49: Gøtudanskt - a centralised Nordic language?

Written by Linden Alexander Pentecost in the UK and published on this UK website from and in the UK on the 12th december 2024. This article contains no sub-sections but interconnected text beginning with comments on my own favourite Nordic languages and into a deeper discussion on Gøtudanskt and related varieties, their history, past importance and ideas for their continuation in the present day and future. This article contains 1182 words.

The topics in this article do somewhat lead on from topics regarding Danish which I have included in some PDF books published this year. But to begin: I have always found it difficult to determine which of the Nordic languages I enjoy speaking the most. In terms of the Nordic languages as a whole, I have come to particularly like Western Norwegian dialects, Finland Norse dialects, like those spoken around Helsinki, and I also really like the sound of the regional Rigsdansk spoken in Jutland, as well as the Jutlandic language. Out of the official “standard” Nordic languages, I like Danish the most, which is interesting as, out of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Denmark is the country I have visited the least (only twice). 

I do not dislike any of the Nordic languages, although I think I am less drawn to Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Swedish, because these language have much the same structure (in many ways, at a written lexical level) as Danish, but unlike standard Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Swedish do not really reflect the traditional languages in those countries, whereas spoken Rigsdansk Danish does represent the dialects of Sjælland.

This is as I have mentioned previously in part because standard Danish, standard Swedish and Norwegian Bokmål are essentially localised versions of “standard continental Nordic”, and the most central of these standard languages is I think Danish as spoken in the form of Gøtudanskt Danish and related varieties.

Gøtudanskt refers to the Danish as spoken on the Faroe Islands. Previously Danish was more widely spoken in Iceland, and still is in Greenland. These varieties of standard Danish are also pretty close to Norwegian Bokmål in its original forms, when it was essentially a form of Danish, with a few grammatical differences to make it less specific to Denmark, and spoken with an accent and phonology more akin to the Nordic languages of Norway. In other words, these varieties of Danish were all very central, as they were “Danish”, but were phonologically easier to understand to Norwegians and Swedes, and were widely understood in Iceland, Greenland and in the Faroe Islands. 

Back in the 1800s, from reading books and works from that time, these varieties of Nordic were widely used in Greenland, Iceland, The Faroe Islands, and so people could communicate easily with the wider Scandinavian world, even if their native languages like Greenlandic and Faroese are not mutually intelligible with Danish. They also spoke this standardish form of language without needing to replicate the difficult prosody and phonology of the colloquial Danish spoken in Sjælland. 

Having read books written in Norway at this time, they were again written in much the same language. Sometimes this language also differs from Modern Rigsdansk in that there are words in the older standard with a more Low-German appearance, for example when reading mining documents from the 1800s one finds the word gruber used in Norway to mean “mines”. This is also the modern Danish word, but nowadays in Norway the term is almost always gruver. 

There is I think, as I have mentioned elsewhere, more to the presence of Danish in Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands than merely that of a colonial standard language. In later times this was the implication, and there was a great effort in Iceland to “remove” elements in language that were considered to be non-Icelandic, whilst I personally am of the view that the “Danes” could have represented a specific community in Iceland, alongside Icelanders. Links with Denmark go back a long way in Iceland, so I do not think we can realistically say that the presence of Danish in Iceland was just a colonial one. There could theoretically have been certain communities with more ties to Denmark, going back to the Viking Age and earlier.

Plus, my research indicates to me, as I have published elsewhere, that “Danes” were in Ireland and Britain thousands of years ago, at this time possibly being a pre-Indo-European group of languages, spoken by people referred to as “Danes”, whether by themselves or by others. In Scotland and Donegal these people seem to have been called “gall”. 

In a sense then, what we call Gøtudanskt and similar varieties can be considered as the direct descendent of the culture and language of those prehistoric Danes, and I think it’s a shame that this once international Nordic language variety, or group of varieties, is nolonger widely spoken, and is largely replaced by English. 

In addition, for people from English-speaking countries, this older more-international standard Danish would have been an ideal variety of Nordic language to teach in universities and the like. Nowadays, students at university will often study Norwegian, usually Bokmål. This is usually taught with a strong, Oslo or standard Southeastern Norwegian accent. So essentially, the “Norwegian” most commonly taught, is much like the older standard Danish, but with a southeast Norwegian accent, and I find it rather strange that this language is presented as “Norwegian” in universities, when it is essentially a variety of older standard Danish with a more Norwegian accent. Would it be more appropriate that when universities taught Norwegian, that they taught Norwegian dialects, using Nynorsk? And would it be more appropriate to instead give students the opportunity to learn the older Danish standard, which would connect them to both Denmark and Norway, and to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland? 

I realise that this would essentially require a revival of older Danish. And I understand that Iceland and the Faroe Islands have their own, very important languages which I pray will always continue to be spoken. But I still think that reviving these older standards of Danish would be far better than Nordic countries simply using English as their cross-cultural language. Because unlike English, Gøtudanskt is a continuation of the culture and language of the western Nordic lands, it harks back to the times of ancient fishing, religion, and shared Nordic culture, and therefore could again act as both an international means of communication, whilst also providing a layer of linguistic and cultural protection for the more localised Nordic languages and cultures. By which I mean, using these varieties of Danish could help to stop English replacing both standard and regional/traditional Nordic languages.

 

I hope that this article was an interesting read. 

 

Note that very soon I will publishing an article this website www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk on Lovecraftian language, with some notes on Uyulala. Note also that two days ago I published an article on this website, titled: 48: Estonian mythology and the name Linda, the link to which is: https://www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk/website-articles-46-55/48-estonian-mythology-and-the-name-linda