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DOI: 10.4324/9781003272687-10
8
ENGLISH IN THE NORDIC
WORKPLACE
Practices, policies, and ideologies
Dorte Lønsmann
Introduction
In the last couple of decades, many workplaces in the Nordic countries have
become increasingly international. The enlargement of the EU in 2004 and the
free movement of labor between EU countries, global migration due to wars and
crises, and new technologically mediated ways of working across borders have
all contributed to the internationalization process. This process entails increased
international recruitment, especially in large companies, an increased number
of international employees working in the Nordic countries (Foged et al. 2019),
increased outsourcing and offshoring to facilities in other parts of the world, and
increased collaboration across borders, often facilitated by new technology such
as video meetings. The changes brought about by internationalization and new
technology have also led to increased linguistic diversity in many workplaces.
Linguistic diversity may be seen as a problem for collaboration and cohesion in
the workplace, and the preferred solution often is to choose a common language.
While the local Nordic languages are sometimes used (see e.g., Kraft 2017),
English is frequently seen as the obvious lingua franca, especially in corporate
workplaces (Lønsmann and Mortensen 2018).
While it can be difcult to track the development of the use of English in
workplaces, there are some data available from the Danish context. A series of
questionnaire studies from the Confederation of Danish Industry suggest the
trend to be an increasing use of English. In 2007, 25 percent of the member
organizations replied that English was the corporate language (the study is
referred to in Ostrynski 2007). In 2016, another study showed that 60 percent of
the “internationally oriented” member organizations had English as a corporate
English in the Nordic workplace 149
language (Vrang 2016), and 90 percent responded that they would need English
within the next ve years. In a similar survey in 2021 (Amir and Mortensen
2021), 83 percent of 565 “internationally oriented companies” responded that
they would need English within the next ve years. Two large surveys on the
role of English in Denmark and Finland further attest to the presence of English
in Nordic workplaces. In both cases, roughly half of employed respondents
indicated that they use English at work at least once a week (Leppänen 2011;
Preisler 1999). Preisler’s (1999) survey showed that English was present in
many Danish workplaces, but with vast differences between different elds.
While 100 percent of respondents employed within IT and 88 percent of
respondents employed within education answered that they were in frequent
contact with English, only 25 percent of respondents working in childcare and
15 percent of workers in agriculture said the same (Preisler 1999, 40). Looking
at the respondents by occupation, experts and managers used English the most
(65– 66 percent said they use English at work), and healthcare and manual
workers the least (23 percent said they use English at work). In a study from
2022 (Lønsmann et al. 2022), 86 percent of respondents say that they encounter
English at work at least occasionally.
However, the question is not only how much English is used at work, but
also why, how, and with what consequences. Exploring the role of English in
the Nordic workplace with a special focus on Denmark, this chapter argues for a
more holistic view on the use of English. In the literature review in the following
section, I give an overview of previous work on the role of English in workplaces
in the Nordic countries. The section on the theoretical framework explores the
concepts (and relation between) language practices, policies, and ideologies.
Finally, I present a case study of the Danish company Consult.1 Drawing on
previously published studies, I discuss how English in this workplace can be
studied from the perspectives of language practices, policy, and ideology, and
end by reecting on the advantages of combining these three perspectives.
The role of English in Nordic workplaces
The research interest in English in Nordic workplaces began in earnest in the
1990s. With non- Nordic employees entering Nordic workplaces, and with
collaboration and trade across borders as a result of mergers, acquisitions, and
expansions, many workplaces experienced changes toward a more multicultural
and multilingual environment. In many of these multilingual workplaces,
English came to play a key role as a lingua franca.
Some Nordic workplaces, in particular large, internationally oriented,
corporate workplaces, began designating English as the corporate language.
Often it is not very clear what this concept covers. While it is sometimes taken
to mean that everyone in the workplace speaks English all the time, in practice,
150 Dorte Lønsmann
having English as the designated corporate language can also mean that the local
language is the default language used in the company, and that English is the
chosen lingua franca if and when one is needed (Lønsmann 2011). Nevertheless,
there is a strong symbolic value in saying that a company has English as the
corporate language (Lønsmann and Mortensen 2018), and the concept of
English as a corporate language has contributed to the discussion of English in
the Nordic countries, including the debate about English as a threat to the local
Nordic languages. From the beginning of the 2000s, the debate about domain
loss to English ran through the Nordic countries, particularly among linguists
and to some extent politicians (see Chapter 6 for an extended discussion about
domain loss). The use of English in the corporate sector was frequently cited
as one area where the Nordic languages were in danger of losing domains to
English (e.g. Höglin 2002; Jarvad 2001), and the practice of naming English
as the corporate language was seen as a measure of the extent to which English
threatened the Nordic languages.
