Some years ago I did a speaking tour in Scandinavia that involved staying in Denmark for a couple of days. Denmark, like the other Scandinavian nations I’ve visited, is a tidy little country full of intelligent, civilized, and agreeable people. As long as you can get along with gray sub-arctic weather and gray, characterless food these are interesting places to be – well, at least for someone with my strong interest in history and archeology. Historical museums, here I come!
But while I was in Denmark I kept tripping over odd facts that pointed to a possibly disturbing conclusion: though the Danes don’t seem to notice it themselves, their native language appears to me to be dying. Here are some of the facts that disturbed me:
- I was told that Danish phonology has been mutating so rapidly over the last 50 years that it is often possible to tell by the accent of an emigre returning to Denmark what decade they left in.
- The Dane with whom I was staying remarked that, having absorbed spoken Danish as a child, he found learning written English easier than learning written Danish.
- Modern Danish is not spoken so much as it is mumbled. Norwegians and Swedes say that Danes talk like they’ve constantly got potatoes in their mouths, and it’s true. Most of the phonemic distinctions you’d think ought to be there from looking at the orthography of written Danish (and which actually are there in Norwegian and Swedish) collapse into a sort of glottalized mud in contemporary spoken Danish.
- At least half the advertising signs in Denmark – and a not inconsiderable percentage of street signs – are in English. Danes usually speak passable English; many routinely code-switch to English even when there are no foreigners involved, in particular for technical discussions.
The overall picture I got of Danish was of a language in an extreme stage of phonological degeneration, extremely divergent from its written form, and functionally unnecessary to many of its younger speakers.
I contemplated all this and thought of Maltese.
Maltese originated as a creole fusing Arabic grammar and structure with loanwords from French and Italian. I have read that since 1800 (and especially since WWII) Maltese has been so heavily influenced by bilingual English and Maltese speakers that much of what is now called “Maltese” is actually “Maltenglish”, rather more like a Maltese-English fusion, with “pure” Maltese only spoken by a dwindling cohort of the very old and very rural. Analysis of this phenomenon is complicated by the fact that the Maltese themselves tend to deny it, insisting for reasons of ethno-tribal identity that they speak more Maltese and less Maltenglish than they actually do.
Based on what I saw and heard in Denmark, I think Danish may be headed down a similar diglossic road, with “pure” Danish preserved as an ethno-tribal museum artifact and common Danish increasingly blending with English until its identity is essentially lost except as a source of picturesque dialect words. For a look at a late stage in this sort of process, consider Lallans, the lowland Scots fusion of Scots Gaelic and English.
I’m blogging about this because I don’t know who to ask for an expert opinion about my suspicions. Most linguists think it’s Just Not Done to say that a speaker population is evolving its own language out of existence, if for no reason than that doing so might embroil them in identity-politics issues of which they want no part and value judgments they’ve been trained to avoid.
So, um, is there a fearless Danish linguist in my audience? If Danish isn’t in terminal collapse, what the heck is actually going on instead?