Bachelor om Lyddansk: Why spelling reform? A review of the reasons with a focus on Danish

Jeg er ved at skrive bachelor i lingvistik og jeg har selvfølgelig valgt at skrive om Lyddansk og ortografireformer mere generelt. Bacheloren har jeg skrevet i Google Drive, så alle kan følge med og kommentere her.

Jeg har skrevet den på engelsk så information om dansk ortografi kan nu ud til en bredere kreds, som jeg skriver:

The subject has continued to be of interest to me and I have read quite a number of books and papers over the last 4 years relavant to it. It therefore seemed quite natural that I could use the bachelor’s thesis to further discuss the subject. The question was then whether to continue to write about it in Danish, as nearly all my previous wrintings on the topic, or make the switch to English. A great many papers and books have been written about the difficulties of the English orthography, but very little English-language material concerns Danish orthography. A Google Scholar (a free acadeic search tool comparable to paid services like Web of Science, see de Winter, 2014) for “Danish orthography” returns only 200 results. This is most unfortunate given that it is scientifically fruitful to compare orthography difficulties, as well as sociopolitical issues, across languages. For this reason I decided to write this thesis in English in the hope that it may be of interest to anyone interested in problems with a non-English orthography but who doesn’t master the language.

Siden at jeg har kun 20 sider at gøre godt med, så har jeg begrænset mig til følgende emner:

The rest of the thesis is structured as follows:

  • In section 2 I discuss definitions of key terms and give an overview of language planning in general
  • In section 3 I discuss reasons for and against spelling reforms
  • In section 4 I discuss the problems of Danish orthography
  • In section 5 I sketch my reform proposal as given in Kirkegaard (2014d), so that readers who don’t read Danish can understand it
  • Finally, in 6 I conclude with some general remarks