Horace Engdahl & Jørn Lund on language politics

Tonight I went to a panel on Nordic language politics with Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and Jørn Lund, chair of the Danish Language & Literature Society.

Lund dropped a bomb in front of the audience by mentioning that incoming Law students to Copenhagen University are now required to demonstrate competency in English, not Danish. This example of native languages losing out to International English was especially painful for Engdahl, who named intra-Nordic law conferences as one of the few examples of when Scandinavian subject experts by and large communicated in their respective languages, rather than English. According to Engdahl this is because of the remarkable uniformity of legal traditions in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, which extends to a similarity of nomenclature. Lund claimed that 95% of all graduates from Danish law schools would go on to practice within Denmark -- for the simple reason that they aren't trained in French or Anglo-Saxon law -- and thus the "trendy" march towards English in the field of jurisprudence was particularly ill-considered.

An interesting theory relayed by Engdahl was that the pan-Nordic commitment to extending a sphere of influence and coöperation over the Baltic (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in the years after the breakup of the Soviet Union had, ironically, lead to a decrease in the use of Nordic languages at Scandinavian conferences. Though there is interest in learning these languages in the Baltic, particularly Swedish, it is not yet at the level to support commercial or scientific discussions, thus the emergence of English as a lingua franca in some previously-Nordic contexts

Both Lund and Engdahl could be accused of hewing close to what might be thought of as Cultural Conservatism, were they transported to an American context. Both have been active in the debate over a "cultural canon", with Lund having actually produced a textbook and teaching guides highlighting the 12 best works in the Danish artistic tradition. In contrast, Engdahl wryly attributes the lack of progress in Sweden on such canon-making to a misplaced fear over the hegemonic nature of Swedish culture inside the country -- to paraphrase his well-received joke, "Swedes are deathly afraid that only their deep commitment to multiculturalism prevents the inevitable spread of their own language and literature over the whole globe."