Perhaps because of the increasing use of English in the Nordic societies in
general at this point, at the beginning of the 2000s the interest in most studies of
English in the workplace was in evaluating to what extent the national Nordic
languages were in danger of domain loss to English. Jarvad (2001) investigated
potential domain loss through ten phone interviews with employees in Danish
companies with English as a corporate language. She found that Danish had a
strong presence across genres, and that English was only used if foreigners were
present. Similarly, Berg et al. (2001) investigated how English affects Swedish
in a workplace context. Their questionnaire study showed that Swedish was
the main language in all the workplaces, but also that 67 percent of their 33
respondents used English every day. From these questionnaire and interview
studies, it is clear then that English played a role in Nordic workplaces at the
beginning of the new millennium, but also that the local languages dominated
in most elds.
In the rst major ethnographic study of English as a corporate language in a
Nordic context, Lønsmann’s (2011) investigation of language practices found
that Danish was the default spoken language in the pharmaceutical case company,
with English primarily used with addressees who did not know Danish. English,
however, was used more frequently in writing because genres such as emails
and PowerPoint presentations often take future addressees into account (see also
Day and Wagner 2007 on this point). Lønsmann (2011) showed that English
competences vary, with some Danish employees uent in English, while others
exhibited very limited English prociency. Other languages, such as German
and Spanish, were also used if all speakers in an encounter were procient in
those languages. In a Swedish context, Nelson (2014) similarly found that while
English was the corporate language in the company she studied, Swedish was
the language used for internal purposes and in daily spoken interactions. English
English in the Nordic workplace 151
was mainly used as a lingua franca for written correspondence across borders and
in meetings with external partners. Louhiala- Salminen et al. (2005) investigated
the use of English as a lingua franca after a merger of a Finnish and a Swedish
company and found that while the percentage of English use increased after
the merger, the local languages were still used around 80 percent of the time.
The same pattern emerged in ethnographic studies of academic workplaces in
Norway and Sweden with English as the nominal language. In practice, these are
multilingual workplaces for students and staff with the local national language
playing an important role (Ljosland 2011; Söderlundh 2013).
If we look beyond corporate and academic contexts, ethnographic studies
of blue- collar workplaces show that English is not the only lingua franca used.
While English does play a role for the cleaners in the Finnish tourism industry in
Strömmer’s (2020) study, Finnish, Bulgarian, and Russian were also used. Holm
et al.’s (2020) study of blue- collar workplaces in the Faroe Islands found that
Faroese was the main language, and while English was used as a lingua franca,
it was not always sufcient, and language brokering into, for example, Russian
was also frequent. Kraft’s (2017) study of language practices in a multilingual
Norwegian construction site with a majority of Polish workers revealed that
Norwegian was the dominant language and main lingua franca. Similarly,
Tranekjær’s (2020) study of an industrial laundry facility in Denmark where the
large majority of workers were migrants who spoke only a little Danish showed
no evidence of the use of English as a lingua franca. Instead, Danish was the
main working language.
From a practice perspective then, it seems that while English is present in
many Nordic workplaces, the local national languages are the main languages
used. The use of English is often triggered by the presence of speakers who do
not speak any of the local languages, or by consideration of future addressees.
Ethnographic studies from the past decade thus nd no evidence of domain
loss to English within Nordic workplaces. What they do reveal is diversity in
language use in different types of workplaces, with English used more in certain
types of workplaces (white- collar, academic, corporate) than in others (blue-
collar), but in all cases, as part of multilingual practices (see also Bellak 2014
and Nielsen 2020 on this point).
Turning to language policy, the interest in most studies has been in investigating
the consequences of introducing English as a corporate language. One strand of
studies focuses on the interactional consequences of introducing English as a
corporate language. These consequences range from language clustering (Tange
and Lauring 2009), that is, when speakers of the same language stick together
to the exclusion of other colleagues, to communication avoidance. In the latter
case, employees may refrain from non- essential and informal interactions due
to the use of English (Tange and Lauring 2009) or avoid communication with
higher- status interlocutors (Lauring and Klitmøller 2015).
