Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality 978-1-349-34039-2, 978-1-137-28356-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter....Pages i-xv
Endangering Multilingualism....Pages 1-21
Front Matter....Pages 23-23
Finland’s Official Bilingualism — a Bed of Roses or of Procrustes?....Pages 25-40
Linguistic Diversity as a Problem and a Resource — Multilingualism in European and Finnish Policy Documents....Pages 41-66
Dealing with Increasing Linguistic Diversity in Schools — the Finnish Example....Pages 67-95
Problematic Plurilingualism — Teachers’ Views....Pages 96-118
Front Matter....Pages 119-119
Hard Currency or a Stigma — Russian-Finnish Bilingualism among Young Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Finland....Pages 121-141
Finnish Culture and Language Endangered — Language Ideological Debates on English in the Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007....Pages 142-175
Multilingualism in Nordic Cooperation — a View from the Margin....Pages 176-193
The Dangers of Normativity — the Case of Minority Language Media....Pages 194-204
Front Matter....Pages 205-205
Discourses of Proficiency and Normality — Endangering Aspects of English in an Individual’s Biography of Language Use....Pages 207-227
Peer Normativity and Sanctioning of Linguistic Resources-in-Use — on Non-Standard Englishes in Finnish Football Forums Online....Pages 228-260
Experiencing Multilingualism — the Elderly Becoming Marginalized?....Pages 261-283
When One of Your Languages is not Recognized as a Language at all....Pages 284-308
Back Matter....Pages 309-313

Citation preview

Language and Globalization Series Editors: Sue Wright, University of Portsmouth, UK and Helen Kelly-Holmes, University of Limerick, Ireland. In the context of current political and social developments, where the national group is not so clearly defined and delineated, the state language not so clearly dominant in every domain, and cross-border flows and transfers affect more than a small elite, new patterns of language use will develop. The series aims to provide a framework for reporting on and analysing the linguistic outcomes of globalization and localization. Titles include: David Block MULTILINGUAL IDENTITIES IN A GLOBAL CITY London Stories Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen, Päivi Pahta and Tiina Räisänen (editors) DANGEROUS MULTILINGUALISM Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality Jenny Carl and Patrick Stevenson (editors) LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE AND IDENTITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE The German Language in a Multilingual Space Diarmait Mac Giolla Chrióst LANGUAGE AND THE CITY Julian Edge (editor) (RE)LOCATING TESOL IN AN AGE OF EMPIRE John Edwards CHALLENGES IN THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LANGUAGE Aleksandra Galasin´ska and Michał Krzyz˙anowski (editors) DISCOURSE AND TRANSFORMATION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Roxy Harris NEW ETHNICITIES AND LANGUAGE USE Jane Jackson INTERCULTURAL JOURNEYS From Study to Residence Abroad Helen Kelly-Holmes and Gerlinde Mautner (editors) LANGUAGE AND THE MARKET Clare Mar-Molinero and Patrick Stevenson (editors) LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES, POLICIES AND PRACTICES Language and the Future of Europe Clare Mar-Molinero and Miranda Stewart (editors) GLOBALIZATION AND LANGUAGE IN THE SPANISH-SPEAKING WORLD Macro and Micro Perspectives Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Dariusz Galasinski THE LANGUAGE OF BELONGING

Richard C. M. Mole (editor) DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN POLITICS Leigh Oakes and Jane Warren LANGUAGE, CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY IN QUEBEC Mario Saraceni THE RELOCATION OF ENGLISH Christina Slade and Martina Mollering (editors) FROM MIGRANT TO CITIZEN: TESTING LANGUAGE, TESTING CULTURE Colin Williams LINGUISTIC MINORITIES IN DEMOCRATIC CONTEXT Forthcoming titles: Robert Blackwood and Stefani Tufi THE LINGUISTICS LANDSCAPE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN A Study of French and Italian Coastal Cities Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain LANGUAGE, SPACE AND IDENTITY IN MIGRATION

Language and Globalization Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–403–99731–9 (Hardback) 978–1–403–99732–6 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Dangerous Multilingualism Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality Edited by

Jan Blommaert University of Tilburg, The Netherlands

Sirpa Leppänen University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Päivi Pahta University of Tampere, Finland

and

Tiina Räisänen University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Selection and editorial matter © Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen, Päivi Pahta and Tiina Räisänen 2012 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-32141-0

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34039-2

ISBN 978-1-137-28356-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137283566

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

Contents List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on the Contributors

x

1

1

Endangering Multilingualism Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen and Massimiliano Spotti

Part I Order – Disorder 2

3

4

5

Finland’s Official Bilingualism – a Bed of Roses or of Procrustes? Olli-Pekka Salo

25

Linguistic Diversity as a Problem and a Resource – Multilingualism in European and Finnish Policy Documents Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri

41

Dealing with Increasing Linguistic Diversity in Schools – the Finnish Example Minna Suni and Sirkku Latomaa

67

Problematic Plurilingualism – Teachers’ Views Sanna Voipio-Huovinen and Maisa Martin

96

Part II Purity – Impurity 6

7

8

9

Hard Currency or a Stigma – Russian–Finnish Bilingualism among Young Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Finland Mika Lähteenmäki and Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski Finnish Culture and Language Endangered – Language Ideological Debates on English in the Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007 Sirpa Leppänen and Päivi Pahta

