The arrival of Large Language Models (LLM for short) has made a cultural battlefield visible that was always there. These LLMs are linguistic homogenisers. Trained on a corpus of text dominated by standard, professional, Anglophone norms, their function is to erase friction, to ‘correct’ deviation, and to produce infinite volumes of statistically probable, smooth, and generic prose. This is the very currency of what we might call the bullshit economy - language that signifies competence but communicates little, language that is perfectly consumable because it is perfectly empty.
LLMs do not create this linguistic hierarchy - they make visible and intensify a cultural battlefield that was always there. The pressure to flatten Danish thought-structures into standard English, the cognitive burden of translation, the symbolic violence of “correction” - these predate the machine. But the LLM renders these forces explicit. It automates what human editors and reviewers have long done informally: the policing of linguistic norms, the enforcement of smoothness, the erasure of productive awkwardness. What was previously a diffuse set of institutional pressures becomes algorithmic, scalable, instantaneous.
Against this backdrop, the ‘error’ of Danglish becomes a critical act. An LLM would never produce “it gives sense” instead of “it makes sense,” unless specifically mimicking a ‘mistake.’ It would instantly flatten the Danish semantic architecture, ‘correcting’ the epistemology back into the Anglophone default. The LLM sees only a deviation from the norm; it cannot see the ny tankebane - the path of thought - that the deviation opens up.
When a Danish speaker says “it gives sense” instead of “it makes sense,” they are not reaching unsuccessfully toward some Platonic English. They are performing a different semantic architecture. In Danish, meaning is givet - given, received, encountered. In English, meaning is made - constructed, produced, willed into being. These are not equivalent. The calque reveals what standard English cannot see: that knowledge might be something you receive rather than something you build. This is not necessarily an error. It is an epistemology.
The current global linguistic order asks us to see such moments as embarrassments, marks of inadequacy. But what if we refused that framing? What if the so-called mistake were recognised as an opening - en ny tankebane - a path of thought unavailable to the monolingual centre?
This is not about making Danglish acceptable. Acceptability is one approach, but not the only one. When hybridity becomes smooth, consumable, easy, it ceases to do certain kinds of political work. But it also ceases to be fun. The julekalender understands this instinctively.
The Julekalender – a 1991 Danish television advent calendar series – has become a cultural touchstone precisely because of its linguistic chaos. The show follows three “nisser” (Christmas elves) named Fritz, Hansi, and Günther who, after crashing in a Jutlandic potato field, speak a famously broken mix of English and Danish (“Danglish”) with heavy, unidentifiable accents. This contrasts sharply with the broad Jutlandic dialect of the human couple they encounter, Oluf and Gertrud Sand. The dialogue’s mangled English, in particular, is simultaneously ridiculous and oddly functional. Lines like “We must make the Christmas” or “I am very tired in my body” became instant classics, quoted and re-quoted in Danish cultural life. The show aired for 24 episodes leading up to Christmas and has been rebroadcast regularly, cementing its place in Danish popular memory.
What makes the julekalender politically interesting is not just its linguistic mixing, but the sheer pleasure it takes in that mixing. The broken English and exaggerated accents are not asking for approval. They simply exist, performing a kind of linguistic play that is both utterly transparent in its absurdity and completely earnest in its execution. The characters are not embarrassed by their mangled English - they inhabit it with confidence, even joy. And in their existence they reveal how fragile the boundaries of correctness are. The laughter they provoke cuts both ways: it disciplines deviation, yes, but it also exposes the absurdity of the norms being violated.
There is something deeply pleasurable about watching language fail in interesting ways. The julekalender taps into a ludic dimension of linguistic life that serious academic discourse about hybridity often misses. Language is not just a site of power and resistance - it is also a playground. Danish, in particular, seems to invite this kind of play. The language’s compound words, its tendency to string nouns together into increasingly absurd formations, its slightly pompous formality that can tip into comedy - all of this makes Danish particularly amenable to linguistic experimentation and pleasure.
