Danish vs English

Influx of English language into Danish sometimes seems ridiculous. Here is a sample of some "danish" words that are considered as a part of the standard Danish language:

housewarming

weekend

Walk-in-closet

Issue

Clutch

I will not even go into the IT words at all. For a much longer and more detailed list, look here: http://cphpost.dk/news/many-new-danish-words-come-from-english.html

I figured this out on one class at language school. After the class I asked my teacher are these words in danish language and he confirmed it. My next question was, but how do the linguist take it? Are they trying to find substitute or try to fight it in some way. He said that they just conclude that is how it is, that is the modern trend and that is that. I must say that when I heard it I was shocked and then I was shocked by my shock.

The reason is that in Croatia language patriots are trying to resist modern day influx from English language with everything they got and sometimes they go so far that it is just ludicrous. I must say that Danes look like the opposite extreme. They are just looking at it happening without even trying to do anything, but they just shrug their shoulders and say that's how it is.

It seems to me that in the long run danish could completely lose the battle with English and here is why. To start with, today in Denmark 80% of the population speaks English. Most of the people who don't speak English are old people who are about to retire. When older generations slowly fade out of the working market, country will be bilingual for all practical purposes. Secondly, modern day danish children are bilingual, they speak English as good as danish and they start learning English at the start of their education. Third, "official" language in the most of the business sector is English, "official" language in the IT sector is English. When you are looking for a job in Copenhagen, a lot of job postings is in English and a lot of the positions do not even require knowledge of Danish language.

To continue, the topic that I covered in the last post, danish is a hard language to learn both for foreigners and for danish children. And there is a couple of reasons for that. One is a large number of vowels and then an even higher number of vowel sounds in speech, it adds up to 40 vowel sounds in total in spoken language. That makes the pronunciation very mushy and then to complicate things more Danes do not pronounce a large number of letters, mostly consonants and in the process they fuse words, so in speech it sound like they said one word, but they actually said 3 or more. All of these things taken together makes the danish language difficult to master. And it is not only difficult to foreigners but it is difficult to danish children also. Danish children start talking much later then the average child. Average child starts talking between 18 months and 2 years. Average danish child starts talking around 3 years of age because of the trickiness of danish language. To top it up Danish researcher, Dorthe Bleses compared vocabulary acquisition in young children and she realised that at the age of 15 months Danish children have the smallest vocabulary of only around 80 words, Swedish children at the same age know 130 words and Croatian children around 200 words. Danish children do catch up later. The reason for their slow start is because of a lot of vowel sounds in Danish and a lot of letters being swallowed in speech, Danish children need more time to crack the language code but when they do, they will catch up.

If, on one hand, we assume that the modern trends in Denmark will continue indefinitely into the future by which I mean: continuous influx of foreigners (which is necessary for Denmark in order to replace the population because Denmark has too low birth rates with 1.79 birth per woman), growing strength of English language in the business sector, growing influx of English words into danish vocabulary, bilingual trends among danish youth.

On the other hand, if we take into consideration that English language is a bit simpler to learn and a lot more forgiving in pronunciation and that English will be the language that is common to most of the population, both foreigners and locals. Than if we take language as a tool that facilitates communication and if we have two languages in a population that are equally spread out, without outside interventions, language that is simpler will slowly but surely take over. Also, danish language has one unexpected drawback. Legally, Denmark does not have an official language. Danish language isn't defined by law as the official language in Denmark. The only place you are legally obliged to speak danish is in courts and nowhere else. Maybe this is something Danes should consider, protect their language at least as a part of their national heritage because if they don't, in the long run, it will have troubles competing with English.