Language crashes and shifting orientations: the construction and negotiation of linguistic value in bilingual school spaces in Finland and Sweden

Abstract

This article analyses the construction of linguistic value and recognition of linguistic resources in educational spaces in Finland, where Swedish is the second national language and in Sweden, where Finnish is one of five official minority languages. Drawing on ethnographic methods, critically informed notions of language policy and spatial theorisation, we argue that linguistic hierarchies created through language and education policies manifest themselves in the discursive construction of linguistic value in the everyday educational spaces. In Finland, the strong societal and political status of Swedish and the monolingual school institutions enable the recognition of language as a right and a resource but potentially present linguistic diversity as a problem within those spaces. In Sweden, the historical traces of a problem orientation towards Finnish language remain, despite the aimed improvements in educational language rights and the shifting orientation on Finnish being recognised as a resource in the market-oriented educational system. Pupils in both countries mostly considered language as a communicative resource in their everyday social spaces but the negotiation of the societal value of language and bilingualism was rather controversial. Discussing linguistic disadvantage in relation to educational spaces will bring new perspectives to language and minority policies in linguistically diverse societies.

Keywords:

• Ethnography
• Finnish
• language policy and planning
• minority language
• Swedish

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by NordForsk [grant number 57741]. We would also like to express our gratitude for the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1.  In addition to the two national languages, the Finnish Language Act (2003:423) does not define other languages historically spoken in Finland, such as Sami and Romani, as official minority languages.

2.  This estimate varies, since Sweden does not compile similar statistics concerning spoken languages of the nation (ref. Henning-Lindblom 2012).

3.  The Language Act (2009:600) also confirmed the position of Swedish as the principal language of Sweden.

4.  The Åland Islands are an autonomous region located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. They received their special status when Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917 (Wahlbeck 2013).

5.  However, as pointed out by Lundahl and others (2013), the emergence of independent schools is not the only aspect of marketisation of Swedish education but competition has been established between all elementary schools at a municipal level.

6.  In this voluntary task given by the researcher for the purposes of this study, pupils received instructions to freely photograph their school life under the title ‘Everyday life in the co-located school/ Sweden–Finnish school’ and the happenings and places they found important or central. Before the photo-elicitation interview they were asked to provide a short description of the printed photos they particularly wanted to discuss.

7.  We primarily contacted the fifth-grade teachers in each school since this grade seemed appropriate in terms of variation in the curriculum. In the Swedish-speaking school in Finland, the fifth-grade pupils were studying in the same group with the sixth-grade pupils, whereas in the Sweden-Finnish school the fifth-graders shared the classroom with fourth-graders. We then included the whole class in the study.

8.  All the names used in this article are pseudonyms.

9.  In the year 2013, the number of pupils in Swedish-speaking primary schools in Finland who had Finnish as their first language was four percent and the number of pupils with some other mother tongue than Swedish or Finnish was five percent (Westerholm, Lindberg and Oker-Blom 2014).

10.  In accordance with their decision the interview was carried out in Finnish.