Volume 2010, Issue 204

This article is a condensed historical overview of the development and status of purism in the Nordic countries, concluding with the state of affairs at the start of the MIN project around 2000. It gives a typology of purism(s), a general overview of the earliest external influences in the prenationalist period and a country-for-country account of the development of standard languages and linguistic nationalisms, and the nature and function of purist movements during this process. A preliminary ranking of the countries according to their degree of purism concludes the article.

The article presents aspects of import words in the written languages of the Nordic countries, based on newspaper corpora from 1975 and 2000. Remarkably, only 2–4 percent of the words in any language occur with unequivocal signs of morphological non-adaptation. The frequency of import words ranges from 17 to 110 per 10,000 words running text, and the proportion of orthographically adapted words from 7–48 percent. Status as majority or minority language also seems to be of relevance, as do relative geographical position within the region, and language structural features.

The data for the investigation presented in this article were collected by a questionnaire. A comparison with the corresponding results for written language shows the same overall pattern, with only minor differences: the highest adaptation rate (i.e. change away from English towards the national language) is found with speakers of languages on the periphery of the Nordic area, the lowest rate is found with Danes in the centre of the area. The mean percentage for “adapted” variants is about 60 in the investigation as a whole, but the ranking order of the communities differs for phonology and morphology. Social variables seem to have surprisingly little impact on patterns of adaptation.

The article reports on how the present-day influence from English is perceived and assessed in seven Nordic communities. The focus is on comparison, between the seven communities, and between two data sets obtained under different conditions of consciousness. The comparisons show that the populations reproduce the “purism level” of their own community's official language policy in their consciously offered responses to questions in a telephone survey, while the purism–laissez-faire ranking of the communities is turned upside down in a subconsciously offered data set obtained in a speaker evaluation experiment based on the matched-guise technique. In the same way, analyses of how the evaluative reactions correlate with social-group divisions show reproduction and non-reproduction of the stereotypically expected correlations, in the conscious and subconscious conditions respectively.

This article discusses the rise and the current standing of “Norden” (the Nordic societies) as an imagined community (Anderson, Imagined communities, Verso, 1991). The ideology of Norden as a coherent community rests on the one hand on the perceived mutual intelligibility of the Scandinavian languages, used as mother tongue or as lingua franca. On the other hand the ideology of Norden rests on a sense of historical unity. Historically, the ideology of the Nordic grew out of the era of national romanticism. The present study therefore addresses the pertinent question of how the ideology of the Nordic fares in late modernity where ideology is under threat from more “rational”, e.g., financial lines of thinking.

The standardization processes of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian display large differences with Denmark and Norway at the opposite ends of the scale and Sweden in the middle. A closer historical study reveals significant differences between the modernization processes (demographic developments, types of industrialization, and modernization processes within agriculture). These differences led to different class alliances, a fact that has had a bearing on language attitudes and language change. In late modern society the notion of class seems to be problematic, and life style analysis has entered the sociolinguistic scene and seems well suited to keep a balance between determinism and agency in a post-traditional world.