121

142

Multilingualism in Nordic Cooperation – a View from the Margin Maisa Martin

176

The Dangers of Normativity – the Case of Minority Language Media Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes

194

v

vi

Contents

Part III Normality – Abnormality 10 Discourses of Proficiency and Normality – Endangering Aspects of English in an Individual’s Biography of Language Use Tiina Räisänen 11 Peer Normativity and Sanctioning of Linguistic Resources-in-Use – on Non-Standard Englishes in Finnish Football Forums Online Samu Kytölä

207

228

12 Experiencing Multilingualism – the Elderly Becoming Marginalized? Anne Pitkänen-Huhta and Marja Hujo

261

13 When One of Your Languages is not Recognized as a Language at all Elina Tapio and Ritva Takkinen

284

Index

309

List of Tables 2.1

Language studies in the national core curricula in Finland

3.1

The data

5.1

Class supervisors, students, their L1(s) and grades

101

6.1

Subjects’ self-evaluation of their language skills in Finnish

130

6.2

Students’ self-evaluation of their language skills in Russian

131

7.1

Editorials and letters to the editor discussing language issues in Helsingin Sanomat in 1995–99 and 2005–7

148

Ideological constructions of English as a danger in Finland

162

7.2

32 45

vii

List of Figures 3.1

Terms used to categorize languages

50

4.1

Statement: ‘Students with immigrant background are regarded as a burden’

77

Statement: ‘The school has too little information on the language background of its students’

79

4.3

Statement: ‘The students are forbidden to use their native language with speakers of the same language during school recesses’

81

4.4

Statement: ‘It is hard for the L1 teacher to become a member of the school community’

83

Statement: ‘A student obviously needs FSL instruction, but does not receive it’

85

Statement: ‘Parents have unrealistic expectations regarding the progress and future education of the student (e.g. a desire to get to upper secondary school)’

87

Statement: ‘More information on the assessment of plurilingual students is needed in the school community’

88

4.2

4.5 4.6

4.7 7.1

The Attack (1905) by Eetu Isto

166

viii

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the Finland Distinguished Professor programme of the Academy of Finland as well as the University of Jyväskylä. Without their support, this book would not have been possible. We are grateful to Ari Häkkinen for his valuable help with the preparation of the manuscript. We also wish to thank Olivia Middleton, commissioning editor for Palgrave Macmillan, and also Keri Dickens and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan for all their help and patience.

ix

Notes on the Contributors Jan Blommaert was Finland Distinguished Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Jyväskylä (2007–10). Currently, he is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His main publications include Language Ideological Debates (editor, 1999), Discourse: a Critical Introduction (2005), ‘Grassroots Literacy (2008) and The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (2010). Marja Hujo studied at the University of Jyväskylä and received her MA in English from the University of Jyväskylä in 2010. In her MA thesis she studied the role of the English language in the Finnish countryside, focusing on the opinions and views that people of different ages had about English. Her interests are in the role of English in Finnish society and in language learning and teaching. Currently, she works as a teacher of English at Sastamala Community College, Finland. Teija Kangasvieri is Research Coordinator in the Finnish Network for Language Education Policies at the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is also a PhD student in applied linguistics. Her research focuses on L2 motivation, and the differences between motivational structures of pupils studying compulsory and optional foreign languages at the upper level of comprehensive school. Her recent publications include reports on language immersion and teaching in foreign languages, and language studies in basic education in Finland. Helen Kelly-Holmes is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and New Media at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Advertising as Multilingual Communication (2005), and has edited/co-edited many titles including: Language and the Market (with Gerlinde Mautner, 2010). She is currently co-editor (with Sue Wright) of the Language and Globalization series published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has published widely in a range of journals on the economic aspects of multilingualism, and media and multilingualism, particularly in relation to minority languages. Samu Kytölä is currently Junior Researcher at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research areas include linguistic diversity in Finland, discourses of non-native and non-Standard Englishes, multicultural discourses of football, multilingual language use as a source of inequality for individuals and communities, as well as the linguistic ethnography of ways of writing, especially internet writing. With these foci, and with insights from sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

linguistic anthropology and computer-mediated communication (CMC), his forthcoming PhD thesis analyses Finland-based online discourses of football. In addition to co-authoring Info National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes (2011), Kytölä’s most recent publications have appeared in 2012 in the series Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism (series editor: Marilyn Martin-Jones). Mika Lähteenmäki is University Researcher in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He holds a doctorate in Russian language and literature from the University of Jyväskylä. He has published extensively on the linguistic aspects of the works of the Bakhtin Circle and the history of Soviet/Russian linguistics. His current research interests include multilingualism among the Russian-speaking people in Finland and the history of Russian linguistics. Recent publications include a co-edited volume (with Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski) Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (2010). Sirkku Latomaa is Lecturer in Finnish in the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. In addition, she has worked as a visiting lecturer in Finnish language and culture at the University of Washington (Seattle), the Moscow State University and at the Communication University of China (Nanjing). Her research and publications focus on multilingualism in the family and school contexts, minority languages, language rights, language awareness, and language-in-education policies. She has extensive experience as an in-service teacher educator. Sirpa Leppänen is Professor of English at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her major publications in the field of multilingualism include National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes (co-author, 2011), Internet Fictions (co-editor, 2009) and Kolmas kotimainen: Lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language: Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland] (2008]. Maisa Martin has been a Professor of Finnish as a second and foreign language at the Department of Languages at Jyväskylä University, Finland, since 1996. Before that she held a variety of academic positions at the same university and taught Finnish at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, for nine years. She is also the Director of Langnet, the national doctoral programme in language studies, for 2012–15. She has been a member of several Nordic working groups, due to her long-time involvement as a member and chair of the Advisory Group for Finnish Studies at Universities Abroad. Her research interests currently focus on the relationship between the functional and structural development of Finnish as a second language, but she has also written on issues of multilingualism, particularly of North American Finns.