152 Dorte Lønsmann
Another strand of studies focuses on how language policy impacts status and
power in workplaces. A series of Finnish studies within the eld of business
communication concluded that power resides with those employees who are
procient in the corporate language, English (Charles and Marschan- Piekkari
2002), and that employees who do not acquire competence in English are
excluded from participating in company- wide activities and are conned to local
operations (Marschan- Piekkari et al. 1999). Conversely, choosing the national
language as corporate language may disadvantage international employees who
lack full competence in that language, both in terms of access to information and
career paths (Bjørge and Whittaker 2015). From a sociolinguistic perspective,
language- based exclusion of international employees has also been found in
workplaces where English does have an ofcial role because the local language
nevertheless fullls important functions (Kirilova and Lønsmann 2020;
Lønsmann 2011). Furthermore, language policies of English in the workplace
have been found to reect the repertoires and practices of high- status employees,
while the multilingual repertoires and practices of lower- status employees are
either overlooked or devalued (Lønsmann and Kraft 2018). Together, these
studies show how a language policy perspective on English in the workplace
highlights issues of exclusion, status, and power, and how categories and
boundaries created by language policies may either reinforce or challenge
existing hierarchies.
Finally, English in Nordic workplaces has been investigated from the
perspective of language ideologies. English is rst and foremost constructed
as the one and only international language and as connected with power and
prestige (Lønsmann 2011). In the context of international business, English is
constructed as the natural language choice, while the idea of other languages
as international lingua francas is ridiculed, despite the fact that other languages
are used to communicate across borders (Lønsmann 2015). In a study of
language ideologies and legitimation strategies in a Danish- Spanish post- merger
situation, Vulchanov (2022) found that English was positioned as the natural
language to the point where the employees simply assumed that it was the
corporate language, without having been told so. Furthermore, English is often
constructed as the great equalizer in contexts of linguistic diversity, as a neutral
and benecial language to which everyone has access (Haberland 2009). This
ideology is not unique to the Nordic setting (see e.g., Pennycook 2017), but
is perhaps particularly prevalent in this context, where the population is very
condent in their own English competence (see Chapters 1, 2, and 6 and further
evidence in this chapter). In a study of language ideologies among managers in
Danish international companies, Kraft and Lønsmann (2018) found that English
is constructed as the language everybody understands, as unproblematic, and as
the easiest solution for everybody. English is also frequently constructed as a
language of opportunity. In some cases, English is linked with career mobility
English in the Nordic workplace 153
for the individual (Lønsmann 2014), while in other cases English is linked with
future opportunities for the organization (Vulchanov 2022).
A further language ideology about English focuses explicitly on English in the
Nordic countries, placing Nordic speakers toward the top of a language hierarchy
of English speakers. Not surprisingly, native speakers are placed at the top of this
hierarchy, with speakers of British English (the variety traditionally taught in
the Nordic educational systems) at the very top. Studies from workplace and
university contexts reveal that Nordic speakers of English place themselves just
below native speakers in the hierarchy, and above all other non- native speakers
(Lønsmann 2011, Peterson and Hall 2023; see also Chapter 1). This ideology
that inhabitants in the Nordic countries are particularly competent in English
has been framed as a part of the idea of Nordic exceptionalism (which also
encompasses the Nordic welfare state) (Peterson 2022). This ideology also posits
that “everyone” in the Nordic countries speaks English (Lønsmann 2011, 251;
see also Chapter 1) and speaks it well. And while self- report studies (European
Commission 2012; Preisler 1999) do show a large number of Nordic citizens to
be condent in their English skills, the same studies also show that a substantial
minority do not have enough English skills to carry out a conversation. From
a critical perspective, the construction of the ideology of Nordic people as
exceptional English users means that the group of “English have- nots” (Preisler
2003) is erased and their exclusion from the large number of interactions that
take place in English is ignored.
This review of previous studies of English in Nordic workplaces has
highlighted some of the key issues around language practices, policies,
and ideologies. It has also highlighted the wide range of methodologies
used to investigate English in the workplace, from surveys over interview
studies to ethnographic studies of workplace interaction. The next section
further discusses the three perspectives of language practices, policies
and ideologies.
