Engelsk i færøsk litteratur: En undersøgelse med tre eksempler postmillenium

The chapter investigates the influence of English in Faroese literature in the first decades of the 21st Century. While the end of the 19th and most of the 20th Century in Faroese politics and literary debate were characterized by the struggle for the recognition of Faroese as the official language of the Faroe Islands, resulting in among other things the successful establishment of a monolingual literature written in Faroese in opposition to a considerable influence from Danish through centuries, the influence from English has increased significantly in recent years. Based on concepts from Michael Bachtin and Yasemin Yildiz the development is described as a breaking up of a monolingual paradigm and as a questioning of the assumed homology between identity and language. The literary examples in the chapter are divided into three different ways of using English: 1) aesthetically, creating pathways of expression in a larger context, 2) as mimesis in dialogues, terminology etc., 3) as an identity marker. More generally, the development appears to change the position of Danish from being a colonizing language in a Faroese context towards being merely another Nordic language facing some of the same challenges as Faroese.