The usage of American and British English in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic international baccalaureate classes

• Main Author: Siikanen, Riikka Maria
• Other Authors: Johan Elsness
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: VDP::020; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/25560; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-22970

The purpose of my thesis is to research the usages and preferences of Nordic International Baccalaureate (IB) students with respect to American (AmE) and British English (BrE). The Nordic countries that participated were: Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. Unfortunately, the results from Sweden came too late and thus there was no time to analyze and include them in the thesis. This thesis is only scraping the very surface of American and British English usage in the Nordic countries, as only one school from each Nordic country (excluding Sweden) took part in this study. After that I shall also write about the history of the English language in the Nordic countries, as this is an important factor that affects the English usage of the IB students even these days. After that I go on to methodology. I sent out questionnaires (appendix 1) to each Nordic school and the teachers were asked to ask their students to fill out the questionnaires and then they were sent back to me for further analysis. The results are displayed in figures and tables in the results section. After this I discussed the findings and then proceeded to conclusions. The results show that the majority of each Nordic class prefer American English more than British English. There are several reasons for these results, for example: media, teachers etc.