The background to the language situation

In the latest issue of the Finland-Swedish journal Nya Argus (nr. 11-12, 2010) linguistics professor Fred Karlsson considers the present uneasy situation surrounding the status of the Swedish language in Finland above all through the prism of the past. In doing so he raises some interesting points that are sometimes forgotten: the men who in the 19th century worked to establish Finnish as Finland’s national language were, after all, Finnish Swedes. Snellman, Forsman and other representatives of the country’s Swedish-speaking intelligentsia helped to bring about a peaceful linguistic revolution, but were soon regarded as traitors by their own Swedish-speaking compatriots. Karlsson also examines the nowadays neglected role of the Finnish linguist and politician Emil Nestor Setälä (1864-1936) who single-handedly drafted Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917 and also wrote an important work on the language law of 1922, in which he emphasized that although Finland had two languages, this did not mean that Finland had two nationalities: “Finland’s people are one.”

The essay also traces the history of pakkoruotsi (tvångsvenskan or “compulsory Swedish” – the preferred translation “mandatory Swedish”  seems like a bit of a euphemism) – in Finland’s schools, pointing out, somewhat drily by reference to online discussions, that compulsion is not usually the way to make friends. There are, however, difficult decisions to be made. An education minister of the Kekkonen era is quoted as saying that if compulsory Swedish is abolished, it will be replaced by another language, “and that language is not Spanish”. Karlsson believes that it’s incumbent on Finland-Swedes to keep a low profile in the current language debate, and to leave it up to the Finnish-speaking majority and their political leaders to draw up guidelines as to their situation in Finland, Europe and the constantly changing modern world.

Mankell may bar Hebrew translations of his books

Via Ynetnews:

Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell may prohibit the translation of his popular books into Hebrew after the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, he said in an interview published on Thursday.
"I am a best-selling author in Israel and I must consider seriously whether I should block my books from being translated to Hebrew," the author of the popular Wallander series of detective novels told daily Dagens Nyheter

To me there's something wrong about this,but I can't put my finger to it...

Shadows of Recession

The latest issue of Hiidenkivi, the cultural magazine published in Helsinki by SKS, the Finnish Literature Society, is focused on the theme of "The Long Shadows of Recession", with a look in words and pictures at three periods of economic crisis in Finland: the early 1930s, the early 1990s and the late 2000s. Articles examine social attitudes to unemployment and poverty through the decades, and there's also a survey of Depression and wartime cookbooks, and a sobering photograph of a Helsinki leipäjono (literally "breadline") or soup kitchen in 2006. Jouni Jäppinen contributes an interesting study of the tiny Baltic-Karelian island of  Tytärsaari, whose Finnish inhabitants traded with local Estonians from the 14th century onwards until the Second  World War, when the island was lost to the USSR (it's still in Leningrad Oblast). And Taru Kolehmainen ponders the history of the Finnish Literature Society's language committee, which was founded in 1928 and modelled to some extent on Germany's Der Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein, which in the Nazi period attempted to rid the German language of foreign - particularly French - loanwords. It's somewhat eerie and even rather disturbing to note some details of the Sprachverein's experiments, such as its aspiration to replace the names of the months of the year with "Germanic" equivalents like Herbstmond (September) and Julmond (December) - for some of these creations seem to have been borrowed from equivalent formations in Finnish (syyskuu, joulukuu). In Finland, the struggle was against Swedish influence, however, and probably represented a natural historical development more or less untainted by ideology.

Why English is best

In the Guardian, Martin Riker writes about The Estonian Argument for English Translations.

Terrier tactics

Hufvudstadsbladet is running a series of articles and features (the website includes only a selection from the paper edition) under the general headline "Swedish Under Attack", focusing on the current language debate in Finland. Yesterday the paper asked some leading Finland-Swedish personalities what they thought of SFP ([Finland-]Swedish People's Party) leader Stefan Wallin's proposal, voiced during an interview on Sunday, that the party should be a "terrier" for Finland-Swedish interests.

Respondents were asked:

1 What do you think of terrier tactics in the defence of Swedish questions?

2 What sort of tactics should they be?

Among literary respondents, Jörn Donner wrote:

If by terrier tactics what is meant is a more aggressive style that beats fists on the table, I can probably see a point in it. It's getting too easy for the Finland-Swedes to become too accommodating and seek consensus. But if terrier tactics are on the agenda, the SFP should probably have left the government a number ofl times during the past 20 years. So far I have seen no indication that they ever intended to do so, alas.

