Language

From a global point of view, few people speak the Nordic languages. Translation is therefore an everyday necessity for many Nordic people who do business and exchange ideas with those outside (and to some extent inside) the region. This has led to a healthy translation industry. Often up to 60% of books published by Nordic publishers are translated texts. Membership associations and certification bodies have grown up to support translators and verify their work, and further education institutions provide relevant theoretical and practical courses. Outside the region, Nordic literature in translation remains limited, often to the genre of crime fiction.

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 interested parties participates, including academics, schoolteachers, writers, journalists and terminological experts.

Quick overview:

• In Denmark the principal language is Danish, with about 5,750,000 speakers (in 2018), but varieties of German are spoken in…

A descendant of Old Norse, Faroese has had to contend with Danish but remains the principal language spoken and written in the Faroe Islands.

A member of the Finno-Ugric language group and thus related to Finnish, Sami consists of three branches, sufficiently different from each other to be considered as separate languages.

Linguistic minorities have existed for centuries, such as the Finns and Sami in Sweden. Since 1960s minority languages have often been associated with immigration. Since 2000 and even before, policies with regard to minority languages have ranged from assimilation on the one hand, where the majority language is a necessity, to multicultural pluralism on the other, where minority languages are encouraged.