Janteloven: making sense of your Danish friends

What is janteloven actually asking of people?

Not that you be small, but that you not place yourself above the room.

The word covers something most Danes absorbed long before they could name it. An ethnographic study of everyday Danish life, based on fieldwork in and around Copenhagen, described it as a taken-for-granted morality in which equality is felt as sameness, something people experience as the natural order rather than as one option among several.³ That was a small qualitative study carried out over 9 months more than 20 years ago, so take it as a description of a sensibility rather than a measurement of one.

The practical effect is specific. Standing out is not forbidden. Announcing that you stand out is. A Dane with a remarkable career will let it emerge in the 4th hour of knowing you, by accident, and will be faintly embarrassed when it does.

Why do my friends go flat when I am enthusiastic?

They are not withdrawing from you. They are lowering the volume of the whole exchange, including their own part of it.

Research treating modesty as a self-presentation tactic rather than a personality trait identified 3 distinct behaviours: playing down your own achievements, raising the other person, and avoiding attention altogether.² Those studies were carried out with participants in Hong Kong, mainland China and Canada rather than Denmark, so the categories travel further than the findings do. The 3 behaviours are nonetheless recognisable in a Copenhagen kitchen.

What throws people from more expressive cultures is that the flatness is reciprocal and friendly. Your enthusiasm is not being refused. It is being matched down to a level where nobody is performing, because performance is what the rule guards against. That is why the same friend who gave you almost nothing at the party sends a practical message 3 days later showing they remembered everything you said.

Does the quiet mean they do not like me?

Usually the opposite, and that is the part people find hardest to believe about this place.

Liking is expressed here by inclusion and by small acts rather than by statement. Being asked a second time. Being told something mildly unflattering about a third person, which is a form of trust. Being given practical help nobody requested. Meanwhile the thing you were waiting for, the explicit I really enjoyed meeting you, may never arrive at all, because saying it places a claim on the other person and claims are what the rule restrains.

This genuinely does cost you something. You are being liked in a language you cannot yet hear, and in the months before you learn to hear it you will feel unliked. Both of those are true at once, and telling yourself the first does not stop you feeling the second.

Is this a warm rule or a cold one?

It is not as benign as the tourist version suggests, and the Danes who complain about it loudest are not wrong.

Across 2 Norwegian population surveys, people who agreed most strongly with the Jante statements also reported less trust in other people, and the same pattern appeared when the data were compared at the aggregate level.¹ That study is Norwegian rather than Danish and its design cannot establish which causes which, but it is a useful corrective to the idea that the rule is only a charming humility.

What I see in the consulting room fits that shape. The rule protects people from comparison and from the exhausting business of self-promotion. It also makes ambition slightly shameful, keeps envy underground where it does more damage, and hands people a ready reason not to say what they want. Danes carry that cost too. You are not a visitor to a problem they have solved.

What helps, and when this has stopped being about culture

Stop treating the quiet as data about your worth, and start reading the other channel.

• Watch what is done, not what is declared. Repeat invitations, practical help and being included in the dull arrangements are the real signal here.
• Lower your own volume by about a third. Not falsely, and not by hiding what you do. State it once, plainly, and let it sit there instead of expanding on it.
• Give a new friendship 6 months of evidence. Most readings made in the first 8 weeks here turn out to be wrong, in both directions.
• Say the warm thing anyway, once. Many Danes like hearing it and have no idea how to produce it. Deflection in the moment is not rejection of the sentiment.
• Keep one relationship where your own register is welcome. An old friend, a sibling, somebody from your own culture. You should not have to run at half volume everywhere.

There is a point at which this is no longer a culture question. If you have started editing yourself in private as well as in company, if you cannot tell any more whether you are being tactful or disappearing, or if the modesty has merged with an older belief that wanting things openly is shameful, then janteloven has become a convenient name for something that was already there. The distinction matters, because the first needs practice and the second needs looking at, and that is the work I do with internationals in Copenhagen.

Questions people ask

Is this something therapy can actually help with?

Yes, because the difficulty is rarely the information. Most people understand the rule within a month and still feel rejected for 2 years, and that gap is the workable part.

Am I supposed to change who I am to fit in here?

No, and attempting it tends to make people harder to befriend. The useful question is which adjustments cost you nothing and which ones cost you yourself.

Will an English-speaking therapist here just tell me to accept Danish culture?

Not if the therapy is any good. Your reading of a culture can be accurate and still be making you miserable, and those are 2 separate pieces of work.

My partner is Danish and says I am overthinking this. What then?

You are both probably right. Come on your own first, because the subject becomes a dispute about who is being unreasonable very quickly when you are both in the room.

How do I know if this is culture shock or something more?

The rough test is whether it travels. If the flatness and the self-editing follow you home and into your old friendships, it is worth looking at more closely than a cultural adjustment would need.

If Janteloven leaves you unsure how to be yourself here, I talk this through with people in expat psychotherapy all the time.

Sources

1. Cappelen, C. and Dahlberg, S. (2018). The Law of Jante and generalized trust. Acta Sociologica, 61(4), 419 to 440.
2. Chen, S.X., Bond, M.H., Chan, B., Tang, D. and Buchtel, E.E. (2009). Behavioral manifestations of modesty. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(4), 603 to 626.
3. Gopal, K. (2000). Janteloven: Danish ideas of equality as sameness. Tidsskriftet Antropologi, 42.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.