Horn, Nynne Thorup (2014). Child-centered semantics: Keywords and cultural values in Danish language socialisation. MA thesis, Aarhus University.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Danish child-view, including Danish language socialization practices, is perceived as particularly foreign and peculiar by immigrants and other cultural outsiders. Personal accounts from Middle-Eastern immigrants are supported by available information material offered by Danish integration services. Thus, the booklet Your child lives in Denmark, devised by the Danish child-oriented organisation Børns Vilkår ‘Children’s Welfare’, which is available in Afghan, Arabic, Danish, English, Somali, Turkish, and Urdu, advises immigrants in Denmark to bring up their children by talking with them, by avoiding coaxing them with sweets, and by giving them the freedom to be children. While this advice may make sense to a native member of Danish culture, they are unintelligible and meaningless to cultural outsiders. By means of semantic and ethnopragmatic analyses, the thesis seeks to concretize and clarify the meaning as well as the inherent cultural values and assumptions inherent in the culture-specific advice and the Danish child-view in general. More specifically, the thesis combines the theory of language socialization with the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to identify and analyse cultural key words and core values in the Danish child-view and investigates if, and how, Danish children become socialized with these key words and their underlying values.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
