{"id":35336,"date":"2018-04-02T01:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T05:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35336"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:45:02","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:45:02","slug":"qotd-is-danish-following-the-same-path-as-maltese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/02\/qotd-is-danish-following-the-same-path-as-maltese\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Is Danish following the same path as Maltese?"},"content":{"rendered":"

… while I was in Denmark I kept tripping over odd facts that pointed to a possibly disturbing conclusion: though the Danes don\u2019t seem to notice it themselves, their native language appears to me to be dying. Here are some of the facts that disturbed me:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I was told that Danish phonology has been mutating so rapidly over the last 50 years that it is often possible to tell by the accent of an emigre returning to Denmark what decade they left in.<\/li>\n
  2. The Dane with whom I was staying remarked that, having absorbed spoken Danish as a child, he found learning written English easier than learning written Danish.<\/li>\n
  3. Modern Danish is not spoken so much as it is mumbled. Norwegians and Swedes say that Danes talk like they\u2019ve constantly got potatoes in their mouths, and it\u2019s true. Most of the phonemic distinctions you\u2019d think ought to be there from looking at the orthography of written Danish (and which actually are there in Norwegian and Swedish) collapse into a sort of glottalized mud in contemporary spoken Danish.<\/li>\n
  4. At least half the advertising signs in Denmark \u2013 and a not inconsiderable percentage of street signs \u2013 are in English. Danes usually speak passable English; many routinely code-switch to English even when there are no foreigners involved, in particular for technical discussions.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The overall picture I got of Danish was of a language in an extreme stage of phonological degeneration, extremely divergent from its written form, and functionally unnecessary to many of its younger speakers.<\/p>\n

    I contemplated all this and thought of Maltese.<\/p>\n

    Maltese originated as a creole fusing Arabic grammar and structure with loanwords from French and Italian. I have read that since 1800 (and especially since WWII) Maltese has been so heavily influenced by bilingual English and Maltese speakers that much of what is now called \u201cMaltese\u201d is actually \u201cMaltenglish\u201d, rather more like a Maltese-English fusion, with \u201cpure\u201d Maltese only spoken by a dwindling cohort of the very old and very rural. Analysis of this phenomenon is complicated by the fact that the Maltese themselves tend to deny it, insisting for reasons of ethno-tribal identity that they speak more Maltese and less Maltenglish than they actually do.<\/p>\n

    Based on what I saw and heard in Denmark, I think Danish may be headed down a similar diglossic road, with \u201cpure\u201d Danish preserved as an ethno-tribal museum artifact and common Danish increasingly blending with English until its identity is essentially lost except as a source of picturesque dialect words. For a look at a late stage in this sort of process, consider Lallans, the lowland Scots fusion of Scots Gaelic and English.<\/p>\n

    Eric S. Raymond, “Is Danish Dying?”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>,2009-05-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    … while I was in Denmark I kept tripping over odd facts that pointed to a possibly disturbing conclusion: though the Danes don\u2019t seem to notice it themselves, their native language appears to me to be dying. Here are some of the facts that disturbed me: I was told that Danish phonology has been mutating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,41],"tags":[273,1235,400,1064],"class_list":["post-35336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-quotations","tag-denmark","tag-esr","tag-language","tag-malta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9bW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35337,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35336\/revisions\/35337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}