Et kig på socialsemiotikken fra Dansk Sprognævn

Abstract

In this paper, I hint at some possible affinities between social semiotics as a descriptive practice of investigating language as well as a plethora of modalities in communication, and the normative work carried out by The Danish Language Council (Dansk Sprognævn). First, one could envisage how the social semiotic approach to multimodality could function in research on ‘domain loss’: this is research which traditionally focuses on the use of one language over another in specific domains of life, but it could be expanded to include the use of one modality (e.g. photographs) over another (e.g. language). Second, in The Danish Language Council, research is carried out on how we communicate in various digitalized media, e.g. on Instagram and Snapchat, and here again an understanding of multimodal social semiotics could enlighten research on e.g. emojis (which are often used instead of standard punctuation). Finally, the understanding of genres in social semiotics bears some affinities to work done on clear communication (‘klarsprog’). Despite these affinities, the paper does not suggest that the more descriptive practice of social semiotics and the primarily normative and corpus based foundations of the research done in The Danish Language Council (e.g. when working with the standardization of the orthography of Danish), in general, are compatible.