xii Notes on the Contributors

Tarja Nikula is Professor in the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include pragmatics of foreign language learning and use, classroom interaction, English–Finnish language contact phenomena, and language education policies. Her current research focuses on conceptual challenges that content and language integrated learning (CLIL) poses for central notions within applied linguistics; she directs a research project funded by the Academy of Finland called ‘Language and Content Integration: towards a Conceptual Framework’. Her publications have appeared for example in Linguistics and Education, Applied Linguistics, Multilingua, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and a number of edited volumes. Her recent publications include a co-edited book (with Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Ute Smit) Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms (2010). Päivi Pahta is Professor of English at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her main publications include Writing in Nonstandard English (co-editor, 1999), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (co-editor, 2004), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation (co-editor, 2008), Medical Writing in Early Modern English (co-editor, 2010) and Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English (co-editor, 2010). Sari Pietikäinen is Professor of Discourse Studies at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include multilingualism and indigenous Sa´mi communities, critical discourse studies and media research. She has published widely on these topics. She is a project leader for an international research project on transforming multilingual indigenous and minority language communities (see www. peripheralmultilingualism.fi). Anne Pitkänen-Huhta is Professor of English and Head of the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on literacy and discourse practices of young people, foreign language learning in formal and informal contexts, and the role of English in Finnish society. Her research employs ethnographic and discourse analytic methods. Sari Pöyhönen works as a Senior Researcher (language education policies) at the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS) at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research and writing deal with notions on language education and integration policies, and linguistic and ethnic minorities. Currently, she is involved in two projects focusing on migrant education and language education policies, called ‘Participative Integration in Finland’ (2010–13), and ‘Transforming Professional Integration’ (2011–14) funded by the Academy of Finland. Recent publications include ‘Russian-speaking young immigrants in Finland: educational and linguistic challenges to integration’ (with Tatjana Rynkänen) in Multilingualism in Finland and Russia. Language Ideologies in Transition (edited by M. Lähteenmäki and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski, 2010) and

Notes on the Contributors

xiii

a forthcoming article ‘Localising supranational concepts of literacy in adult second language teaching’ (with Lars Holm). Tiina Räisänen is Junior Researcher in the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include ethnographic, discourse and sociolinguistic studies of language users’ identities, individual linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories. Her longitudinal research project focuses on Finns as users of English in globalized working life. Taina Saarinen is Researcher at the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her main research interests are higher education policy, internationalization, discursive policy and language education policy. Currently, she is working on an Academy of Finland funded project on the (in)visibility of ‘language’ in Finnish and Nordic higher education internationalization. She has published for example in Studies in Higher Education, Discourse Studies and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Her latest publications include articles ‘Dominant and emerging approaches in the study of higher education policy change’ (with Jani Ursin) and ‘Internationalization of Finnish higher education – is language an issue?’ Olli-Pekka Salo is a teacher of Swedish at the University of Jyväskylä Teacher Training School, Finland. He is working on a PhD thesis on the chain of effect of the teaching of Swedish in Finland. His research interests also include teacher education, second/foreign language appropriation, dialogical language philosophy and language planning policy. His recent publications include a co-edited book (with Marita Kontoniemi) Educating Teachers in the PISA Paradise. Perspectives on Teacher Education at a Finnish University (2011). Massimiliano Spotti is Deputy Director of Babylon, the Centre for Studies of the Multicultural Society at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. In 2009, he co-edited the volume Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship. Since 2010, he has also covered the post of researcher within the group Languages and Discourses in Social Media at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Its current research interests deal with superdiversity at the margins, language-testing regimes for citizenship and identity construction in multicultural schooling settings. Minna Suni is Lecturer in Finnish Language at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and Postdoctoral Researcher (2011–13) funded by the Academy of Finland. Her major research interests include second language development in interaction, work-related language skills of adult immigrants, and multilingualism in schools. Recent publications include a Theme Issue of the journal Puhe ja kieli (‘Speech and Language’, Guest ed. April 2011) on Finnish as a second language at work, and articles

