English words in Danish have become the focus of a new debate in Denmark, where Culture Minister (Kulturministeren) Zenia Stampe has argued that the language needs greater protection from the growing influence of English. Words such as like, chatte, nice, streamer and awkward have become ordinary parts of many Danish conversations, particularly among younger people. But linguists and language authorities across Scandinavia suggest that borrowing words is not, by itself, evidence that a language is disappearing.
The debate reflects a broader question that is also being discussed in Sweden and Norway. Languages constantly change through contact with other languages, and Scandinavian languages have absorbed foreign vocabulary for centuries. The more significant concern may therefore not be whether people occasionally use an English word, but whether Danish, Swedish or Norwegian stop being used altogether in important areas of society.
Why English words in Danish have become a political issue
In an interview with DR, Zenia Stampe, Denmark’s Culture Minister, said increased exposure to English through screens and digital platforms could gradually weaken Danish vocabulary.
“We have a wonderful language, but we also have a very small language,” Stampe said.
According to the minister, preserving Danish also means maintaining access to expressions, sayings and cultural references accumulated over generations.
Her concern is particularly focused on younger speakers. An 18-year-old student interviewed by DR said that his English vocabulary was sometimes larger than his Danish one and that he occasionally switched to English when he could not find the corresponding Danish word.
Stampe wants the Danish Language Council (Dansk Sprognævn) to take a more active role in language policy and intends to discuss the responsibility of public service media for Danish during upcoming media negotiations.
The Council is already moving in that direction. In April 2026 it launched the national campaign Kan vi på dansk?, asking Danes which English expressions could reasonably be replaced by Danish alternatives. A second survey begins on 1 September 2026, while a list of recommended Danish alternatives is expected in early 2027.
DR has also turned the discussion into a linguistic experiment. Its P1 programme På dansk is proposing Danish replacements for words used in areas ranging from dating to food and workplaces, including terms such as ghosting, snack and airfryer. The project illustrates how language planning can try to influence vocabulary without formally restricting how people speak.
Danish is changing, but that does not mean it is disappearing
The scale of English influence is also smaller than everyday impressions may suggest.
Research collected by the Danish Language Council has found that English loanwords account for less than 2 percent of the vocabulary in the Danish material studied, including newspapers, magazines and spoken language.
English nevertheless influences Danish in other ways. Researchers have examined, for example, the spread of the English plural ending -s and the suffix -ish beyond words directly borrowed from English.
That makes the linguistic picture more complex than a simple count of foreign words. English can influence vocabulary, spelling and grammatical habits without replacing the basic structure of Danish.
Associate Professor Jacob Thøgersen of the University of Copenhagen told DR that describing Danish as threatened by English was “completely absurd”, calling the controversy a political “storm in a teacup”.
His argument reflects a basic feature of language development: borrowing is normal.
Danish itself has been shaped over centuries by contact with Low German, French and other languages. Words that once appeared foreign can become so integrated that speakers eventually stop recognising them as loans.
The same process can now be seen with English.
Sweden has lived through this debate before
Sweden offers perhaps the clearest Scandinavian example of a more relaxed approach.
According to Lena Lind Palicki, Head of the Language Council department at Sweden’s Institute for Language and Folklore (Institutet för språk och folkminnen), the strongest Swedish debate over English influence took place during the 1990s.
Today, the presence of English vocabulary is not generally treated by Swedish language authorities as evidence that Swedish itself is endangered.
The Institute notes that borrowing words has been part of Swedish for thousands of years. English is currently the strongest external influence, but German played a comparable role during the Middle Ages and French during the 18th century.
The Institute estimates that more than half of the words used in modern Swedish may ultimately have been borrowed from other languages at some point in their history.
That has not prevented Swedish from remaining Swedish.
At the same time, Swedish language authorities regularly promote local alternatives when they are easier to spell or adapt grammatically. A computer is generally a dator, a password a lösenord, while phishing can be rendered as nätfiske.
The Swedish Language Council also maintains recommendations for replacing or adapting English terminology.
The principle is therefore not to exclude loanwords altogether. Foreign and Swedish forms can coexist, while speakers ultimately determine which survive.
Norway is more concerned about losing entire linguistic domains
Norway takes a somewhat more interventionist position.
The Language Council of Norway (Språkrådet) encourages speakers to use Norwegian terms where established alternatives already exist and publishes alternatives such as minnepinne for memory stick and nettbrett for tablet. It also supports adapting established foreign words to Norwegian spelling.
But the Council itself acknowledges that English can enrich Norwegian through new words and meanings.
The concern becomes more substantial when English does not simply add vocabulary but replaces Norwegian in a particular field.
This phenomenon is commonly described as domain loss.
Norway has paid particular attention to universities and research. The Language Council warned in its assessment of the future of Norwegian that English is increasingly used for academic publications, university teaching and course material.
A 2026 study commissioned by the Council found that Norwegian-language course material accounted for only 12 to 27 percent of reading lists in sociology, physics and computer science at bachelor’s level. In history, the share was 52 percent.
The concern is that students may eventually become perfectly capable of discussing specialised subjects in English while lacking the corresponding terminology in Norwegian.
That is a different issue from saying nice or streaming in an everyday conversation.
Loanwords and language loss are not the same thing
The comparison between Denmark, Sweden and Norway shows that there are at least two different debates taking place at the same time.
The first concerns loanwords. Scandinavian languages borrow vocabulary from English because their speakers consume English-language entertainment, technology, research and social media. Historically, languages have always changed this way.
The second concerns whether a language remains usable across society.
A language can absorb thousands of foreign words while retaining its grammar, literature, media and everyday use. Conversely, a language can face difficulties even without extensive borrowing if speakers gradually stop using it in education, science, administration or technology.
For relatively small languages such as Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, maintaining terminology in these fields may therefore matter more than preventing individual English words from entering everyday speech.
Danish is undoubtedly changing under the influence of English. So are Swedish and Norwegian. But change is not the opposite of linguistic continuity. It is one of the mechanisms through which languages have survived for centuries.
The more important question for Scandinavian language policy is likely to be not whether people like, stream or chat, but whether they can still study, work, debate and create new knowledge in their own language.
