Language ideologies in Danish Higher Education: Exploring student perspectives

This chapter presents a qualitative analysis of attitudes towards different forms of English held by four students at an international study programme in Denmark. The students belong to a transient multilingual community in which historically-accrued language ideologies cannot necessarily be assumed to be shared by all members. Our analysis suggests that the students see competence and effectiveness as important parameters in their evaluation of different forms of English in the university context, irrespective of the provenance of the speaker, but they also subscribe to familiar language ideologies that favour ‘native’ English varieties and accents over other kinds of English. This could be seen as a contradiction between practice and ideology, but we argue that the contradiction is only apparent.