xiv Notes on the Contributors

on multilingualism in for example The Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics (2 Feb. 2011, with Sirkku Latomaa and Lea Nieminen) and Apples (vol. 5(1), 2011, with Hannele Dufva, Mari Aro and Olli-Pekka Salo). Ritva Takkinen is Professor of Finnish Sign Language at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has conducted research on sign language acquisition of deaf children, bilingual first language acquisition (Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) and Finnish) in children with a cochlear implant, on depicting signs and existential expressions in FinSL. She has been head of the Finnish Sign Language section of the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, since 2005 and chair of the Advisory Board of the Sign Language Centre at the University of Jyväskylä since 2010. She has also lectured on sign language acquisition and bilingual acquisition of a spoken and signed language for families of deaf children and professionals with deaf children. Publications addressing sign language acquisition and bimodal bilingualism include The Acquisition of Finnish Sign Language (2008), Evaluative Language in Spoken and Signed Stories Told by a Deaf Child with a Cochlear Implant: Words, Signs or Paralinguistic Expressions? (co-author with Lea Nieminen, 2011) and Two Languages in the Life of Children Using a Cochlear Implant (2012). Elina Tapio is a university teacher in Finnish Sign Language in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä. Her ongoing PhD research focuses on the English language in the everyday life of Finnish Sign Language people. Her research interests include multilingualism, language learning, multimodality in interaction and ethnography. Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski is Professor of Russian Language and Culture in the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. From 2003 to 2006 she was Professor of Russian in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Joensuu. Her research interests include issues of syntax, semantics and pragmatics as well as contrastive analysis with Finnish. Her current research focuses on discourse analysis, especially on the language use and variation in Russian media discourse. Her recent publications include the volume of Voices and Values of Young People – Representations in Russian Media (co-editor with L. Siilin, 2007) and Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (co-editor with M. Lähteenmäki, 2010). Sanna Voipio-Huovinen is a PhD candidate in Finnish and Education at the University of Jyväskylä and at the University of Helsinki. She received her MEd. at the University of Helsinki in 1999 and has studied at the University of Munich and at the University of Toronto at OISE. Her PhD in progress focuses on bi- and plurilingualism among teenager immigrant students and on the support for their bi- and plurilingualism. She is also interested in bilingual education, Finnish as a second language (FSL) teaching methods,

Notes on the Contributors

xv

L1 instruction and educational arrangements among immigrant students, language education policy, and immersion language education. She has co-authored study books of FSL for teenagers and adults with different teams. She is an active member in the Association of Teachers of FSL and has served on the board of the association for several years. Currently she is a member of the editorial board of Sutina, the journal of the Association of Teachers of FSL in Finland.

1 Endangering Multilingualism Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen and Massimiliano Spotti

Introduction To the extent that every science has its banner and rallying cry, multilingualism would be that of sociolinguistics. In the face of a widespread societal dismissal, degradation, denial or abnormalization of multilingualism, sociolinguistics has since the 1960s been making the claim that multilingualism is a positive thing in societies. It represents the richness of cultural diversity in language and so enriches society, and it is beneficial for individuals too. These arguments have, to some extent, now penetrated political institutions, and the EU, for instance, now celebrates and champions multilingualism in the Union. There is no need to provide an emblematic string of references here: most of sociolinguistics has shared these assumptions and has, often with vigour and passion, broadcast them to whoever was likely to listen. The record speaks for itself on this point. It would be hard to find a sociolinguist who would seriously doubt that multilingualism is a positive thing. The point here is therefore not to deny or challenge this; rather we want to draw attention to the fact that even if multilingualism is in general and in principle a positive thing, it can in actual fact be a problem for individuals and social groups. Not all forms of multilingualism are productive, empowering and nice to contemplate. Some – many – are still unwanted, disqualified or actively endangering to people. And while sociolinguistics should by all means go on proclaiming the positive sides of multilingualism, it should not turn a blind eye to its negative sides. It is good to champion equality among people and their languages, but the best way of doing that (and we echo Hymes, 1996 here) is to actively combat the actual inequalities that exist between them. Rather than present such forms of dangerous multilingualism as an aberration or as the product of silly language policy makers, we should see them as an integral part of social and sociolinguistic reality. They are features of a sociolinguistic system; more precisely, they are systemic and structural features of the sociolinguistic system of high modernity (Bauman and Briggs, 2003; 1

2

Dangerous Multilingualism

Baumann, 1991). High-modern forms of management of multilingualism, notably those forms organized by the nation state, define much of multilingualism as problematic. Now that globalization challenges the foundations of high modernity, such features are more than ever anachronisms. But every social system contains anachronisms at any point of its existence, and so with sociolinguistic systems. The tension between high modernity and what has been called postmodernity or late modernity remains unsolved. And, as we shall see throughout the essays in this book, the dominant response to post- or late modernity, at least in large parts of the West and in the field of language, consists of typical high-modern measures: denying or combating hybridity, multiplicity and ‘mixing’, ‘crossing’ and related expressions of impurity (Hymes, 1996; Silverstein, 1998; Blommaert, 2009). The increasing importance of language testing in the context of immigration and ‘integration’ policies, for instance, represents a form of modernist linguistic border control in which ‘modern’ (and thus essentialist) regimes of identity attribution are central, and in which a static, mono-normative and artefactualized concept of language is used (see the essays in Hogan-Brun et al., 2009 and Extra et al., 2009). Similar language-ideological foundations underlie the Common European Framework of Reference on Language (CEFR), an amazingly modernist instrument for addressing (i.e. measuring and comparing) language competences across Europe and increasingly elsewhere (Van Avermaet, 2009). We thus set the problematic of dangerous multilingualism in this historical frame: as anachronisms that reflect the ongoing and unresolved tensions between high modernity and post- or late modernity. This to some extent shifts the debate and moves it into another intellectual field of force: a historical and political one, not just a synchronic–sociolinguistic one, concerned mainly with the operational demands of things like education, policy-making or media. The space into which we bring these issues is a macroscopic one, a space of slow changes in a social system – changes that make visible (and often accentuate) paradoxes, fissures and fields of struggle. And our aim is therefore not just documentary but analytical. It is to provide a particular diagnostic of why language is such a big problem to so many people in the present world; a diagnostic that does not just look at language but even more at society (as a place of order guaranteed through loyalty from those who are part of it) and that tries to do justice to the deep social forces of inclusion and exclusion that determine sociolinguistic systems.