When Danish speakers mix English into their speech, they are not always engaged in critical resistance. Sometimes they are simply enjoying the sound of the words, the way meanings shift and slide, the creative possibilities that open up when two linguistic systems collide. A phrase like “Det var meget nice” (That was very nice) is not just a practical borrowing - it is also playful, slightly ironic, a way of signalling cultural positioning whilst also having fun with the collision of registers.
And perhaps there is more to this laughter and play than meets the eye. The julekalender may not return frequently to Danish screens, but its Danish-English characters have lodged themselves in the cultural memory, becoming a beloved touchstone. Their linguistic mixing, remembered and quoted, is made ordinary, even beloved. The comedy does not just reinforce the norm - it also makes the norm visible, shows it as constructed rather than natural. When we laugh at the broken English, we are also laughing at the idea that there is a correct English, at the pretension that language should be pure. The julekalender demonstrates that norms are malleable, that they can be played with, stretched, made ridiculous. This is not revolution, but it is not nothing either. It creates a space where hybridity is not just tolerated but enjoyed, where the mistake becomes the joke, and the joke becomes part of the culture.
The ludic function of language - its capacity for play, for pleasure, for creative malfunction - is not separate from its critical function. They work together. Play makes critique bearable, even enjoyable. It creates affective attachment to hybrid forms that political argument alone cannot produce. When children grow up quoting the julekalender, when “I am very tired in my body” becomes a phrase used affectionately among friends, when linguistic mixing becomes a source of pleasure rather than shame, the ground shifts slightly. The norms do not disappear, but they become less rigid, more negotiable, more open to intervention.
What if artistic and academic work could do something similar, not as festive exception but as ongoing practice? Not to overthrow linguistic hierarchy - that may not be possible - but to make it slightly more porous, slightly less rigid, slightly more open to deviation. And crucially, to make that work pleasurable, ludic, something people want to participate in rather than something that feels like obligation or sacrifice.
I
I live this division daily. Danish is the language of care, of the everyday, of the body. It is the language in which I comfort, argue, joke, the language that emerges when I am tired or angry or moved. It is hjemlig - not just familiar but of home, carrying the texture of intimacy. Danish is where I feel.
English is something else. English is the language of theory, of profession, of intellectual work. It is the language in which I read philosophy, write academic papers, engage with ideas. More than this: English has become the obligatory passage point for all theoretical knowledge. When I encounter French theory or German philosophy, I read them in English translation. English is the language into which all other languages pass before I can access them. Even when I know that the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in French, that the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in German, that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in Italian, I reach for the English versions. The detour through English has become so naturalised that reading theory in its original language feels like reading a translation, even when it is the source text.
This creates a strange internal geography. The life of the mind is Anglophone. The life of the body is Danish. Theory happens in English. Care happens in Danish. The split is not absolute, but the gravitational pull is undeniable. When I reach for a complex concept, for a precise theoretical formulation, English arrives first. When I reach for comfort or connection, Danish is there.
But Danish is also where I play. The language’s capaciousness for compound words, its ability to generate neologisms on the fly, its slightly ridiculous formality - all of this makes Danish a language of creative possibility. When I make up words with my nieces, when I deliberately mistranslate English phrases back into Danish to comic effect, when I exploit the gap between the two languages for humour or surprise, I am drawing on resources that Danish offers more readily than English. This ludic dimension matters. It is not peripheral to the political question of linguistic hierarchy. It is one of the reasons Danish remains worth defending, worth using, worth insisting upon even when English would be more practical.
This is not a neutral division. It is a hierarchy internalised. English becomes associated with rigour, intellectual sophistication, the capacity for abstraction. Danish becomes associated with the domestic, the local, the particular. I can feel this hierarchy operating even as I resist it. When I write academically in Danish, the language feels somehow inadequate, as though the concepts themselves require English to be realised. This is absurd - Danish is capable of expressing complex thought - but the association has been made. English is the language of theory because that is the language in which I encountered theory. The two have become fused.
