Danglish: A Special Report
April 23rd, 2008
PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Kaila Krayewski
April 15, 2008
Tel.: 01273 704434
Mobile: 079 385 66952
E-mail: Kaila@obanmultilingual.com
www.obanmultilingual.com
DANGLISH
How this unique language can improve your business
Danish sporting apparel company, Hummel International, wants a ‘Danglish’ website. They have enlisted OBAN Multilingual, an international search engine optimisation company, to do the job.
They are among the many companies realising that cultural differences are key when targeting specific regions.
There are close to five and a half million people living in Denmark.
English is a required course in Danish primary schools also must be spoken during gym class. The result is that most people in Denmark speak English at some level.
As is common in countries with two or more often-spoken languages, English and Danish have become intertwined to create ‘Danglish’.
What does this mean for business?
Consider the following statistics:
Nearly 90 percent of Danes have internet access at home. According to Jupiter Research statistics, of this number, 58 percent buy online.
In 2007, the online spend in Denmark neared £1,300,000,000. A quarter of this sum was from spending in the travel and tourism market. In 2006, two-thirds of Danes went on holiday, and most of them went abroad.
Online clothing retail accounted for about 10 percent of online spending.
Not to mention that EU countries account for 68 percent of Denmark’s foreign trade (Germany is their foremost trading partner, followed by Sweden and the UK).
How can your business get a slice of the DKK pie?
Danes are more likely to type Danish-English hybrid words into search engines than British English. Therefore, sites that are not optimised for ‘Danglish’ will not show up in their search results.
Multilingual search engine optimisation is the key to unlocking the ‘Danglish’ market. This process involves improving the quality of the coding, presentation, structure, content, etc. with cultural modifications and regional spellings of keywords, to gain better rankings in the index.
In countries like Denmark, where most of the population can communicate in English, the trick is finding the cultural linguistic differences between ‘Danglish’ and British English, and optimising the site with those differences in mind.
Businesses that want to reach Danes should not just be looking to Google. Denmark’s largest Internet portal, Jubii, is a popular search engine in Denmark, with 2.8 million monthly users.
When speaking ‘Danglish’, Danes tend to avoid the “th” sound. Therefore, theatre often becomes teatre, and thirst becomes tirsty.
Also, ‘T’s tend to find their way onto the ends of words where they may not belong in British English, for example: goodt (good).
Sites that are optimised in this special mixture of Danish and English are most likely to profit from the immense market for online sales in Denmark.
-30-
Glad you liked our press release, Charlie!
What’s interesting is that it’s not only Danish that has these localisms, but languages all around the world.
We do have native researchers for each language we optimise who are able to find these culturally unique keywords and keyphrases and who uses them to help our clients reach those specific cultures.
Best of luck learning Danish - it’s tricky!
Keep checking our website for info like this - there’s loads more to come:)
Interesting Press Release. So when you talk about Danglish optimisation, are you simply optimising pages and/or PPC keywords/landing pages for bilingual misspellings? If so, pretty smart in itself, but there’s potential for some really interesting stuff here I reckon…
Have you got a native Dane working on this research, or are you simply mining AdWords, SpyFu etc. for the data? Or do you have access to the analytics data of a large Danish site from where you are pulling this data based on converting keywords/referrals etc? I’d be intrigued to know.
It’s very interesting, because as you say most Danes speak very good English (believe me, that makes learning Danish as an Englishman VERY hard indeed), it would be interesting to perhaps scrape some content from the most popular Danish blogs, MySpace profiles etc. to look at how (teenagers in particular) are mashing the two languages together.
I digress, you’ve hit 2 topics in this release that interest me: SEM and Danish - so thanks for that! And it’s great to see your site and business developing, though this blog page does seem to be too wide in Firefox on a Mac particularly (sideways scrolling is annoying