The story of “Danish Happiness”
Global discourse and local semantics
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This chapter takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of “happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword lykke. The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The chapter calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
References (34)
Albrechtsen, S
(
2013)
A piece of Danish happiness: One woman finds the secrets of the happiest people on Earth. Author. Colorado Springs: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Allchin, A.M., & Nicholas, L
(
1997)
N.F.S. Grundtvig: An introduction to his life and work. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Biswas-Diener, R., Vittersø, J., & Diener, E
(
2010)
The Danish effect: Beginning to explain high well-being in Denmark.
Social Indicators Research, 97, 229–246.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Borish, S.M
(
1991)
The land of the living: The Danish folk high schools and Denmark’s non-violent path to modernization. Nevada City: Blue Dolphin Publishing.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Booth, M
(
2014)
The almost nearly perfect people. The truth about the Nordic miracle. London: Jonathan Cape.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Borge, V
(
2001)
Smilet er den korteste afstand. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
DDO. Den Danske Ordbog
Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog og Literaturselskab. [
[URL]]
Elsnab, P., & Knudsen, J.N
(
2006)
Svantes Viser. Kulturkanon.dk: Din guide til den danske kulturkanon. Retrieved, Oct. 2013.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Gilbert, D
(
2007)
Stumbling on happiness. New York: Vintage Books.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Greve, B
(
2010)
Et lykkeligt land? Hvad skal der til og kan velfærdssamfundet bidrage. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Goddard, C
(
2006)
Ethnopragmatics: A new paradigm. In
C. Goddard (Ed.),
Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Goddard, C
(
2009)
Cultural scripts. In
G. Senft,
J-O. Östman &
J. Verschueren (Eds.),
Culture and language use (pp. 68–80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A
(
2014)
Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
GRO Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger
Gundelach, P., Iversen, H.R., & Warburg, M.I
Hjertet af Danmark. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.
Hamann, M., & Levisen, C
Forthcoming).
Talking about livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse, and cultural models. In
S. Waters &
C. Levisen (Eds.)
Cultural keywords in discourse
Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J
(
2013)
World happiness report. New York: Sustainable development solutions network.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Hendin, H
(
1960)
Suicide in Denmark.
Psychiatric Quarterly, 34, 443–460.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Hendin, H
(
1964)
Suicide and Scandinavia: A psychoanalytical study of culture and character. New York: Grune and Stratton.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Horn, N
2014.).
Child-centred Semantics: Keywords and Cultural Values in Danish Language Socialization. MA thesis, Aarhus University.
Levisen, C
(
2012)
Cultural semantics and social cognition: A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Levisen, C
(
2013)
On pigs and people: The porcine semantics of Danish interaction and cognition.
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33, 344–364.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Levisen, C
(
2014)
Scandinavian Semantics and the Human Body: An Ethnolinguistic Study in Diversity and Change.
Language Sciences.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
McMahon, D
(
2006)
Happiness: A history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Šmelev, A.D
(
2002)
Russkaja jazykovaja model’ mira: Materialy k slovarju. Moscow: Jazyki Slavjanskoj Kul’tury.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Stolt, B
(
2004)
Luther själv: Hjärtats och glädjens teolog. Skellefteå: Artos.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Stolt, B
(
2012)
“Laßt uns fröhlich springen!” Gefühlswelt und Gefühlsnavigierung in Luthers Reformationsarbeit. Eine kognitive Emotionalitätsanalyse auf philologischer Basis[
Studium Litterarum, 21]. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Trushima, N
(
2013)
Cultural semantics in a post-soviet virtual diaspora. The discursive construction of Denmark and the Danes by Russian language migrants. MA thesis, Aarhus University.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wierzbicka, A
(
1999)
Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wierzbicka, A
(
2004)
‘Happiness’ in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective.
Daedalus, 133, 34–43.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wierzbicka, A
(
2010)
The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research.
Emotion Review, 2, 269–273.
![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wierzbicka, A
(
2011)
What’s wrong with “happiness studies”. The cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and Sčast’e’. In
I.M. Boguslavskij,
L.L. Iomdin, and
L.P. Krysin Slovo i Jazyk (pp. 155–171). Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kultury.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Wierzbicka, A
(
2014)
Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Zuckerman, P
(
2008)
Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. New York: New York University Press.
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Cited by (2)
Cited by 2 other publications
Sakaba, Hiromichi
2023.
Conceptualization of “happy-like” feelings in Japanese and its relevance to a semantic typology of emotion concepts.
Australian Journal of Linguistics 43:4
► pp. 283 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.