I’m in Copenhagen for three weeks to learn Danish, and about the Danish.
The language is famously difficult to grasp, not because its grammar is particularly complex or its vocab full of anomalies, but because the Danes can’t be bothered to pronounce their own tongue. Think I exaggerate? It’s so bad, Danish babies have been shown to understand their parents significantly later in life than all other children worldwide. So people whose mother tongue it is struggle with Danish, and this is the language I’m supposed to pick up in three weeks?!
Of course, as a Swede you’d think I’d be helped by the similarities between our respective languages; after all, for much of history the two countries were either one or in various unions with one other. Surely this is reflected in the two languages?
Helped might be the wrong word. You see, for the rest of history we’ve been at war. Linguistically it’s nearly always the case that if two synonyms exist in both languages, then one is anachronistic in one language and simultaneously the contemporary word in the other.
This is probably due to a conscious effort on both sides to distance themselves from and be less like the arch enemy (in between the Liza Minelli-like reoccurring reunions of various kinds). That phenomenon makes me very self-conscious when speaking to the natives, aware as I am that I’m likely sounding weirdly archaic by instinctively picking the wrong word. Imagine if someone came up to you in an English-speaking country and addressed you with “Salutations, swain, what giveth?”. That’s how I feel.
It could just be that Swedes are more self conscious altogether than Danes, of course. Certainly Danes are much more liberal, sybaritic and individualistic than Swedes.
In my first week here I have been constantly taken aback by people’s drinking habits, for instance. The settings for lunch restaurants include shot glasses, something which hasn’t been the case in Sweden for fifty years. Beer is everywhere, but there are few truly drunk people. Little grannies will have a beer whilst chatting on a garden bench, labourers walk along chugging from a bottle whilst working, and people of all ages rent special party boats (essentially floating tables) to go around the harbour whilst drinking.
That company name, tho!
The harbour area is also home to sunbathers throughout central Copenhagen. Not all of them think bathing attire essential. And no one bats an eyelid as these impromptu nudists stroll around the docks, with latter-day Zorn tableaux ensuing – you got to love a country like that!
And if you want further proof you needn’t look further than Christiania, of course. The hippie collective in the middle of town is famous for its street vendors that openly sell drugs, but beyond the sweet and heavy haze of Pusher Street (as it is called) where people are puffing away there is a rather endearing and enduring sentiment that it is every individual’s freedom to live how they want.
As seen through a green haze.
There are, famously, those who don’t think these freedoms should apply to all, however; the second day I was here a law was adopted that makes it illegal to wear masks in public. The government isn’t targeting halloweeners, it’s after Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab.
Whilst I’m not in favour of a religion or culture that imposes that kind of clothing on a gender, fining them or confining them in their homes for dressing the way they do isn’t going to achieve real change, to my mind.
But here again, liberals are fighting back, and so it was that I witnessed first hand the demonstration where hundreds of masked Danes went out in solidarity with Muslim women on the first day of the ban. That, more than anything, endeared them to me. After all, where else can you see a topless niqab-wearer and a Stormtroopette join forces?