ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the status of English-language popular culture throughout the Nordic countries with regard to its relation to attitudes toward English and its effect on everyday discourse. The traditions and contemporary developments of English as an academic subject in the Nordic countries reveal an important shift in the symbolic capital of English. While English as a linguistic system and Anglophone literature and culture once symbolized erudition and high intellectual pursuits, the abstract idea and concrete manifestations of English in the Nordic countries are now more likely to invoke Anglophone popular culture and media artifacts. However, the close association between popular culture and the English language has fostered a Nordic-wide relationship to English that deviates from native Anglophone norms, whereby the filtering of English through popular culture encourages the use of English as a language of play and imbues a distance to its affective properties. The chapter presents a pan-Nordic overview of the rise of Anglophone popular culture and the effects of the stronghold that the English language enjoys in the Nordic countries as a result of the wholesale adoption of English-language popular culture.