Modernist ideologies of language This macroscopic angle makes our approach complementary to, but also an extension of, those forms of critique that already circulate intensely in the sociolinguistic literature, notably the critique of what we could broadly describe as the ethnolinguistic assumption – the assumption that aligns

Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen and Massimiliano Spotti

3

language use and ethnic or cultural group identity in a linear and one-on-one relationship, and in which the modern subject is defined as monolingual and monocultural. The ethnolinguistic assumption The ethnolinguistic assumption was already quite conclusively critiqued by Edward Sapir in his 1921 Language (‘Totally unrelated languages share in one culture, closely related languages – even a single language – belong to distinct cultural spheres’, Sapir, 1921, p. 213). The same assumption was crippled by Dell Hymes in his famous paper on the ‘tribe’ (Hymes, 1968), and more recent work has developed entirely different lines into the analysis of language and ethnic or cultural belonging (e.g. Rampton, 2006; Harris, 2006). The long lineage of such critiques can be explained by the fact that the ethnolinguistic assumption was the cornerstone of the classic Herderian language ideologies of the nation state (Bauman and Briggs, 2003; essays in Blommaert, 1999; Kroskrity, 2000 and especially Silverstein, 2000) and has lived a long life in a variety of versions in the context of state-managed language and culture policies throughout the twentieth century, one of its most prominent versions being ‘classic’ multiculturalism (Vertovec, 2010; for illustrations see Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998; essays in Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). As the central assumption of modern governmentality in the field of language and culture, it was through the ethnolinguistic assumption that governments addressed national minorities, immigrants and colonial subjects – ‘them’ – as well as their own ‘native’ class, gender and other sociolinguistic distinctions – ‘us’. Full membership of a nation was predicated on full (and exclusive) membership of an ethnolinguistic community: a community defined by one language and one culture. Speaking another language than the ‘national’ one, when seen from within the ethnolinguistic assumption, creates a fundamental problem of otherness for which a range of solutions was designed, from extinction and expulsion over assimilation to integration – because a ‘normal’ person naturally belongs to only one language and culture unit. This assumption thus organized several forms of social, cultural and political rejection and oppression in the modern nation state. The evidence for these practices is sufficiently known: Native American children had to wash their mouths with soap when they were heard speaking their native language; similar forms of punishment were administered to Aboriginals in Australia and Africans in the colonial empires. The Finnish Sámi people had Finnish as their official medium of instruction until 1995, and native minority languages as media of instruction are still in a nascent and fragile stage across the world. Remarkably, the ethnolinguistic assumption has experienced a revival of sorts in the context of a theme that, since at least the 1980s, became a

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fundamental attack on the language and culture hierarchies of the nation state: the recognition and empowerment of linguistic minorities and endangered languages (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Nettle and Romaine, 2000; May, 2001). Respect for national minorities, indigenous peoples and endangered cultural heritage became part of the postcolonial world order, and it represents a historical discontinuity with the era of the classic nation state. It is in the context of this discontinuity that the Sámi and many other minorities acquired the right to use their language in education. Yet, those who would have expected that this recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity within the nation state would have caused an ideological adjustment to a more relaxed and flexible view of language and culture were wrong; if anything, this development has strengthened the power and scope of the ethnolinguistic assumption, which is now eagerly adopted by minorities and used as a crucial, compelling and compulsory defining feature of minorities’ own purity (see Spotti, 2011). Indeed, as Michael Silverstein observes, ‘Groups of people are increasingly challenged to have newly active, positive cultural processes emanating from centring institutions, so that what we have here termed the relative and seemingly residual fact of locality gets semiotically turned into a positive attribute of their identity’ (Silverstein, 1998, p. 404; also Silverstein, 2003; Moore et al., 2010). Thus, while the recognition and empowerment of minorities is a discontinuity with earlier stages, it is at the same time a factor of continuity. The attention to empowerment of minorities and endangered linguistic and cultural groups is a distinct late-modern feature that shoots through the high-modern nation-state constructions and results in what can appear to be a politically and ideologically haphazard assemblage of different positions and orientations (see the work by Duchêne, 2008 on how linguistic minorities become entextualized in the discursive practices of supranational institutions). What we see, however, and what the essays in this book establish, is that both the classic high-modernity nation state and the late-modern recognition and empowerment of linguistic and cultural minorities within the nation state (or interstate systems such as the EU) proceed along very similar lines in practice. The upshot of this is that the hybrid nation state of late modernity operates very much within a modernist hegemonic discursive framework. In short, the nation state was, is and remains the terrain on which this hegemony is played out, and we will come back to this below. Policing modern sociolinguistic systems We must be more precise with regard to what we understand by the modernist language ideologies that will inform the analyses in this book. Even if the ethnolinguistic assumption underlies much of it (and has its roots in Enlightenment ideas of natural law), it is in itself not sufficient to delineate the space of modernist language ideologies.

