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In this article I will describe some of the forms of Danish which I come across as a teacher of Danish just south of the Danish-German border. Varieties of the Danish language occur which bring various aspects of language learning and language contact into focus.
In 1992, the School of Economics and Business Administration Handelshøjskole Syd and the University of Flensburg set up the first transborder study course for both Danish and German students. This meant that the education systems of the two institutions - along with their specialities of business economics and pedagogics - had to be coordinated. The SPRØK study course, started in 1995, has integrated language and economics. On 1 September 1997, a new language study course starts with a Danish BA in business language, with language pedagogics as a special subject and a German diploma qualification within language & culture management as superstructure, the new BA course places special emphasis on the mediation of language and culture.
On the SPRØK course both Danish and German are spoken - the neighbouring languages are used both as everyday languages and as teaching languages. The Danish qualifications of the German students' 'beginners class' on the SPRØK course, however, can vary considerably. There can, for example, be Southern German students who have never heard Danish before, Northern Germans who know the occasional word in Danish, and others who come from the border region and are used to buying goods north of the border, or who have family and friends in Denmark.
Students with Danish as a foreign language in the Realschule [lower secondary school], Gymnasium [upper secondary school] or business school in Schleswig-Holstein, children of Danish-German mixed marriages with prior German schooling as well as members of the Danish minority with Danish as a second language are all put in classes for 'advanced and second language' students.
One thing the 'beginners' share is that they have all learned up to three foreign languages in their prior schooling, usually though in an education system where language pedagogics has been grammar-oriented. Most of them are highly motivated and learn fast. One of their problems is that there is a distinct asymmetry in their language development, with their reading proficiency developing much quicker than their listening proficiency and productive skills.
Beginners with no prior knowledge of Danish soon find out that it is much easier to read Danish than to understand the spoken language. Reading proficiency is further strengthened by the fact that the other study subjects contain Danish reading material as well as that the actual study situation is extremely text-oriented.
When minority students with Danish as their second language begin the course with a Danish-German 'studentereksamen' (upper secondary leaving examination, cf. 'A' levels), their schooling has been in Danish, but in Germany. Their linguistic and cultural codes do not, however, always coincide; broadly speaking, they have a commanding knowledge of a special variant of the standard Danish language (sometimes referred to as 'sydslesvigdansk'), but know practically nothing about Danish society north of the border. They say themselves that they experience difficulty in not getting Danish and German language usage norms 'mixed up'. They have a tendency, for example, to use Danish 'culturemes' (e.g. the more informal and direct language usage norm) when speaking German, yet they are also unsure whether they are right on target when speaking Danish.
On the other hand, they are more reticent about the standard Danish language norm. If we just look briefly at the Danish that is characteristic for the students from the minority, the characteristics that are typically 'South Schleswig Danish' can be summed up as follows:
Their language contains loan translations, German quotation vocabulary and 'vacuum translations', where Danish is not assumed to have a corresponding expression (e.g. 'TÜV' (Technischer ÜberwachungsVerein) for the compulsory car test.
A typical statement is:
"Jeg finder, at danskerne forærer deres dronning mere end tyskerne sin Bundespräsident."
("I think the Danes give away their queen more than the Germans their Bundespräsident." [German 'verehren' = 'to honour'])
Ger. 'Ich finde, dass die Dänen ihre Königin mehr als die Deutschen ihren Bundespräsident(en) verehren.'
Syntactically, there is a tendency - also in writing - to bring forward 'heavy' adverbial adjuncts in the sentence (e.g. in front of the verbal infinitives and objects, the resulting syntax resembling that of German:
"I 1990 blev i de nye forbundslande den sociale markedsøkonomi indført."
("In 1990, in the new Länder social market economy was introduced.")
Ger. 'Im Jahr 1990 wurde in den neuen Bundesländern die soziale Marktwirtschaft eingeführt.'
They often place adverbials after the finite verb in clauses:
"Trods det indre marked, der skabte 1986-91 mere end ni millioner arbejdspladser (...)"
("Despite the Single Market, which created in 1986-91 more than nine million jobs...")
Ger. 'Trotz des Binnenmarktes, der 1986-91 mehr als neun Millionen Arbeitsplätze geschaffen hat (...)'
Their sentence intonation - though with many individual variations - is often characterised by a locally falling intonation at the very end of statements, as opposed to the globally falling intonation of statements in standard Danish.
Terminal declarative intonation in Danish:
Terminal declarative intonation in German:
Some of the students show a tendency to use German discourse markers, such as "ne?" with rising intonation (rather like "ik?" in standard Danish): "Så holder jeg på mandag mit referat, ne?" ("So, I'll be giving my referat [Ger. Referat = oral presentation or talk, seminar paper] on Monday, ne?").
The students use Danish when discussing subject-related matters in Danish teaching (Danish as 'knowledge language'), but they shift to German when talking about more private subjects, or when chatting to each other (German as 'experience language'). Since everyone present understands German just as well as Danish, this cannot reflect a desire to exclude others. It is simply a question of their spontaneously choosing the language they are used to using when communicating with people their own age. In that situation their identity as 'young people' dominates over their identity as South Schleswig Danes, with German quite clearly being the young people's group language.
Characteristic of the students from the minority - in stark opposition to their fellow students with Danish as a foreign language - is that they are generally speaking not interested or motivated when it comes to having their Danish corrected on the basis of standard Danish norms. Recent theories on bilingualism would refer to this as a norm phenomenon: the South Schleswigers have their own Danish language norm, one which they feel is fully valid, with the aid of which they communicate and at the same time demonstrate a regional, bicultural and bilingual identity. As a Danish teacher it can therefore be extremely difficult to decide whether serious 'interference errors' are to be corrected or not. In this connection, it is perhaps necessary to distinguish between:
If the latter is the case, I am unable to adopt a corrective attitude without questioning the learners' identity as South Schleswig Danes. The South Schleswig Danish language does not resemble anything we are used to hearing as standard Danish speakers:
Basing oneself on Peter Trudgill 1992, it is possible to consider the South Schleswig language as being an example of a creoloid language. This is the term Trudgill uses to describe the result of a language contact that gives rise to simplification tendencies, which in this case consist of a parallel use of the two languages at several levels, as well as mixed forms. The South Schleswig language user is to a certain extent conscious of the origin of some of the lexical mixed forms he or she uses as 'markers'. On the other hand, awareness of the parallel use of the two languages at the tonal, syntactical or pragmatic level is virtually absent.
An interesting approach is to consider the Danish language in South Schleswig as a 'contact language' that shows how the Danish language would have developed in general if the close language contact between Danish and Low German (in the period of the Hanseatic League) and later High German (until the 19th century) had continued a while longer than it did.
The Danish language in South Schleswig can generally be considered as a 'language island' and, as such, can possibly have shared characteristics with the situation in which the immigrant languages find themselves in Denmark. From the point of view of a language user, the South Schleswig language variant works excellently as a means of communication, because practically all the people a South Schleswig Dane normally speaks Danish with are other South Schleswig Danes who also have German as their first language.
Braunmüller, Kurt: Sydslesvigdansk - et regionalsprog? in: Institut for dansk Dialektforskning: Studier i talesprogsvariation og sprogkontakt. Til Inger Ejskjær på halvfjerdsårsdagen den 20. maj 1996. København 1996. pp. 33-44.
Fredsted, Elin: Variable og invariable fejl i tysksprogede elevers udtale af dansk. in: Mette Kunøe/Erik Vive Larsen: 2. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog. Århus 1989. pp. 99-109.
Trudgill, Peter: Introducing Language and Society, London 1992.
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