The result is a life lived in translation. But what if this split is not just personal? What if it reflects a broader structure, one that operates not through direct political domination but through the organisation of knowledge itself? English is not just a convenient lingua franca. It is the language that determines what counts as theory. To participate in global academia is to participate in English, and to participate in English is to accept, at least partially, its categories, its ways of organising knowledge.
This is what makes hybridity political rather than merely personal. When I write in English but let Danish syntax intrude, when I use a Danish term because the English equivalent flattens something important, when I refuse to smooth out the awkwardness, I am not just expressing my particular bilingual experience. I am pushing back against the hierarchy that made English the language of theory in the first place. And sometimes, I am also just enjoying the collision, the creative friction, the way meanings multiply when languages meet.
II
There is something else I acknowledge. Even if I wanted to, I could never possess the range of English nuances the way a native speaker does. The idioms learned in childhood, the subtle regional variations, the class markers embedded in vowel shifts - these remain partially opaque to me. There will always be moments when my English reveals itself as learned rather than lived.
But here is what the myth of the native speaker conceals: native speakers do not possess some unified, complete English either. The English of a working-class Geordie is not the English of an upper-middle-class Londoner. The English of a Jamaican speaker, a Nigerian speaker, an Indian speaker - all native speakers of English - differ not just in accent but in grammar, vocabulary, idiom. The “standard” English that operates as the invisible norm in international academia is itself a class-marked, geographically specific, historically contingent form.
What this means is that the playing field is not level even among those who claim English as a first language. A working-class British academic, a Black American scholar, an Australian from a regional university - all face pressures to modify their English, to move it closer to the unmarked professional standard. Their “native” English is marked as regional, classed, raced. They too translate, code-switch, manage the gap between the language they speak and the language that signifies intellectual authority.
The difference is that their hybridity is less visible. The category of hybridity tends to be reserved for those crossing national-linguistic borders, as though the borders within English - the class borders, the racial borders - were somehow less significant.
This reveals something about how linguistic hierarchy operates. It is not simply a matter of native versus non-native speakers. It is a more complex system in which certain forms of English - and certain speakers - are granted authority. My Danglish marks me as non-native, yes, but a Cockney accent, a Scots dialect, a Caribbean patois - these also mark their speakers, often more harshly, as outside the professional norm. My Danglish is marked as foreign, which carries its own penalties but also, in certain contexts, a certain exotic charm. A working-class or racialised English, by contrast, is often marked as simply wrong, stupid, lazy - stigmatised without the compensating mystique of foreignness.
An anti-hierarchical linguistic politics attends to these differences. It does not celebrate Danish hybridity whilst ignoring the ways that class, race, and geography fracture English from within.
III
I hesitate to frame this purely through the language of centre and periphery, through the familiar choreography of certain theoretical frameworks. Not because that framework is wrong - it captures something real - but because it risks reproducing the very centrality it critiques. It can inadvertently keep the centre at the centre, even in critique.
What interests me more is the possibility of margin-to-margin conversation. Not Denmark looking to Britain or America for recognition, but Denmark looking to Catalonia, to Québec, to Wales, to the Faroe Islands, to Greenland. To other small language communities navigating similar tensions between local particularity and global participation, between identity and access.
This sideways looking is also a form of solidarity. Not the false solidarity of nationalist movements that demand unity through sameness, but solidarity through difference. Margin-to-margin thinking recognises that Catalans, Danes, Québécois, and Welsh speakers face different histories, different forms of linguistic pressure, different relationships to state power. The point is not to erase these differences in pursuit of a unified “small language” identity, but to learn from the specificity of each other’s strategies whilst remaining attentive to what cannot be translated between contexts. This is solidarity built on mutual recognition of shared structural positions, not on xenophobic dreams of cultural purity or common essence.
These are not all the same contexts - the histories and mechanisms differ - but they share certain structural positions. They are places where linguistic choice is never neutral. What can Catalan strategies teach Danish speakers? How do Québécois writers navigate the tension between French particularity and English-language global literary markets? What does Welsh language media production look like?