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For Bauman and Briggs (2003), modernist ideas of language revolved around the rejection of ‘hybridity’, and hybridity is used as shorthand for every form of ‘impurity’ and ‘disorder’ in language. Languages, according to this modernist view, were only worthy of that label when they were pure, uninfluenced by outside forces, and showed clear and linear features of authenticity. This connection between language purity and authenticity emerged out of a romantic preoccupation with local cultures of the bucolic type: local or regional traditions that were seen as the roots of the cultures of the emerging nation states. We of course recognize the traces of the ethnolinguistic assumption here. The emerging field of dialectology was one of the main providers of scientific evidence for such local cultures, and linguistic structuralism became the methodology for studies of the languages of such cultures. Languages and dialects were given shape and scientific (and, shortly afterwards, political) reality as soon as they could be delineated and identified on the basis of a descriptive apparatus that emphasized the pure, correct and unique features of such units. A structural–descriptive grammar and a dictionary became the codified objectives for such exercises, in which modern languages obtained their official existence – an existence ‘on record’ as an artefactualized object of study, and as an essential ingredient of the recognition of cultures (Blommaert, 2008). Bauman and Briggs’ viewpoint gels with the classic discussion of modernity by Zygmund Baumann (1991), in which he sees the rejection of ambivalence as the key to understanding modernity. To be more precise, [a]mong the multitude of impossible tasks that modernity set itself and that made modernity into what it is, the task of order (more precisely and most importantly, of order as a task) stands out – as the least possible among the impossible and the least disposable among the indispensable; indeed, as the archetype for all other tasks, one that renders all other tasks mere metaphors of itself. (Baumann, 1991, p. 4, emphasis in the original) It was in the context of the emergence of modernity that the preoccupation with order became a major political, social, cultural and scientific objective: ‘[o]rder is what is not chaos; chaos is what is not orderly’ (ibid.), and this binary opposition between order and chaos became the driving force behind the different projects of modernity. Order, or the quest for order, became a feature of another dominant binary opposition of modernity: that of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’. According to Foucault (2003), modernity was organized around the rise of an intellectual and political paradigm – an episteme and a governmentality – in which the ‘normal’ subject was an ‘ordered’ subject, someone who behaved according to the norms of modern society, and such norms were heavily policed by state institutions such as

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schools and the legal system as well as by the scientific edifices of modern medicine and psychiatry. The ‘abnormal’ subject was someone who defied, either in defect or in excess, the clear categories that were used to describe and police the social system, and defining the ‘abnormal’ as an identifiable category in its own right was the task of modernist humanities. In the field of language, as we have seen, the normal was the normative – normal languages were pure, uninfluenced by other languages, and markers of non-ambivalent authentic identities. Three important axes thus defined the policing of linguistic normality; we shall use them as the organizing principles of this book: 1. The axis of order versus disorder in language use, often leading to modernist language policies in which languages were hierarchically ordered in relation to one another; 2. That of purity versus impurity, in which judgements about language ‘quality’ were made on the basis of modernist (i.e. structuralist) appraisals of the purity of a language form, projected onto the purity of its speakers (if you speak a ‘pure’ language X, you are a ‘real’ member of a culture Y); and 3. That of normality versus abnormality, in which identity judgements depended on judgements of normal versus abnormal language use. These axes dominated both the public debates and policies on language in society (and to a large extent still do; see the references to recent work on language testing above), as well as assessments of individual language proficiencies, competences and skills (as can be seen from the expanding success of the CEFR, also mentioned earlier). Modernist language policy and planning It is not an overstatement to claim that these language-ideological features of modernity have determined the sociolinguistic face of large parts of the world. Or at least, it is not an overstatement to claim that they have determined our current understanding of the sociolinguistics of large parts of the world, and that this understanding is shared by many expert and lay voices about language in society (see Williams, 1992 for a trenchant critique of modernist sociolinguistics and Makoni and Pennycook, 2007 for an influential recent statement). The tradition of language policy and planning studies, for instance, rests upon solid modernist principles. Multilingual societies, first, needed to reduce the number of (societally, and thus economically, valuable) languages in use on their territory – the principle of oligolingualism. Second, because of the efficiency and loyalty principle, the remaining languages needed to be ranked, hierarchically ordered across different domains in society (see for a fuller discussion Blommaert, 1996, and also 1999).

