Michael P. Barnes
Michael P. Barnes, Professor emeritus of Scandinavian Studies at UCL. Specialisations: history of the Scandinavian languages, comparative Scandinavian linguistics, Faroese, runes and runic inscriptions.
Contributions to nordics.info
2019.02.21 | The Quick Read, Michael P. Barnes, Culture, Nation building
Official bodies overseeing the Nordic languages
There has been much more official involvement with the Nordic languages than with English. That is true even of the well-established Danish, Icelandic and Swedish standards. Each language exists under the watchful eye of a language ‘committee’, ‘board’ or ‘council’, for the most part state-sponsored, semi-autonomous bodies. A wide spectrum of…
2019.02.21 | Article, Michael P. Barnes, Culture
Linguistic variety in the Nordics
Quick overview: In Denmark the principal language is Danish, with about 5,750,000 speakers (in 2018), but varieties of German are spoken in northern Slesvig by some 20,000 people, and Denmark is also host to 10,000 or more Faroe Islanders, whose native language is Faroese. Sweden has approximately 10,000,000 speakers of Swedish; in addition there…