And in the course of his (longer) reply Kjell Westö said:

I have no easy counter-prescription. I'm surprised that so many Finland-Swedes seem to experience Finnish-speaking Finland as a scary, completely alien world. This autumn's debate has made me realize that I've underestimated that sense of alienation. I personally get along well with  Finnish-speakers and have always felt myself to be a Finn who happens to have Swedish as his mother tongue. For me language - any language - is a tool that makes it possible to build bridges, and I don't think I'm going to abandon that position.

See also: Land of one language?
Land of one language? - 2

Land of one language? - 2

The renewed and often bitter debate about the position of the Swedish language in Finland continues to cause waves in Finnish cultural and political life. Last week Anna-Maja Henriksson, chair of the Swedish Assembly (Folketinget) which promotes the interests of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority warned that if the anti-Swedish trend continues (the future of the country's Swedish-language television service is currently in doubt) the Åland Islands may seek separation. At present Åland (in Finnish, Ahvenanmaa) enjoys a special autonomous status within Finland, enabling the province to conduct its affairs entirely in Swedish, without the need for the people who live there to learn and speak Finnish at all.

This statement, which Ms. Henriksson subsequently modified, saying she had been misunderstood, caused outrage in the comments section of the Helsingin Sanomat article in which it appeared, and she began to receive threats and accusations of treason.

Polarization around the issue does appear to be gathering momentum, though the discussions I've read generate more heat than light. Today's issue of Hufvudstadsbladet leads with a story about Finland-Swedish hospital patients and their experiences, suggesting that Finland-Swedes demand more of the public health services than Finns do. On the other hand, most of Finland's medical personnel don't speak much or any Swedish, especially those doctors and specialists who have migrated to Finland from abroad.

Finland's current prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, is the first politician to hold the post who in meetings with his Nordic colleagues uses English, not Swedish, as a means of communication.

Svenskfinland in English has much more on all the related issues - seen from a Finland-Swedish viewpoint, of course. 

See also: Land of one language?

Finnish as she is spoke

The Finnish publishing house Gummerus has issued the 500+-page Oikeeta suomee - Suomen puhekielen sanakirja. Dictionary of Spoken Finnish, which contains some 7,000 words and phrases. Books from Finland's editor Soila Lehtonen writes in a note to the magazine's translators: "you probably already know what for example säväri, terkkari, opo, arska or perseet olalla means (and perhaps the Internet provides the translations easily)..."

Elias Bredsdorff: "Ærkedansk": 3

Some of Elias Bredsdorff's comments and strictures on modern Danish could apply equally well to English.

Is Danish a beautiful language, or is it, as some foreigners claim, a disease of the throat? Sometime last century, according to the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, a little Dutch boy was sitting practising his Danish. His father interrupted him with the words: "Don't hiccup like that, boy, it's not good for your throat", to which the boy replied: "I'm not hiccuping, father, I'm speaking Danish".

But the question of beauty or ugliness is meaningless. Anyone who has heard Bodil Kjer or Erik Mørk reciting a Danish text will be in no doubt that Danish can be a very beautiful language. On the other hand, most Danes feel that Dutch is an unattractive language. But here, of course, the Dutch disagree!

Like most other living languages, Danish is a language in constant flux. Year after year Dansk Sprognævn (the Danish Language Commission) explains new words that have come into the language, either as neologisms or as loan-words.

Here are some examples of words which have entered the language in the course of the last 35 years: lommeregner (pocket-calculator), alternativkultur (alternative culture), nærbutik (local shop), bistandslov (social security law), ecu (common unit of monetary value in the EU), edb (electronic data capture), forbrugerklagenævn (consumer complaints commission), flyvebåd (hydrofoil), ellert (a small three-wheeled electric car), afrohår (Afro hair) and rotteræs (rat-race).

The Danish Language Commission explains when each individual word was first used. And I myself have the honour of having been the first to use the word kulturradikalisme (cultural radicalism). To quote from "Information" in the report of the Danish Language Commission: "It was Elias Bredsdorff who defined the concept in a heated debate in the summer of 1955, when he pointed to the unbroken line of descent from Georg Brandes' time to the Kulturkampf of the 30s".