There is something generative about attending to horizontal rather than vertical relations. Instead of always looking up, what if we looked sideways? What strategies have they developed?
This becomes an act of critical translation. These examples are not models to be copied directly. This is not a search for a new, purer model, as many “minor” language movements have their own internal politics of purity, their own nationalisms that police their internal borders. The goal, then, is not to import a different, smaller-scale nationalism. Rather, everything learned from a Catalan, Basque, or Welsh context needs to be adapted locally and critically examined. We are looking to translate strategies of hybrid survival and anti-hierarchical practices - like the grassroots adaptability of Basque ikastolak schools - while remaining deeply sceptical of any model that proposes a new form of purity. It is about learning how to maintain particularity without falling into reactionary localism.
There is also something politically useful about refusing to make the Anglophone centre the primary reference point. If we are always explaining ourselves to the centre, justifying our linguistic choices for the centre, then the centre remains the arbiter of value. But if we are in conversation with each other - Catalans and Danes, Québécois and Welsh speakers, Basques and Faroese - then we create a different kind of network, one that does not require validation from above.
This is not isolation. It is a different form of internationalism, one built laterally rather than hierarchically. We still use English, still participate in global discourse, but we do so with reference points that are not solely Anglophone, with a sense of solidarity that does not depend on the centre’s approval.
IV
Denmark already circulates in the global imaginary, but often in forms that do limited political work. The centre has learned to consume Denmark in two primary registers, both of which tend to render it harmless.
First, there is Nordic noir. Forbrydelsen, Broen. This is Denmark as aesthetic object, as mood. The subtitles domesticate the language, rendering Danish dialogue into smooth English. Nordic noir succeeds internationally because it offers difference without difficulty. The viewer consumes Danish culture as packaged entertainment.
Second, there is Denmark as utopian fantasy. The progressive Scandinavian welfare state. This Denmark is not a real place. It is a projection, a screen onto which the centre projects its own desires. The complexity of Danish society - its tensions around immigration, its own forms of inequality - disappears into the fantasy of the Nordic model.
Both registers operate as forms of exoticism. They allow the centre to acknowledge Denmark without being challenged by it. The limitation is that they are complete. They offer the centre a finished image, something that can be understood, appreciated, and then set aside. There is no remainder, no excess, nothing that resists absorption.
Hybridity offers something different. It can be precisely what refuses smooth consumption. The difference is worth noting. The exotic can be collected, displayed, enjoyed. The minor is irritating, incomplete, resistant. The exotic other is fascinating; the minor other is simply wrong. That wrongness is where certain kinds of politics might live.
V
Consider the phrase “I am interesseret.” A Danish speaker who code-switches mid-sentence might be asserting that interesseret does something different. The Danish term carries the weight of interesse - concern, stake, involvement - in ways that the flatter English “interested” does not. To leave it untranslated is to suggest that the Anglophone reader might do some of the cognitive labour that non-native speakers perform constantly.
Or take the construction “I have it not.” This is not necessarily broken English. It is Danish syntax asserting itself. The hesitation it creates can be productive. It forces attention to the mechanics of syntax. The minor language, in the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terms, is not a dialect seeking elevation. It is a way of making the major language malfunction, stutter, reveal its contingency.
The academic who writes “this is not possible to overlook” instead of “this cannot be overlooked” might be following Danish logic, where det er ikke muligt at overse places the impossibility outside the actor. English wants control, agency, the subject who cannot. Danish offers a world where impossibility is a condition you encounter. These are different ontologies.
I notice this in my own writing. I write “this gives problems” when English expects “this causes problems.” These are not careless errors. They are places where Danish logic refuses to be translated, where the thought itself is structured differently. To smooth these into standard English is not just stylistic editing. It is a subtle shift in meaning.
