Danish

Danish democracy in English

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This is an English translation of Dorte Lønsmann and Jacob Thøgersen’s article. Read the Danish article here.

During the recent election campaign for municipal and regional elections in Denmark, we encountered a new linguistic phenomenon: although the election campaign was conducted predominantly in Danish, the English language – and other languages – also played a significant role, at least in some places. This has led us to consider: what role does English actually play in the Danish democracy?

Unlike in parliamentary elections, foreign nationals residing in Denmark have the right to vote in local elections if they are EU citizens or if they have lived in Denmark for at least 4 years. Kommunernes Landsforening (Local Government Denmark) estimates that … ↪

To buy a pig in a poke – a Danish-German language collaboration on fixed expressions

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Have you ever “bought a pig in a poke”?
If you speak Danish (at købe katten i sækken) or German (die Katze im Sack kaufen), you might already know this phrase. If not, you are about to discover why idioms and fixed expressions are so fascinating – and why they matter for communication across languages.

Share your favorite expressions with the project here.

The project

Knowing and being able to use each other’s language is one of the most important prerequisites for a well-functioning community. For the Danish-German border region, this applies in particular, since knowledge and command of the neighbor’s language cannot be taken for granted. German faces difficult conditions in Denmark, while Danish as … ↪

Global Languages Day, Sept. 17, Dokk1, Aarhus, Denmark

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Researchers and teachers connect to Aarhus University (AU) who are interested in languages, are organizing Global Languages Day, an initiative aimed at showcasing the work they do with and about languages at AU to the general public, including gymnasium students. As many languages  as possible will be represented.
The event is planned in three parts:
  1. Short talks
  2. Small booths representing the languages we have at AU (sprogsmagning) – including snacks and possibility for 2-minute language dating
  3. Q&A session (with questions selected in advance for preparation: globallanguagesday@cas.au.dk)
Global Languages Day will take place on September 17 at DOKK 1.
We plan to have the talks (part 1) from 10:00 – 12:10, the sprogsmagning (part 2) from 12:10 – 13:30, and
… ↪

What is the New Nordic Lexicon and how did it come about?

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The new nordic lexicon

Media coverage of the Nordic region is often dominated by clichés. Commercial and political branding can quickly reduce ‘Norden’ to easily understandable messages, such as ’gender-equal’, ’consensus-orientated’, ’little or no corruption’, ’green’ etc. The main purpose of the New Nordic Lexicon is to provide a more nuanced and research-based approach to the Nordic countries by giving a popular voice to researchers and to disseminate this to young people in the Nordics.

The lexicon is a collection of articles about topics within Nordic society, history, and culture. It is written by researchers, and accompanied by a series of research-based podcasts and films. It has been developed with the input of researchers and students from across the Nordic countries. Young peoples’ input … ↪

An excellent tool for learning Greenlandic by yourself!

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Liv Molich has a website: Learn Greenlandic. There is an accompanying printed workbook Kompendium til Grønlandsk 1 2. This workbook is written in Danish and is thus by default directed specifically to the Danish speaking readership. However, I choose to write this review in English because a wider audience should take notice of it.

Liv Molich’s Kompendium is just that: a workbook accompaniment to a language course. It makes no claim to be anything else. However, the 97 A4 pages can in fact be read on their own and the workbook is remarkably self-contained. Add in the QR-code links to digital resources, and it is a full language course for the beginner in its own right. I chose to … ↪

Silencing the Vikings: Bureaucracy and The End of Old Norse at Aarhus University

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“Not perverts but bureaucrats will set things off, and we won’t even know if their intentions were good or bad. Things will go off by command; they will be carried through according to regulations, mechanically, down the chain of command, with human wills bent, abolished, overcome, in a task that ceases to have any meaning”.[1]

– Jacques Lacan

Old Norse is the language of the Vikings. It is the language carved laboriously into runestones all over Scandinavia, indeed even as far afield as Ukraine. It is the language of the Icelandic sagas of the High Middle Ages, and the language which preserves most of our knowledge of Scandinavian mythology: Gods such as Óðinn and Þórr, the vengeful Fenrisúlfr … ↪

Free Ukrainian! Special linguistic operation for the Ukraine: Free Ukranian-Danish-Ukrainian dictionary for displaced Ukrainians and their helpers.

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(див. український текст нижче)

When I visited an old friend, a farmer, in the countryside, he told me that he had given a safe haven in his farmhouse to a couple of Ukrainians who had fled the violence in their homecountry. The ladies and their families were very happy with their new place. In the meantime, they have moved on to Horsens and Hammel.

The challenge was, that my friend and the Ukrainians could not communicate with each other, because they had no language in common. The Ukrainians only spoke Ukrainian. It is an illusion that “everybody” speaks English. I estimate that one in 30 of the refugees speak some (some) English.

Then I thought: there is a task for … ↪