Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 241

THE SCAND. COMMUNITY OF LANGUAGE 235
amon
him t
ally c
l the general public or the experts. His campaign has made
íe centre of a series of debates in the Danish press, especi-
uring the winter of 1940—41. In the result, he has already
achieved his first objective: to make the Scandinavian language
problem one of the burning questions of the day, so that it is
now more to the fore in Denmark than in any of the other Scan-
dinavian countries.
During the summer of 1941 a Danish Society for the Pro-
motion of Scandinavian Language Unity was founded, and this
society has recently issued a call for “Scandinavian Unity in the
Defence of the Northern Languages.” The platform of the asso-
ciations is as follows:
a) The object of the Society is to preserve and promote the Scan-
dinavian character of the Danish language.
b) The Society will endeavour to secure that the common Scan-
dinavian vocabulary is increased, or, failing that, that it is
not reduced. This it will attempt to do
1) by keeping alive common Scandinavian words (including
dialect words),
2) by reintroducing forgotten common Scandinavian words
still used in the sister languages,
3) by introducing common Scandinavian words for new
phenomena, and
4) by promoting borrowings from the other Scandinavian
languages.
The Society will enter into collaboration with circles in the
other Northern countries working for the same aims.
A language is neither created by philologists or educationalists
nor by agitators, no matter how gifted they may be. A language
is a sovereign piece of reality which cannot be compelled to
change at the bidding of anybody at every time and under every
possible set of conditions. It is heritage which lives on the lips
of the people and which is developed and transformed in the
process of being used, by the press and the wireless, by poets
and prose-writers. If greater Scandinavian language unity is ever
to be achieved, it can only be achieved as the expression of a
conscious and active sentiment of unity among the Scandinavian
peoples. That the future of this linguistic unity has now come
up for debate — the mere fact that it could come up for
debate — and that the cause has won staunch friends and cham-
pions throughout the North — that in itself is a sign that the