Theoretical framework: Language practices, policies, and
ideologies
The theory that I draw on for the case study in this chapter comes from critical
sociolinguistics, a eld that is interested in how language use positions language
users in society and in workplaces. I draw here on language and political economy
(Del Percio et al. 2018), a subeld within critical sociolinguistics that focuses
on how societal structures and discourses impact the opportunities of language
users. Much research within language and political economy focuses on the
intersection between language, work, and migration (e.g., Allan and McElhinny
2017; Flubacher and Yeung 2016), including research that pays special attention
to the role of English in contexts of mobility, migration, and work (e.g.,
154 Dorte Lønsmann
Strömmer 2020). In this section, I discuss three concepts that I nd particularly
useful in trying to understand language in the workplace: practices, policies, and
ideologies. The key point of introducing these three perspectives is that together
they allow for a holistic exploration of language use at work. Combining the
three perspectives lets us see how language ideologies shape language policies
as well as daily language practices. Comparing language policy with language
practice may reveal discrepancies between the management outlook and the
employee reality (Lønsmann and Kraft 2018). And viewing language practice,
policy, and ideology as intertwined enables us to see how language is linked with
social inequality, power, and inclusion in workplaces.
Critical sociolinguistics views language as social action, a perspective that
entails a focus on language practices. Language practices can be understood
simply as what people do, which languages they use, with whom, and for what
purposes. But practice can also be seen as more than just language use. Language
practices are at the same time embedded in social and linguistic structures and
contribute to shaping these structures (Ahearn 2017, 25). As Pennycook (2010,
2) writes, “What we do with language in a particular place is a result of our
interpretation of that place; and the language practices we engage in reinforce
that reading of place.” A language practice perspective embedded in ethnographic
eldwork provides a participant perspective that provides data on what people do
with language, but also on how these practices are embedded in larger structures.
Another, complementary, perspective comes from critical language policy
studies, a eld that examines the link between language policy and social,
political, and economic inequality (Tollefson 2009). While much of this work
has been focused on the national level (e.g., Tollefson 1993), for example on
the role of minority languages within nation- states or linguistic requirements for
citizenship, my interest here is in how language policy in workplaces may result
in social and economic inequality.
While mainstream sociolinguistic theory has dened language policy as
consisting of three components: language practices, beliefs about language,
and language management (Spolsky 2004), language policy in the workplace is
often conceptualized as a top- down process that is part of strategic efforts – and
when it comes to English language policies, part of strategic internationalization
efforts (Lønsmann 2017a, 2017b). In other cases, English language policies
are introduced to regulate language choice or to designate one language as
the working or corporate language to reduce the perceived problems caused
by linguistic diversity. In contrast to this top- down view of language policy,
empirical studies from the university context have shown that language policies
may also be practice- based and “from below,” that is, introduced by students
and not policy makers (Mortensen 2014; see also Chapter 4), and that such
policies may allow for mixing English and the local language. A language
English in the Nordic workplace 155
policy perspective can help us see how language users are positioned in the
organizational context by such attempts at managing language choice.
The third perspective is that of language ideologies. Language ideologies can
be dened as beliefs about languages and language users, nested in the interests
of particular social groups, or as Irvine (1989, 255) puts it: language ideologies
are “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships,
together with their loading of moral and political interests.” Because they are
tied to interests, language ideologies are both determined by power relations
and instrumental in creating them (Seargeant 2009). Language ideologies are
useful constructs for analysts interested in how language use positions language
users, since language ideologies ascribe value to certain linguistic practices,
certain languages, and their speakers. While language ideologies are shared by
large groups of people, they are not necessarily shared by all members of a
given society. This means that we may nd contradictory language ideologies
in a society or community. For instance, we nd the two seemingly conicting
beliefs that English is the appropriate language for international communication
taking place in workplaces in Denmark, while Danish generally is the appropriate
language to use in the country (Kraft and Lønsmann 2018). From a theoretical
angle, the language ideology perspective focuses on how language users are
positioned not just in the workplace, but also in society at large.
