Helle Lykke Nielsen

University of Southern Denmark, Centre for Middle East Studies: Dinamarca

hln@language.sdu.dk

“The hidden language battle”: Immigrant languages in the welfare state.

Denmark has been a homogeneous and monolingual society for centuries, but in recent years this situation has come under pressure due to several waves of immigration from third-world countries as well as to the more recent push from globalization. This has resulted in what could be termed “a language battle” between groups in society who want to sustain homogeneity and monolingualism for the sake of national identity and others who favor cultural diversity which include, among other things, the demand for recognition of immigrant languages. The language battle over the status of immigrant languages is only reflected partly in the public discourse, probably because of a wide-spread consensus in the population for maintaining Danish as a de facto national language. Public attention has mostly been drawn to the acquisition and use of English in a globalized world, leaving minority groups in a position to act relatively unnoticed by the majority population, when it comes to language issues. The paper will outline how this language battle over immigrant languages, exemplified by Arabic, takes place and what means are used by top-down agents, such as politicians, ministries, and educational administrators on the one hand, and bottom-up agents such as immigrant families, university students and small business owners on the other. The paper aims to show the dilemmas of the welfare state – not only in terms of the ongoing battle between state and immigrant citizens, but also between conflicting parties inside state organizations.

Assoc. professor, PhD, at the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Southern Denmark (1986-). Responsible for the centre’s Arabic programs (1992 - ). Her research interests cover acquisition of Arabic as a foreign language, Arabic rhetoric and political discourse in the Middle East as well as language policy and planning in Denmark and the Middle East. She is currently working on the position of minority languages in Denmark, with a focus on Arabic.