Sometimes I let these constructions stand. This, of course, is a position of privilege. My ability to choose this awkwardness, to frame it as a deliberate artistic strategy, is a luxury not afforded to the student who is simply marked down for the same “error.” Their hybridity is stigmatised; mine can be aestheticised. What the artistic-political project might do, then, is not to rescue or protect - those gestures presume too much - but to slightly redistribute the conditions under which the “error” becomes legible. Not creating a safe theoretical space, but making the risky space slightly less punishing, making visible that what gets called error might also be read as thought. This is damage reduction rather than salvation. It does not eliminate the hierarchy, but it might make survival within it marginally less costly.
VI
English presents itself as neutral. This is debatable. English carries histories, presumptions of centrality. Every time a non-native speaker labours to produce “correct” English, they participate in this system to some degree. Every moment of skam might be understood as a small transfer of cultural capital.
But what if there were other ways to participate? Not by refusing to speak English - that is impractical - but by speaking it forkert, deliberately. By making English carry Danish thought-structures. This is what the writer Franz Kafka did to German. His Prague German is not failed High German. It is German made to stutter.
Danglish could do something similar. The business meeting where someone says “we have a dialogue about this” - the Danish dialog does not translate cleanly. It implies something more sustained, more serious, than the casual English “discussion.” To leave it as “dialogue” sounds slightly off in English. But that weight might be the point.
Or the academic paper that insists on “I will illuminate this problem.” The Danish belyse means both to light up and to examine from multiple angles. The English “illuminate” is close but not quite right. But that slight awkwardness could be generative.
The division in my own life between Danish and English - between care and theory - is not unique. It reflects a broader pattern in which English has become the obligatory language of intellectual seriousness. This is a form of cognitive structuring. It is not imposed by force but by the subtle pressure of academic convention. The result is that English shapes not just how we communicate but how we think.
When I write hybrid English, when I let Danish intrude, I am trying to disrupt this slightly. Not to escape English, but to make it less smooth, less transparent. The awkwardness is deliberate. It is a reminder that we are always translating, and that something is always lost or gained in that movement.
VII
To think bilingually is to live in perpetual translation. The thought arises in one language, is rendered in another. The bilingual speaker knows this loss intimately. They experience it as a constant low-level friction.
This is usually pathologised as confusion. But what if it is also a form of lucidity? The bilingual speaker sees what the monolingual cannot: that all language is translation, that meaning is never stable. The monolingual speaker has the luxury of pretending their language is transparent. The bilingual speaker knows that træ and “tree” do not occupy exactly the same semantic space.
When a Danish speaker says “I am finished on the back” (bagpå), they are following Danish spatial logic. “On the back” sounds wrong, but “at the back” does not quite capture the sense of lagging. So the hybrid speaker is stuck, forced to choose between clarity and fidelity. What if they sometimes refused the choice? What if they said “I am finished on the back” and let the Anglophone listener do some of the work? This need not be hostile. It could simply be a refusal to bear the entire burden of translation alone.
There is an emotional dimension to this. When I speak Danish with family, the language carries affect in ways that English does not. These emotions are coded in Danish. Conversely, when I engage with complex theoretical ideas, English feels more precise, because I learned to think theoretically in English. The language of intimacy is not the language of intellect. The language of care is not the language of critique.
This split is a wound, but it is also a resource. If the split is the engine, the artistic practice is the site of the contamination. It is the laboratory for working with the split, not by choosing one language over the other, but by forcing them into an uncomfortable, generative collision. My practice becomes an attempt to write theory in the language of care - to give intellectual critique the affective texture of the hjemlig. And conversely, to write about care with the language of theory, to perform the alienation and make it visible. Not healing in the sense of resolution, but making the split productive rather than merely painful.
VIII
The Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz offers a model. In his fiction, Spanish and English exist on the same page without hierarchical marking. Where conventional publishing practice would italicise Spanish words - visually marking them as foreign, as requiring special framing - Díaz simply writes them in regular typeface alongside English. A character might say “Tú no eres nada” in one sentence and “You’re nobody” in the next, with no typographical distinction between them.
