The Danish Composite State and the Lost Memory of a Multilingual Culture

In the Danish nation state the multiethnic and multilingual aspects of the past were first rejected and later forgotten. The examples in this chapter show a far more complex linguistic reality of the nineteenth century than that presented in later national historical narratives. For a long time languages were primarily used as tools for communication, but during the national conflict in the nineteenth century the nexus between language and identity became dominant. In the Danish composite state there were several ways to navigate between languages, regional varieties and mixed languages but the national ideology suppressed the visibility of multilingual realities and instead constructed a clear antagonism between 'Danish' and 'German' in both culture and language.