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Abstract
From the beginning of the 1990s, the Swedish society has been affected by various changes at various levels. This modified social, political and economic context led to several reforms implemented in the educational arena. These reforms dealt with decentralisation, choice, use of market forces and privatisation. All these aspects had an impact on language education. This article will focus upon the social, ideological/political and educational parameters having affected language‐in‐education policy in Sweden these last years. It will investigate the present‐day position of languages – Swedish, minority languages, English and other foreign languages – in the Swedish educational milieu. It is based upon the following main assumption: an investigation into the position of these languages in education highlights the new trends observed in the educational sphere since the 1990s. These new trends themselves echo the various changes Sweden has been experiencing lately in several domains.
Notes
1. SOU = Statens Offentliga Utredningar (Swedish Government Official Reports Series). Here, 26 refers to the number of the study in this series in 2008.
2. In 2006, the classification “ethnic/linguistic profile” disappeared to be included in the category “general education”.
3. In the early 1980s, the identification among Finnish‐speakers with both Sweden/Swedishness and Finland/Finnishness, pressed for a new ethnonym to be created, Sweden Finn and Sweden Finnish (Lainio Citation2004, 1)