This refusal to italicise is more than stylistic choice. Italics perform a specific function: they tell the monolingual English reader “this is not your language, this requires translation or can be skipped.” They mark Spanish as outside, as other, as secondary. By refusing this convention, Díaz forces Spanish and English onto the same typographical plane. The monolingual reader must now do the work - inferring meaning from context, sitting with incomprehension, or learning enough Spanish to follow along. The cognitive burden is redistributed. The reader who has always moved through texts with easy comprehension suddenly encounters opacity. Meanwhile, the bilingual reader finds themselves at home in both languages, no longer required to treat one as primary and the other as supplement.
Díaz writes for a substantial Spanish-speaking readership in the United States, which makes his strategy legible as literary choice rather than error. For a Danish writer working in English, the context is different. There is no large Danish-speaking audience within the Anglophone literary market. The hybridity risks being read simply as mistake, as failure to master the dominant language.
This is where the julekalender model becomes interesting. The laughter here is complex. Yes, it can function as a safety valve - we laugh at the memory of the show and then return to policing correctness. But the julekalender also demonstrates that linguistic norms are not fixed. Its enduring cultural presence shows that English can be played with, that mistakes can be funny rather than shameful, that hybridity can be a source of pleasure. The comedy makes the norms visible as norms, as constructed and therefore changeable. It does not overthrow the hierarchy, but it makes the hierarchy slightly less rigid, slightly more negotiable.
What if artistic or academic work could build on this, not as festive exception but as ongoing practice? Not comedy necessarily, but a willingness to let hybridity show, to resist the pressure to smooth everything into standard English. The scholar who shifts mid-paragraph to “dette rejser spørgsmålet”, inviting the reader to encounter Danish directly. The poet who code-switches at moments of intensity. The artist whose titles work only in the overlap between languages.
This is different from exoticism (hygge, minimalist design). Nordic noir operates in exactly this register. It exports Danish culture as mood and style, but the export is complete, finished, smoothly translated. The same is true of the utopian Denmark. Both forms of export tend to render Denmark legible to the centre without challenging the centre’s authority. The minor, by contrast, is what the centre finds irritating, wrong, unassimilable. It is the Danism that refuses to be edited out.
The julekalender shows that there is an appetite for linguistic play, for forms that do not take themselves entirely seriously, for mistakes that become art. This is not revolution, but it suggests that the norms are more flexible than they appear, that there is room to move, to experiment, to fail in interesting ways.
IX
Language is not the only site of hybridity. Danish hip-hop that switches between Danish and English mid-verse is performing a similar deterritorialisation. The Danish smørrebrød that incorporates Asian or Middle Eastern flavours is an assertion that tradition is always already hybrid. The same is true of language. There is no pure Danish. Purity is always a retrospective fantasy.
What Danglish makes visible is that hybridity is the condition, not the exception. The hybrid speaker knows better. They see the seams. This knowledge is not a deficit. It could be a more accurate understanding of how language works.
X
If Danglish is to be more than a symptom, it might become a strategy. This would benefit from cultural production. The academic who writes in English but structures arguments according to Danish rhetorical norms, producing texts that feel off to Anglophone readers - too direct, too unconcerned with hedging. These need not be mistakes. They could be choices that embody different intellectual cultures.
What would it mean for Danish scholars to sometimes refuse to adjust? The result would be texts that international readers find difficult, that require extra cognitive labour. This difficulty could be part of the politics. It redistributes the burden of translation.
Consider what Nordic noir almost does but ultimately does not. What if there were a version of Nordic noir that refused subtitles, or that provided only partial translation? What if the exported cultural product was deliberately incomplete, requiring engagement rather than passive consumption?
Imagine a Danish intellectual intervention into Anglophone debates about social democracy that refused the terms of the utopian fantasy. Not Denmark as the place that solved everything, but Denmark as a specific, contradictory society. This would be a Denmark that speaks on its own terms. This would be a cultural product that is not a julekalender, not a harmless laugh, but a genuine irritant.