Some of the new words are taken directly from English: "callgirl" (for luder, "cash" (for rede penge, "booke" (for bestille på forhand, "computer" (for datamaskine and "blender" (for a kitchen utensil [NB Danish word not given!]. We adopted English words in earlier times too, but not always in the meaning they had in English. What we in Danish call a speaker is an "announcer" in English, and in English a kasket (cap) has never been called a "sixpence".

Another loan from English is the increasing tendency nowadays - especially among the young - to use the word du in the sense of "one", i.e. where du in no way refers to the person one is talking to. That this is the case emerges clearly from this example which Jørn Lund quotes in one of his books:

"An elderly undersecretary asked his granddaughter to describe the internal design of the girls' changing-rooms at the Øbro swimming-pool, and received the following reply: "First you go in through a door, yeah? And then you come to a room with little lockers. You get changed there, yeah? And then you can go and have yourself a shower"."

Over the years there have been zealous guardians of the language, the so-called "purists", who have seen foreign loan-words as a threat to the purity of the Danish language. Personally speaking I do not share this point of view. But when it is a question of linguistic disagreements, people often become fanatical.

We saw this to a lesser degree in Denmark in the summer of 1985 during the so-called "mayonnaise war", when people reacted violently to a suggested change in the written language whereby certain foreign words, e.g. mayonnaise, would acquire a more Danish form.

More violent still was the war that raged after the Occupation over the issue of scrapping the initial capital letter of nouns. For many people it was almost a matter of life or death to preserve the capitals. Nowadays, however, only a very few people still use them.

One of the genuine threats to the Danish language is the linguistic laziness that leads to linguistic poverty. It is meaningless to say ik (no?), after every other sentence, and it is a rank bad habit to say lissom (for ligesom, "like") about everything (han er lissom lidt gammel, "he's, like, quite old").

In newspapers one sees journalists, who ought to know better, writing a sentence like this: Han hører til en af de største kunstnere "he belongs among one of the greatest artists", where the meaning is that he is one of the greatest artists, or that he belongs among the greatest artists.

The expression indtil flere "more" is a meaningless cliché. Flere is sufficient by itself. The combination både-og, unfortunately, is being gradually edged out both in the written and spoken language by både - men også (both - but also), e.g. han var både klog, men også forudseende (he was both intelligent but also far-sighted).

On the radio and TV one constantly hears the word premierminister (prime minister) pronounced as premiereminister, and the word vurdere (estimate) as vudere. Some people have a tendency to emphasize laudatory or derogatory expressions with the help of words like utrolig (unbelievable) or fantastisk (fantastic). It is not enough to say of someone that he is nice, or that he is very nice; this has to be beefed up forcefully and powerfully into "he's unbelievably nice" or "he's fantastically nice".

To me, "it's an unbelievably good book" is no more convincing than "it's a good book". For if everything is emphasized with the help of the word "unbelievable", the word itself is going to be devalued.

(to be continued)

translated from Danish by Harry D. Watson

Elias Bredsdorff:"Ærkedansk" - 1
Elias Bredsdorff:"Ærkedansk" - 2

Elias Bredsdorff :"Ærkedansk" - 2

In former times, when people in so-called "well-bred circles" turned up their noses at the Copenhagen dialect, their indignation was provoked both by the dialect of the socially inferior classes with the flat a, which became æ in words like gæde and Dænmark, and by the opposite tendency, i.e. the use of open a in words like traor instead of træer (trees). I still remember a song that Lisa Weel sang in the review "On the bottom" in 1932.

This song, which was written by Poul Henningsen, contains the following lyrics:

The embankments, the old streets, the green trees,
Let others see the beauty in all that.
The city, to me, is the people with the open a's.
And what do I care that there are green trees there.

Yet the theatre once spoke
The Danish language
Like a book.
Say hello to Herr Neindam from me.

We speak short and sweet.
Forcefully, tersely and fast,
Smart-assed,
Kiss the Copenhagen lingo from me!

They speak Fynsk and Lollands on the radio,
Speak Copenhagen, and then you'll get somewhere.

The broad, open clang
Of Copenhagen slang,
Just listen, man -
Give them all a kiss from me!

I got to know Poul Henningsen himself at the beginning of the thirties when, as a cultural commentator on Politiken, he was very involved with language problems in his determined struggle in favour of natural speech-forms and against the tendency to allow the pronunciation of words to be influenced by the spelling. In this context he attacked, in particular, radio-announcers.

