The purpose of this article is to examine the position of English, neighbor languages and the teaching of neighbor languages in the different levels of education. Also, the intention is to find out what status the neighbor languages and English have in research and teaching. To describe the co-existence of English and the Scandinavian languages, the article starts out by explaining the concepts of ‘parallel languages’ and ‘linguistic domain/domain loss’. In the continuation one finds chapters on the use of English and the Scandinavian languages in research and teaching. The article ends with a review on the teaching of neighbor languages in the primary and secondary schools. The main conclusion is that English has become the most important language in the publication of peer-reviewed research literature. However, the national languages still have an important role to play on different levels in the research process. Since the internationalization and globalization of the universities in the 1990s English has also become much more visible in university teaching. The number of international students has increased quite a bit which has prompted more courses and fields of study in English. As a counterpoise to this development the politicians in Denmark have sat a ceiling for the numbers of international students at the universities of Denmark. This resulted in a ‘de-internationalization’ and development of a specific language policy on the universities, where focus is especially on the use of parallel languages. In the Nordic region, the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are understood as natural neighbor languages. In generations people from these countries have been able to understand each other using their own tongue. Today, it looks like it is not the case though the neighboring languages are taught as a mandatory subject in all three countries. On the contrary, it seems as if English is used as an important auxiliary language at the expense of the Scandinavian languages.
Michael Dal (Fri,) studied this question.