XI
This approach walks a narrow line. On one side is nationalist reaction, the dream of linguistic purity. On the other side is smooth assimilation. Neither is appealing.
The distinction is relational. The reactionary defence of Danish defines itself through exclusion. The minor language politics proposed here defines itself through friction and multiplicity. It values Danish not as pure essence but as one term in a relation, productive precisely because it is in tension with English.
This means the approach would benefit from remaining porous. If the argument is anti-hierarchical, it would extend to all hybrid forms: not just Danglish but also Arabic-Danish, Turkish-Danish, Somali-Danish. The goal would be to challenge the structure that ranks languages and marks some speakers as correct and others as deficient.
This is the political test: does the project create space for other forms of linguistic difference, or does it merely assert a privileged, white, European particularity? The friction of Danglish is often read by the centre as “awkward.” The friction of Arabic-Danish is read as “threatening,” ‘un-Danish’, or “ghetto.” The quality of the irritation is different because it is racialised. A genuinely anti-hierarchical politics attends to this. It moves beyond the relatively safe hybridity of Danglish to build an explicit coalition with these other, more heavily policed forms.
But the coalition extends further still. It recognises that class, geography, and economy fracture English from within. The working-class British speaker whose grammar is corrected, the Black American academic code-switching - these too are forms of linguistic marginality. An anti-hierarchical linguistic politics attends to the borders within languages as well as the borders between them.
XII
What, concretely, might this look like?
It could mean writing forkert with intention. It might mean code-switching not apologetically but as a deliberate aesthetic and political choice. It could mean sometimes refusing to italicise, refusing to translate.
It might mean making art that is untranslatable. Poetry that depends on the overlap between Danish and English. Visual art with titles that pun across languages.
It could mean teaching students that their hybrid speech is not necessarily deficient but potentially generative. It might mean creating spaces - journals, conferences, workshops - where the “error” is read as invention rather than failure.
It could mean refusing to be the Denmark of Nordic noir or utopian fantasy. Not the exotic aesthetic object, but an irritating presence that insists on its own terms.
It might mean looking sideways rather than up. Learning from Catalan strategies, from Québécois practices, from Welsh language activism, from Basque resilience - and critically translating those strategies, adapting them locally, remaining sceptical of their own purisms. Building networks of solidarity that do not require validation from the Anglophone centre.
It would mean accepting that this will sometimes be difficult. That international readers will sometimes be confused. That reviewers might object. But it also means recognising that smooth assimilation has costs too - the cognitive burden, the symbolic violence.
For me, this would mean trying to work with the split between Danish and English, between care and theory, by letting them contaminate each other. Writing theory that carries the texture of everyday Danish speech. By allowing emotional complexity into English prose. Not healing in the sense of resolving the tension, but making the split productive - transforming the wound into a resource, the friction of code switching into a generative force.
The goal would be not to retreat into the local but to participate in the global on different terms. Not to be the exotic Dane performing hygge for the centre’s consumption, but to explore being a minor presence that is genuinely irritating - not charmingly “wrong” like a julekalender, but structurally problematic. To be the construction that cannot be edited out, the syntax that resists smoothing, the voice that insists on its own logic even when that logic makes the centre uncomfortable.
This is one version of a politics of productive friction. It does not seek resolution, synthesis, or smooth integration. It values the awkwardness, the stutter, the moment where language fails to flow. Because in that failure, something else becomes possible: a way of thinking that neither Danish nor English alone can produce, a hybrid epistemology that exists only in the space between, a form of knowledge that is given rather than made.
Det giver mening. It gives sense. Not because it is correct, but because it might be true.
I write this, and yet I hesitate. I am unsure if I can do this. I am unsure if I dare to be this “irritating” presence, to risk the “error” in a world that prizes smoothness above all. I am unsure if this way of being would find a place, or if it would simply be dismissed, unheard. The pull of assimilation is strong. The cost of friction is real. This doubt is, perhaps, the final and most personal proof of the hierarchy - the wound this essay has been trying, and perhaps failing, to speak from.
#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom
