Managing multilingualism on state websites: how institutional employees explain language choice

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to understand how institutional language managers make and legitimize decisions about language choice on state websites. The focus lies on state institutions in two technologically advanced European nation-states: Estonia and Norway. The analysis is empirically based on interviews with employees at the institutions who are involved in the implementation and appropriation of state language and communication policies. A qualitative study focusing on these language managers helps to reveal the way they make sense of their policy environment, and brings out their priorities and challenges. The interview data show that institutional language managers explain language choices not just by referring to explicit policy statements, but also in relation to a broad range of other factors, such as economic, pragmatic, and technical considerations. The article sheds light on the language ideologies underpinning these factors by demonstrating how various languages are valorized differently in the institutions and reveals a complexity of intertwined reasons behind the prioritization of certain languages over others. Finally, the article aims to show that it is important to go beyond analyzing policy documents and websites as finished products, and to talk with the institutional actors in order to gain insights into the multiple conditions that influence language policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Norway
• Estonia
• language management
• language managers
• state websites
• language policy
• language ideologies

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Helen Kelly-Holmes, Aneta Pavlenko and Unn Røyneland, as well as my wonderful colleagues at MultiLing for their feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maimu Berezkina is a PhD candidate at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing) at the University of Oslo. In her doctoral project she is researching multilingualism in the increasingly digitised public services of Estonia and Norway. Berezkina holds a specialist degree in Norwegian Linguistics and Literature from the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia, and a Master’s degree in Scandinavian Linguistics from the University of Oslo. Her research interests include language policy and planning, multilingual websites, linguistic landscapes, and onomastics.

ORCID

Maimu Berezkina http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7564-0035

Notes

1 ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which does not allow computing in non-Roman alphabets.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.