He claimed the fact that more and more people were saying God dag instead of goda, which is the natural pronunciation, was due to radio-announcers' habit of constantly saying god aften instead of goaften. He raged against the growing tendency to think it was refined to pronounce the silent letters in words, so that more and more people were beginning to say købmand (grocer) instead of kømand and snedkermester (master carpenter) instead of snekermester. It's the semi-educated people who say Bredgade (Broad Street) and Købmagergade (Meat-Seller Street) instead of Bregade and Kømagergade, he maintained. Poul Henningsen won the support of many fellow-writers, who took his criticisms to their logical conclusion by introducing written forms which more accurately reflected pronunciation: simply omitting any misleading letters, so that for example they wrote osse in order to avoid the frightful pronunciation ouså (i.e. også, 'also').

It was osse a step in the right direction when the Language Reform made it officially acceptable to dispense with the silent d in the words ville (wished), kunne (could) and skulle (should).

I myself have suffered from someone, in their eagerness to speak correctly, inserting redundant silent letters into their pronunciation. In the word sølv (silver) the v is silent, and in the word guld (gold) the d is silent, but I have known people talk about sølv and guld. A maid, trying desperately to emulate her employers' bad habits, answered a phone-call for her mistress with the words: Ja, nu skal jeg kalve (Yes, I'll call her now).

I spent many years teaching Danish to English students and I would tell them that words like bliver, blev and blevet (stay, stayed and (has) stayed) should not be pronounced as they are spelt, but as blir, ble and bleet. My English students had learned that a d is normally silent after an n, and therefore they didn't find it hard to pronounce the word Handelsbanken properly. But when they saw the name of another bank, which was called Andelsbanken, they were inclined to make it rhyme with Handelsbanken and call it Annelsbanken.

I also had to teach them that the letter f is never pronounced in the little word which is spelt a-f, but this was complicated by the fact that the word is very different in contexts such as én af dem (one of them) and han faldt af (he fell off). In everyday speech the t in at is simply not pronounced. But in the sentence det er let at se (it's easy to see) it is pronounced å, and in the sentence han siger, at han kommer (he says he's coming), as a.

I have heard older people, while reading aloud, employing the pronunciation dig, sig and mig (you, one-/himself, me) with a sharp i sound: a pronunciation which some psalm-verses demand for the sake of the rhyme. While the authentic pronunciation of the word we spell h-a-v-d-e (had) is hade and the word l-a-g-d-e (laid) is la (with a long a), the same elderly individuals generally used the forms haude and laugde.

I taught my English students that the plural of noget (some) should be pronounced noen - Har du noen penge? (Do you have any money?), but when they were in Denmark they found that many Danes nevertheless pronounced the word as it is written: nogle (noule. It is confusing to foreigners that the word which is pronounced vær is spelt v-e-j-r (weather) - det er dejligt vejr (it's nice weather). Nor does the numeral seksten (sixteen) rhyme - as foreigners might think - with teksten (the text), but with gejsten (the ghost) - though without the stød (roughly, glottal stop).

(to be continued)

translated from Danish by Harry D. Watson

Elias Bredsdorff:"Ærkedansk" - 1

Elias Bredsdorff: "Ærkedansk". Twelve Essays from Glænø

Elias Bredsdorff (1912-2002) was a Danish scholar best known in the English-speaking world for his work on Hans Christian Andersen, whom he strove to portray not just as an amiable author of children's tales, but as a creative and poetic philosopher. He had a long-standing connection with the United Kingdom, having been a lecturer in Danish at University College London and at Cambridge, where he was made a fellow of Peterhouse. His association with this famously right-wing and traditionalist college, the nursery of many Conservative politicians, was particularly ironic, given Bredsdorff's life-long involvement in left-wing politics, which for a time led him to be a member of the Communist Party.

In about 1960 Bredsdorff and his wife bought a former smithy and attached dwelling-house on the island of Glænø, off Zealand, as their summer home. So when the head of the regional radio station asked Bredsdorff to give a series of talks, these were given the general title of Ærkedansk. Tolv essays fra Glænø (Arch-Danish. Twelve Essays from Glænø). The essays were published in book form in 1992.

In the introduction to the book, Bredsdorff explains that Ideen var at gå fra det lokale til det alment danske og - så vidt muligt - også at sætte emnet ind i det europæisk perspektiv (The idea was to go from the local to the generally Danish and - as far as possible - also to set the subject in its European perspective).

