Danish Echoes of English

Abstract

The present dominance of Anglo-American culture is recognized worldwide as having a huge impact on the way national cultures and languages change these years. No wonder, with the influx of English- inspired language features (in the following referred to as Anglicisms) follow extensive language-political discussions among concerned laymen, scholars and politicians in the speech communities affected. Unfortunately, such discussions often lack coherent terminology, and statements are seldom based on a sound empirical foundation. Against this background, this paper seeks to: a) establish a comprehensive - as well as comprehensible - typology that will accommodate the bewildering variety of Anglicisms found in contemporary usage the world over, thus constituting a common denominator for future debates on the influence of English, and b) illustrate how language corpora may be fruitfully exploited to yield the empirical data necessary for promoting genuinely scholarly discussions and sustainable language policies. Before elaborating on these two points, I will provide the reader with an outline of the present language-political climate in a speech community strongly influenced by English, and then use this to distill a working definition of the key notion dealt with in this paper: Anglicism.