same time the party tried to use the language conflict to further its separatist goals. They had a consistency argument for Faroese as the language of instruction: in the other parts of the Danish kingdom education was conducted in the native language: Icelandic in Iceland, Greenlandic or in Greenland, and English in the Danish West Indies (from 1917 the United States Virgin Islands). It was thus a question of equal treatment for all areas under the Danish crown. Revival as the language of instruction History worked for the demands of . 1908 is considered to be the start of the conflict, which persisted until 1938. In 1908 the teachers of the sixth-form secondary school in Tórshavn (the capital) petitioned the school administration to be allowed to use Faroese in teaching. The administration responded with a partial refusal: Faroese could be used only as an aid, in order to explain certain things. Jákup Dahl, who later became the Provost, was opposed to the administration's ruling and refused to teach in Danish; from then on he taught in Faroese. The school administration referred the issue to the Danish education ministry, which referred it to the Løgting, the Faroese parliament, who could not agree on the issue and in 1910 split into two sides, a majority opinion and a minority opinion. The majority opinion was represented by : Danish was more important as a foreign language than others such as German and English, and the pupils were to hear and speak Danish in all subjects. An important argument for this was that Danish was a key to the higher education in Denmark, and thus was important for the young people's vocational progress. The maintained their previous position, that it was natural and understandable that a people should be taught in their native language. But they did not dispute that there were no appropriate teaching materials in Faroese. So they proposed that it should be left to each teacher in which language he taught. As a compromise, it was planned that Faroese was to be used as the language of instruction for the younger children. For the older students, fundamental instruction would be in Danish with Faroese permitted as an aid to instruction. On 16 January 1912, this regulation was passed by the Danish government as §7 of the Faroese school regulations. Although it could be rated as a partial success of , their