I would also like to introduce here the concept of language- based exclusion,
an issue that is intimately connected to the use of English in the workplace. While
the concept of exclusion has not been given much attention neither in public
debates nor in sociolinguistic theorization, it is central to discussions of English
in Nordic workplaces where English is used side by side with other languages,
and by users of varying prociency. I dene language- based exclusion as a
lack of opportunities for participation related to language practices, language
policies, and language ideologies. Language- based exclusion can take different
forms. Many people in the Nordic countries have high English prociency,
but not everyone is able to use or is comfortable using English in high- stakes
interactions, for example, in the workplace. While the use of English in the
workplace may straightforwardly exclude some employees simply because they
do not have the linguistic competence to participate in interactions in English
(Lønsmann 2014), exclusion may also happen in more subtle ways. Even when
employees seem to have the language competence they need in English, they
may not feel condent in their abilities, and this subjective language competence
impacts how they act, causing them, for example, to avoid attending meetings
in English (Neeley 2013). Language- based exclusion may also take the form of
language ideology- based stereotyping, such as downgrading non- native varieties
of English (Lønsmann 2011) or other foreign languages than English (Lønsmann
2015) – and by extension speakers of these varieties.
156 Dorte Lønsmann
In the next section, I present a case study of the role of English in a Danish
workplace. I draw on the three complementary perspectives of practices,
policies, and ideologies in order to understand how the introduction of English
in the organization is related to language- based exclusion.
Case study: Introducing English to internationalize the
organization
“A new and important part of the strategy is that we want to be an international
company,” said Paul, the human resource manager who was the rst person
I interviewed at Consult. “We have to grow, and since we already dominate
the Danish market, we have to grow internationally.”2 When I turned the
conversation to language, he told me that while the employees were happy to
work with people from other cultures, having to use English was a barrier. Older
employees and those employees who worked mainly with local projects and
local customers tended to be wary of English. The Danish employees were shy
about speaking English in front of other Danes, he said. Sometimes they asked
to have separate meetings for Danes in Danish and for international employees
in English, but that did not encourage an international mindset. The employees
typically argued about English from the perspective of their own competences,
good or bad. Paul wanted instead to introduce a more strategic perspective on
what he called “corporate English.”
Already in this rst interview, Paul introduced the key issues at Consult in
relation to the strategic introduction of English as a corporate language and
employees’ responses to the increased use of English in the company. I contacted
Consult in 2013 as part of the LINGCORP research project.3 In the project,
my colleagues and I were interested in investigating the challenges many
companies experience as a consequence of increased linguistic and cultural
diversity. Consult is a Danish consulting and engineering company established
in 1945. Since the early 2000s, Consult has expanded internationally, and at the
time of the eldwork the company had 10,000 employees in 57 countries. My
study focuses on the Danish branch of the organization, Consult DK. In 2012,
Consult DK embarked upon an “internationalization journey,” as they called it
in their internal communication. This journey included a number of strategic
internationalization targets, including increased offshoring to the Indian branch
of the company. It also included the implementation of an English language
policy.
English had already been the de facto corporate language in Consult DK for
a number of years, but in 2012 a language strategy project was initiated with
the aim of implementing English as the corporate language “for real,” as one
informant put it. As a rst step, a number of employees were interviewed about
the prospect of making a shift to English in the Danish part of the organization
English in the Nordic workplace 157
(which was the initial aim of the language strategy project). However, the project
group encountered a lot of resistance to the idea and convinced management to
change the plan to a “soft transition” with a period of parallel Danish- English
use until the nal implementation, after which all top- down communication
would be in English only. This is the point where I entered the company and
started eldwork. Over the following two years, I did ethnographic interviews
with employees, carried out one month of participant observation in a global
IT department in the company headquarters, and conducted three focus group
interviews with a total of fteen employees in departments around the country.
I wrote extensive eld notes during this period and collected a range of written
material. This data set allows for investigating the role of English at Consult
from three perspectives: language practices, language policies, and language
ideologies. We will start with language ideologies.
From a language ideologies perspective, it was interesting to investigate
why Consult DK chose to implement English as the corporate language, or as
my co- author and I ask in Lønsmann and Mortensen (2018, 437): “How is the
introduction of the language policy in our case company related to hegemonic
(language) ideologies?”4 The analysis of language policy documents and
interviews with employees involved in the language policy process revealed that
English to a large degree was positioned as the “natural” language and as the
only valuable language in the company context. This is not surprising, given
how prevalent this ideology is across the western world, and particularly in the
business sector. However, at Consult DK the introduction of (more) English
was also tied to increasing revenue and expansion into the international market.
