Language attitudes and the ideology of the Nordic

Abstract

This article discusses the rise and the current standing of “Norden” (the Nordic societies) as an imagined community (Anderson, Imagined communities, Verso, 1991). The ideology of Norden as a coherent community rests on the one hand on the perceived mutual intelligibility of the Scandinavian languages, used as mother tongue or as lingua franca. On the other hand the ideology of Norden rests on a sense of historical unity. Historically, the ideology of the Nordic grew out of the era of national romanticism. The present study therefore addresses the pertinent question of how the ideology of the Nordic fares in late modernity where ideology is under threat from more “rational”, e.g., financial lines of thinking.