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Thus, in many postcolonial African states a number of local languages could be used in primary education, a smaller number in (parts of) secondary education, and one language – invariably the ex-colonial one – in higher education (see Mazrui and Mazrui, 1998; also the essays in Ricento, 2006). The general idea was that the high number of languages in postcolonial countries such as Cameroon or Nigeria was a form of ‘chaos’, which required a (modernist) effort to bring order. Indigenous languages also needed to be ‘developed’, and the model for such development was the former metropolitan language or classical languages such as Latin; exercises such as status and corpus planning always started from the assumption that what needed to be planned was a pure, uninfluenced, stable authentic language. Such forms of planning again mirrored the kinds of language policies that were in vigour in ‘developed’ regions such as Europe and North America, where ‘monoglot’ ideologies had dominated the sociolinguistic scene for about a century and had saturated state nationalisms as well as substate nationalisms (Silverstein, 1996; Kroon and Spotti, 2011; see also the essays in Kroskrity, 2000). The hierarchical ranking of languages within such monoglot sociolinguistic formations later gave rise to the linguistic minorities and linguistic rights paradigm, which, as we have already noted, again adopts a fundamentally modernist vocabulary (May, 2001). And it is within such a modernist language regime that Bourdieu identifies the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate language use – between bouche and gueule (Bourdieu, 1991). ‘Bouche’, as we know, was the normative and hence normal form of language use – the standard – while ‘gueule’ was the deviant, abnormal and substandard form (note the hierarchical order in the current sociolinguistic term ‘sub’-standard). Note that until fairly recently, widespread (and sociolinguistically highly salient) forms of linguistic ‘impurity’ such as codeswitching were also seen as substandard forms of language use, and most of the early influential research on code-switching saw it as a deviation of normal monolingual language use, a curious, perhaps intriguing and even somewhat amusing ‘freak’ form of language (see the essays in Auer, 1998 for a critique).

Challenges to modernism The ideological space of sociolinguistic modernism has now been described; changes in the social and cultural patterns in society, however, gradually undercut the explanatory power of these ideologies of language and empirically challenged them. Modernity, as we have seen, rejected ambivalence, the fact that things can have multiple forms, functions and meanings. In the field of language in society, it rejected sociolinguistic diversity, and if such rejection was impossible it ordered, regimented and policed such ‘chaotic’ sociolinguistic realities by means of modernist language policies and planning efforts. Behind such efforts we could usually discern an

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assumption, that oligolingual or monolingual language policies reflected the total or partial uniformity of the people – the people of a nation state, of a region or of a minority group. Such uniformity, needless to say, was and is a sociological illusion, and the failure of modernist language regimes became overt as soon as societies were manifestly confronted with and acknowledged societal diversity. Migration, in particular, offered critical challenges to monoglot state policies in domains such as education, welfare and public administration, and these challenges were identified early in the game (we can think of Jim Cummins’ work here; see Baker and Hornberger, 2001). Immigrants, as a rule, introduced different linguistic resources into areas dominated by state or substate monoglot regimes; as soon as they entered the education system or other state-sponsored systems, these systems became confronted with multilingualism as a reality which posed a range of operational, political and ideological problems. The complex patterns of multilingualism did not go well with a monolingual education policy (the dominant issue in Cummins’ work), and a widening gap emerged between the regime of language in schools and that outside schools and in the informal learning environments in which children dwelled (for the latter, see Heath, 1983). This gap was long seen as a deficit for the immigrant children and as a major factor in explaining the widespread academic underachievement and lack of upward social mobility of minority students (and still is; see Crawford, 2001 and essays in Gorter and Extra, 2008 for critiques). At the same time, it was demonstrated that this gap offered a rich terrain for inspecting the social dynamics of language contact, for instance in providing an almost infinite and dynamic range of identity resources for young people, often connected with popular culture and with subcultural patterns of conduct (Rampton, 1995; Harris, 2006; Leppänen et al., 2009). These subcultural patterns of conduct were, in effect, patterns of conduct typical of a late-modern society affected by globalization; flows of people, images and symbolic resources such as language (Rampton, 2006; also Blommaert, 2010). Globalization has given contemporary societies a profound makeover, and this makeover included a sociolinguistic change, both in terms of quantity (more languages being present in migration centres such as the metropolises of the West) and of quality (languages being used differently in such centres). Vertovec (2006, 2007) coined the term ‘super-diversity’ for these changes, suggesting that the post-Cold War forms of diversity (thus, the forms of diversity we associate with contemporary globalization processes) are of a different order than those generated by the previous waves of immigration. The fact can hardly be denied: at least sociolinguistically, we see an escalating diversity, not only in Western urban centres but also elsewhere around the globe, and the new discipline of linguistic landscaping does its best to map the quantitative dimensions of these forms of diversity (see

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Extra and Barni, 2008 for examples). Qualitatively, sociolinguistic life is also changing. The introduction and success of new media such as satellite television, the Internet and the mobile phone (the last being far more democratically distributed than the two former ones) enable migrants to maintain patterns of native language usage that in the previous generation would have been very difficult to sustain. These new media also generate new issues with respect to language and literacy norms, as they are forums for heteronormative experiments with language varieties and with literacy forms (Kress, 2003; Green and Haddon, 2009). Complex forms of language, genre and style mixing emerge, and the late-modern urban subject is distinctly and intensely polyglot – where ‘glot’ replaces ‘language’, because very often such forms of mixing are not predicated on the ‘full’ knowledge of one or more language, but rather on ‘truncated’ bits and pieces of language (Blommaert, 2010, pp. 102–36; Leppänen, 2012). Such new forms of diversity raise theoretical and descriptive issues that cannot be addressed by means of the modernist paradigm discussed in the previous section. The modernist conception of language (and of the language-using subject) was based on clearly identifiable boundaries between languages and on standard indexical attributive links between languages and identities. Widespread ‘impurity’ of language, as in superdiversity, does not fit that picture, and, of course, a theoretical universe in which everyone is sociolinguistically abnormal is a universe in dramatic need of revision. Such a revision is long overdue, because as we said at the outset, the realities of late modernity are perpetually (and perhaps increasingly) confronted with sociolinguistic recipes from the modernist kitchen. The effect is dangerous multilingualism: particular forms of latemodern multilingualism are effectively endangering because, even if they define the sociolinguistic realities of contemporary Western societies, they are imagined as being disordered, impure and abnormal. Those who use such forms are at risk of being disqualified, marginalized, stigmatized or excluded.

