamilla Kraft and Marianne Haugaard Skov. Presentation at the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, 7 December 2022.
  • English and Globalisation in Denmark. Dorte Lønsmann, Jacob Thøgersen, Janus Mortensen. Presentation at Sociolingvistisk Studiekreds, 27 September 2022.
  • Project presentation at The Danish Language Council, 5 October 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The project’s advisory board is composed of world-leading experts on English in Denmark, language attitudes, critical sociolinguistics,  English & mediatisation and sociolinguistic change:

Nikolas Coupland, Cardiff University
Jette G. Hansen Edwards, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tore Kristiansen, University of Copenhagen
Sari Pietikäinen, University of Jyväskylä
Barbara Soukup, University of Vienna

 

 

Statistics Denmark is a partner in work package 1. The questionnaire data will be collected by DST Survey, Statistics Denmark for the University of Copenhagen.

The Enida project collaborates with Aarhus University Press and Videnslyd about a book and a podcast series about English in Denmark. The book and podcast project is funded by a grant from Carlsberg Mindelegat.

 

  • Kraft, Kamilla. 2023. Sprogideologier om engelsk i Danmark: Hvem bruger engelsk, og hvor bør man (ikke) bruge engelsk? Anglo Files 210.
  • Kraft, Kamilla and Dorte Lønsmann. 2024. Er du Svend eller er du Pia? Stance og positionering i fokusgruppesamtaler om engelsk i Danmark [Are you Svend or are you Pia? Stance and positioning in focus group conversation about English in Denmark]. Danske Talesprog 23-24. 72-105.
  • Lønsmann, Dorte. 2024. English in the workplace: The case of Denmark. Elizabeth Peterson and Kristy Beers-Fägersten (eds.). English in the Nordic countries: Connections, tensions, and everyday realities. Routledge. 148-164.
  • Lønsmann, Dorte and Janus Mortensen. 2023. Engelsk i Danmark – what’s the score? [English in Denmark – what’s the score?] Anglo Files 208. 32–36.
  • Lønsmann, Dorte, Janus Mortensen and Jacob Thøgersen. 2024. Det engelske sprog i dagens Danmark: Here, there and everywhere [The English language in Denmark: Here, there and everywhere]. Sprog og Samfund 42(1). 10-14.
  • Lønsmann, Dorte, Jacob Thøgersen & Janus Mortensen. 2022. Er engelsk stadig et fremmedsprog i Danmark? Et spørgsmål om kollektiv sproglig identitet [s English still a foreign language in Denmark? A question of collective linguistic identity]. NyS – Nydanske Sprogstudier 61. 126-179.
  • Lønsmann, Dorte, Kamilla Kraft, Jacob Thøgersen og Janus Mortensen. 2024. Engelsk i Danmark – What’s the story? [English in Denmark – What’s the story?] Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
  • Mortensen, Janus. Forthcoming. English in Denmark. To appear in: Kingsley Bolton et al. (eds.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes.
  • Mortensen, Janus. 2024. Beyond threat or opportunity – English and language ideological tensions in the Nordic countries. Elizabeth Peterson and Kristy Beers-Fägersten (eds.). English in the Nordic countries: Connections, tensions, and everyday realities. Routledge. 104-124.
  • Skov, Marianne Haugaard. 2023. ”Meget af det kommer nok også fra TikTok” – unges brug af engelsk som sproglig ressource i hverdagen [”A lot of it is probably from TikTok” – the use of English as a linguistic resource in the everyday life of young Danes]. Anglo Files 209. 75-79.
  • Thøgersen, Jacob. 2023. Danskernes engelskkompetencer og engelskkontakt i 1990’erne og 2020’erne [English competence and English contact in the 1990s and 2020s]. Anglo Files 208. 37-43.
  • Thøgersen, Jacob. 2023. Danskerne og det engelske sprog i 1990’erne og 2020’erne [Danes and the English language in the 1990s and 2020s]. 19. møde om udforskningen af dansk sprog (MUDS 19-rapport). 343-360.
  • Thøgersen, Jacob and Bent Preisler. 2024. Globalization, attitudes towards English and party-political affiliation: The case of Denmark. Scandinavian Studies in Language 15(1). 1-52.
  • Thøgersen, Jacob and Bent Preisler. 2023. Danskerne og det engelske sprog – dengang og nu [The Danes and the English language – then and now]. NyS – Nydanske Studier 64. 8-50.

 

 

Researchers

Name Title Phone E-mail
Kraft, Kamilla Associate Professor E-mail
Lønsmann, Dorte Associate Professor - Promotion Programme +4535336633 E-mail
Mortensen, Janus Professor +4535334020 E-mail
Skov, Marianne Haugaard PhD Fellow +4535325469 E-mail
Thøgersen, Jacob Associate Professor +4535335749 E-mail

Funding

Independent Research Fund Denmark

The project is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities

Project period: September 2021 - December 2025

PI: Dorte Lønsmann