Honestly I have mixed feelings about these types of jokes for basically that reason. I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian and I’ve made these sorts of jokes both about Norwegian words sounding funny in English, and about English words sounding funny in Norwegian, or words in neither language sounding funny in either, and I don’t think these types of jokes are inherently a bad thing — provided they aren’t being used to establish or reproduce a hierarchy between languages.
Laughing at “fart” being Scandinavian for “speed” is really just acknowledging that languages you already speak color your perception of languages you don’t speak. I would argue that not laughing, and instead insisting on treating every single language with utmost dead seriousness 24/7, would really be worse for those actually interested in learning. The simple shock factor of seeing a serious-looking action movie poster with the word “FART” on it, or a traffic sign saying “MAX FART”, is probably going to make it a bit easier for Anglophones to remember that “fart” is Scandinavian for “speed”, in much the same way as I’m never going to forget that the Japanese Sign Language for “big brother”, “little brother”, and “brothers” looks like flipping someone off: regardless of the context of how you learned the words, if you later decide to learn these languages for-realsies, you will have a few words’ head start!
So these types of jokes really just become a problem when people start saying things like “Norwegian/Swedish/Danish isn’t a real language”, or this ends up becoming the sort of unspoken sentiment in the air with people sharing Swedish Chef pictures and stuff. Because at that point you’ve gone from acknowledging your own bias, to actually judging the other language for being different. That type of line, “not a real language”, implies that the language is inherently comical and unserious, that it isn’t worthwhile, that it should be “put away like a child’s toy” in any sort of serious context. In the case of Germanic languages being called “unserious” by Anglophones, this judgment I’d argue is actually deeply tied to the class connotations of Germanic vs Romance vocabulary in English, going all the way back to the Norman conquest.
Edit: Not that I think this is necessarily people’s conscious intent, I think people are really just trying to be hyperbolic when they say it isn’t a “real language” — I’m just saying that this is the sort of subconscious bias that gets manifested in threads like this one.
Honestly I have mixed feelings about these types of jokes for basically that reason. I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian and I’ve made these sorts of jokes both about Norwegian words sounding funny in English, and about English words sounding funny in Norwegian, or words in neither language sounding funny in either, and I don’t think these types of jokes are inherently a bad thing — provided they aren’t being used to establish or reproduce a hierarchy between languages.
Laughing at “fart” being Scandinavian for “speed” is really just acknowledging that languages you already speak color your perception of languages you don’t speak. I would argue that not laughing, and instead insisting on treating every single language with utmost dead seriousness 24/7, would really be worse for those actually interested in learning. The simple shock factor of seeing a serious-looking action movie poster with the word “FART” on it, or a traffic sign saying “MAX FART”, is probably going to make it a bit easier for Anglophones to remember that “fart” is Scandinavian for “speed”, in much the same way as I’m never going to forget that the Japanese Sign Language for “big brother”, “little brother”, and “brothers” looks like flipping someone off: regardless of the context of how you learned the words, if you later decide to learn these languages for-realsies, you will have a few words’ head start!
So these types of jokes really just become a problem when people start saying things like “Norwegian/Swedish/Danish isn’t a real language”, or this ends up becoming the sort of unspoken sentiment in the air with people sharing Swedish Chef pictures and stuff. Because at that point you’ve gone from acknowledging your own bias, to actually judging the other language for being different. That type of line, “not a real language”, implies that the language is inherently comical and unserious, that it isn’t worthwhile, that it should be “put away like a child’s toy” in any sort of serious context. In the case of Germanic languages being called “unserious” by Anglophones, this judgment I’d argue is actually deeply tied to the class connotations of Germanic vs Romance vocabulary in English, going all the way back to the Norman conquest.
Edit: Not that I think this is necessarily people’s conscious intent, I think people are really just trying to be hyperbolic when they say it isn’t a “real language” — I’m just saying that this is the sort of subconscious bias that gets manifested in threads like this one.