Current Issues In Language and Society
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Volume: 7 Number: 1 Page: 51–69
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Swedish Tomorrow – A Product of the Linguistic Dominance of English?
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Britt-Louise Gunnarsson
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This article discusses the consequences of the dominance of English for a small language like Swedish and a small country like Sweden. The first part presents a survey of contrastive studies, which reveal
that texts and writing in the mother tongue differ between cultures. Also, writing styles in foreign languages, for example in English, vary depending on the cultural and textual background of the writer.
The main focus lies in contrastive studies, including Swedish texts from different domains: the business world, the academic community, courts, journalism. The second part presents studies of the current
situation in Sweden, which reveal a serious threat towards certain linguistic domains and certain linguistic genres. In the concluding section, the Swedish of tomorrow is discussed. In order to prevent
further dominance of English, the level of awareness among Swedes must be raised. Changes and language influence, though not bad per se, must be controlled. Language policies should aim at adapting changes
to the Swedish context, so as to incorporate them into the traditional Swedish patterns and structures.
© Multilingual Matters 2001
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