One example of this came from a set of PowerPoint slides used to introduce the
language strategy to employees. Under the heading “Why do we need a language
strategy?”, the following reasons were given:
English is key to creating a Global Mindset. We aim to work even stronger
together internationally, and to employ more non- Danish speaking
colleagues.
International revenue should increase from XX% in 2013 to XX% in 2016.
Cooperation with India should increase from XX% in 2013 to XX% in 2016.
English as a common language is a prerequisite for sharing knowledge,
setting the right team, employee mobility, and working internationally.5
In this extract, English is explicitly linked with economic growth, which can
be described as a neoliberal ideology that positions growth as the natural goal
(see also Chapter 7). English is also linked with a “global mindset.” While it
is not entirely clear what this entails, it is linked with employing “non- Danish
speaking colleagues.” English is not only positioned as the natural language of
158 Dorte Lønsmann
international cooperation, but also as the key to becoming more international
(compare with the role of English in academic internationalization as discussed
in Chapter 7). This linking of English with the strategic goal of growth and
internationalization explains why Paul, the human resource manager, saw
reservations about English as a barrier for internationalization. And it explains
why Consult DK management initiated the language strategy project despite no
immediate need for using English in the Danish branch of the organization: from
the strategic perspective of top management, English was both the natural
language for international communication and a tool for increasing revenue. But
as Paul’s comments suggest, this was not necessarily how employees viewed
English.
“How is it for you when you receive communication from management in
English?” I asked in the rst focus group interview, and Finn, an experienced
engineer and project manager, promptly responded: “I can’t be bothered with
it. I delete it.”6 I include this example here to highlight two issues: rst, that
creating a language policy does not mean that it is carried out in practice,
and second, that the employee perspective may be very different from the
management perspective. Finn’s response may at rst glance seem like a rather
extreme way of resisting the language policy. However, it became clear from the
focus groups that dealing with communication in English was time- consuming
for many of the Danish employees, and that the company culture of logging how
every minute was spent did not take this into consideration. There was no extra
time set aside for reading and writing in English, and no separate category in
which to log this extra work.
Most employees, however, took a pragmatic stance toward English. According
to Erik, another engineer:
English is ne, but I think you should only use it where it adds value, right. It
is kind of that thing where then everything has to be in English and things like
that. It doesn’t always make sense, you know. And I think people forget that.
With this stance, Erik and his colleagues aligned with management but insisted
that the use of English had to make sense. “Making sense” turned out to be a
key point in employees’ reception of the language policy. While employees’ own
evaluation of their English competence inuenced their stance toward English
(the more procient, the more positive), the local linguistic context was an
equally important factor. All of the study participants were Danish- speaking and
worked with Danish customers and collaborators on projects in Denmark. This
meant that their core work tasks were all conducted in Danish.7 In this context,
English was simply not relevant, and receiving emails from top management in
English seemed out of touch. Finally, management’s long- term strategic goals
of increasing internationalization and revenue through the use of English were
English in the Nordic workplace 159
very far from the engineers’ everyday work. While most of them agreed that
English made sense in the long- term perspective if the company wanted to be
international, from a short- term perspective, that is, that of nishing this week’s
work tasks on time or that of older employees nearing retirement, English was
simply not relevant.
Nevertheless, English did play a role in the employees’ everyday lives to a
smaller or larger extent. In this section I look at how employees handled this
from a practice perspective. As Finn’s comment about deleting emails suggests,
employees used their discretionary power (Lipsky 2010) when it came to
carrying out top- down language policies in practice. In the focus groups, the
employees outlined some of their strategies when it came to the use of English
in the workplace.8 For some employees, including in the global IT department
where I did my participant observation, the use of English was perceived as
(and observed to be) straightforward and unproblematic. English was used both
in work talk in meetings and for small talk among employees from a range of
national and linguistic backgrounds. For other employees, especially those who
worked with Danish- speaking colleagues and customers, English presented a
barrier. Olav, a head of department, said:
We can see it in the management meetings. We also sit there saying nothing
so there isn’t a lot of dialogue. Yes, those who are good at English, they
control the conversation, but the rest of us, we hold back a bit. It is only when
it is really important [that we participate].