The concept is suitable Grundtvigian - the Danish bishop-educator advocated starting children off with local studies of their immediate environment, progressing to the surrounding county, the country, and then the wider world.

The individual essays cover such subjects as The Vikings, Folk Ballads, School, Language, H.C. Andersen, The Village, and Humour. They are very much the product of a Dane talking to fellow-Danes, and I do not believe they have ever been translated before.

What follows is the first part of Sproget (Language), a quirky reflection on the Danish language by one who knew it inside-out.

Danish is spoken everywhere in Denmark, but it is not the same Danish that is spoken throughout the country. Even in particular geographical locations one can hear differences in the speech of the local people. If a phonetician with the same skill in identifying people’s geographical origins that Professor Higgins had when, with a fair degree of accuracy, he was able to say what Eliza the flower-girl’s speech betrayed about her background .. if such a phonetician were to talk to all the inhabitants of Glænø he would soon discover that a certain proportion of the population speak an unadulterated South-West Zealand dialect, another group speak Standard Danish with distinct traces of the original Zealand dialect, another lot again speak a North Zealandic which betrays possible origins in the Gundsømagle area, and that there are some whose speech bears unmistakable signs of their having spent their childhood or youth on Funen or in Jutland. And finally, there would also be people with distinct reminders of Copenhagen in their speech. But Zealandic would of course be the dominant trait.

There is nothing remarkable about this. One would really have to go to remote country areas in Jutland or Funen to find a whole population without exception speaking the unadulterated regional dialect.

Language changes, partly because people move from one area to another and take their language with them; partly because of the influence of the electronic media, even if radio and TV now deserve some credit for giving the Danish dialects equal billing with the so-called “standard language”, which people in earlier times were inclined to perceive as “the language of educated Danes”. Now, the definition of “standard language” is a negative one: it is language which bears no trace of any form of local dialect.

I remember from my childhood that there were people who had a tendency to judge others’ character traits from the dialect they spoke.

People who spoke a pronounced Jutlandic dialect, especially West Jutlandic, were “solid Jutes”, genuine and reliable; but this in no way prevented a degree of scepticism about Jutland horse-dealers, about whom one knew that if they sold you a cow in Jesus’ name, you could be sure that it would have three teats!

Dwellers on Funen got the designation “unworried and jolly”, but the Zealanders were “slow and over-cautious”. The Copenhagen dialect, the speech of Grønnegade, was a “street-urchins’ language” which was looked on with disdain by cultivated people.

The idea of a connection between local dialects and character traits corresponded to some extent to the clichés in my geography books, that “the Finns are quick to reach for their knives”, the Spaniards are “warm-blooded” and the French “frivolous”.

Johannes V. Jensen, a Jutlander himself, once carried out an amusing literary experiment. Having first interpreted Hans Christian Andersen’s story “What Father does is always right” as a true story from Funen which could not have happened anywhere else in Denmark, he tried the experiment of telling the story as it would have sounded if it had instead taken place in Jutland.

Andersen’s story is about a farmer who takes a horse to market. On the way he exchanges the horse for a cow, which he exchanges for a sheep, a goat, a hen, until finally he returns with a sack of rotten apples. A couple of rich Englishmen he meets in a pub have a bet with him that when he returns home his wife will give him a thrashing, but the farmer maintains that he will be met with kisses rather than blows, and that his wife will say: “What Father does is always right”. And the story ends with the farmer winning the bet.

In his Jutlandic version of the story, Johannes V. Jensen had the farmer going to the market with a sack of rotten apples and returning with a horse. But the ending is quite different too, for the Jutlandic wife is sour and irritable and had been expecting that her husband would have done better all along the line. When at last he tells her that he palmed off a cow on a man and got a horse in its place, she says: “I thought you had come home with a team”. And with that she turned and went into the house. And what she had not found a way of expressing in words, her back said for her." Country folk will take for granted that et spand means a team.

But the inherent difficulty of the Danish language, even for an academic like Professor Hans Brix, was demonstrated by the latter in 1947 in a reference to Poul Reumert’s reading of the story of the Jutlandic farmer’s wife, when he wrote in Berlingske Tidende: “When she was shown the horse, she would have greatly preferred a bucket…”

Hans Brix, in other words, had not understood the difference between et spand (a team) and en spand (a bucket)!

(to be continued)

translated from Danish by Harry D. Watson