And while no other participants talked about deleting emails, there were other
ways to work around the demands placed by written communication in English.
Leo, an engineer and project manager, described it in the following way:
And so what often happens is that when we get such a couple of pages of
dense, written English text, we don’t have time to read it just then. You just
don’t get around to reading it.
Withdrawing from interactions and knowledge- sharing, as described in these
extracts, has been termed “communication avoidance” (Sanden and Lønsmann
2018), but can also be seen as examples of language- based exclusion. Contrasting
the practice perspective with language ideologies highlights the complexities
of English in Danish workplaces. On the one hand, English is positioned as
the natural language of international collaboration and Danes as very procient
English speakers. These ideologies may lead management to assume that it is
unproblematic to ask employees in Denmark to use English at work. On the
other hand, while English may be natural and easy for some employees, it is not
the case for everyone, not even highly educated and highly placed employees.
160 Dorte Lønsmann
These employees then have to resort to a range of strategies to get by at work,
some of which may result in language- based exclusion.
“Danish workplaces” comprise many different types of work in different elds
with different types of employees. This means that generalizing about English
in Danish workplaces should be done with care. Nevertheless, the Consult case
highlights some trends that occur across many Danish workplaces. The presence
of English is intimately linked with widespread language ideologies about
the natural position of English as the global lingua franca, and with a perhaps
specically Nordic ideology about English exceptionalism. Together, these lead
to a belief that English is a neutral medium to which everyone in the Nordic
countries has access. English language policies in the workplace establish an
ofcial position for English which contributes to constructing English as a
highly valued linguistic resource, intimately linked with the company’s nancial
success. This positioning of English has two types of consequences for the
Danish employees. The introduction of more English in employees’ working
lives is a change that requires extra time and effort for some employees. In some
cases, the extra burden placed on employees by English causes them to withdraw
from key interactions and knowledge- sharing. And while English- procient
employees may be able to use their English competence to their advantage in
the workplace, for those less competent in English the presence of English in the
workplace leads to status loss and exclusion.
Conclusion
As of 2023, English is rmly established as a key language in many Nordic
workplaces, to the extent that we can discuss whether English is now perceived
as a second language in a country like Denmark (Lønsmann, Mortensen, and
Thøgersen 2022). In many cases, English in the workplace is not only linked with
international cooperation, but also with migration. Using English as a working
language allows companies to recruit internationally, and it allows newcomers
to start working in Denmark without or while learning Danish. In this way,
English opens up doors for workplaces and workers alike, and may function as
a language of inclusion in contexts where the local languages exclude certain
employees. On the other hand, as we have seen in the Consult case, despite
language ideological beliefs about the strong position of English in Denmark,
and its “natural” role in international collaboration, English in the workplace
may also function as a language of exclusion. In all likelihood, English will
continue to play important roles in Nordic workplaces in the foreseeable future.
From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, investigating language practices,
policies, and ideologies together allows us to see how top- down English language
policies, on the one hand, are embedded in larger ideological structures. On the
other hand, we can see how the positioning of English as a corporate language
English in the Nordic workplace 161
impacts employees by creating a barrier in their daily working lives, while also
impacting their status and position in the workplace. If we want to understand
the role of English in Nordic workplaces, however, it is important that we take a
holistic perspective and focus not just on English but on all the languages used
in multilingual workplaces, and on the consequences of language ideologies,
policies, and practices in terms of power and status, inclusion, and exclusion.
Notes
1 Consult is a pseudonym.
2 Interview excerpts have been translated from the original Danish by the author.
3 The LINGCORP project (Language and Interaction in the Globalized Corporation)
ran 2012– 2015 and was headed by Professor Hartmut Haberland, Roskilde University.
See more at lingcorp.ruc.dk.
4 The discussion of language ideologies at Consult draws on Lønsmann and Mortensen
(2018).
5 Figures in the extract have been replaced with XX in order to ensure condentiality
for Consult.
6 The discussion of the implementation of language policy at Consult draws on
Lønsmann (2017b).
7 It also means that I would likely have obtained very different results if I had
interviewed non- Danish employees.
8 The discussion of strategies for using English at work draws on Sanden and Lønsmann
(2018).
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