The nation state: focus on Finland This is the macroscopic and historical field of tension in which this book will be placed: the tension between a late-modern sociolinguistic phenomenology and a high-modern ideological instrumentarium by means of which these phenomena are being addressed and handled. This instrumentarium operates along the axes specified earlier: those of order versus disorder, purity versus impurity and normality versus abnormality. This tension yields a wide variety of concrete problems, ranging from language-political anomalies, through inefficient and discriminating systems of ‘integration’ and education, to individual uncertainty and unease about language and language use. We believe that this tension is discernible in numerous regions

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across the world, even though it may assume a variety of actual shapes, and the growing literature on this topic supports this. We will repeatedly stress the importance of the nation state in this story. While there is an abundance of literature on globalization in which the end of the nation state is proclaimed, there is very little evidence for this in the sociolinguistic field. Quite the contrary: the increase of late-modern super-diversity in Western societies appears to go hand in hand with a strengthening of the nation state (or of interstate systems) as a guardian of order – something we can see clearly in fields such as immigration and asylum, security policies, welfare and education – and language emerges as a critical battlefield in almost all of these fields (e.g. Blommaert, 2009). Language, thus, becomes the object upon which the tension of late-modern realities and those of the high-modern – this hybrid of the contemporary nation state – is played out and by means of which this tension is articulated; it is through language that we see the continuity of the high-modern nation state in a late-modern society, and in which the high-modern nation state deploys its full apparatus for creating, restoring or maintaining sociolinguistic order. This book attempts to provide a panorama of various aspects of this issue in one nation state, Finland. Confining the studies to Finland offers us several advantages. The first one is that the studies cumulatively construct a rather comprehensive and detailed picture of dangerous multilingualism in one country, thus allowing levels of detail and depth in our examples, which would be hard to achieve in a comparative project. In addition, Finland is a relatively young and homogeneous nation state in the geographical periphery of Europe. Its rapid post-war development into a modern, urban and highly technologized society highlights much uneasy collusion of tenacious high-modern aspirations and a well-honed instrumentarium for order, and the disorderly processes of change ensuing from late modernity and globalization. Before gaining independence in 1917, Finland had been part of two empires. From the twelfth century to 1809, it formed the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden (or Sweden-Finland), and from 1809 to 1917 it was the autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. Thus, Finnish history is marked by extended periods of colonization by foreign powers, but even as a sovereign state, Finland was the child of crises. After gaining its independence, the new nation was deeply scarred and divided by a civil war in 1918. The warring parties were the Social Democrats, the ‘Reds’, who were mainly Finnish-speaking working class, and the forces of the non-socialist, conservative-led Senate, the ‘Whites’, dominated by farmers and middle- and upper-class Swedish speakers. While the Second World War to an extent managed to unify the nation against a common enemy, it also brought along another trauma: large areas of what used to be the easternmost parts of Finland were lost to the new neighbouring

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empire in the east, the USSR. These conflicts and traumas of the new nation and nation state explain part of the historical mistrust of the foreign in Finland. As the essays in this volume will illustrate, this mistrust also manifests in the sense of danger that foreign languages and multilingualism have often been taken to pose for Finland. Since 1922, Finland has been an officially bilingual country with two ‘national’ languages, Finnish and Swedish. Currently, out of the 5.3 million citizens, 90.7 per cent speak Finnish as their first language and 5.4 per cent speak Swedish. Swedish is offered as an obligatory second language to Finnish-speaking students. In addition, Finland hosts several other minorities: besides the Swedish minority in the south-west of the country, the Sámi populations in the north are the most prominent, while the small resident Roma minority population is quite visible as well. The Finnish constitution ensures that the Sámi and Roma and other groups are entitled to maintain and develop their own languages. The Sámi have a legal right to use their own languages in communication with Finnish authorities, and also the rights of sign language users or other individuals in need of interpreting and translation services are protected by law. Each of these minority languages has a relatively low number of L1 users. For instance, only 0.03 per cent of the population speak Sámi as their mother tongue (Statistics Finland, 2010a). However, many of the speakers of these minority languages are bi/multilinguals, having either Finnish or Swedish as their first language. Immigration to Finland from the rest of the world is still quite modest. Finland has the lowest percentage of non-EU migrants in the European Union: during the past ten years, the number of immigrants to Finland has fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000 per year (Statistics Finland, 2010b). Although it is a slow process, Finland is gradually becoming a multilingual society: according to the Ministry of Justice (2009) 120 languages are currently spoken in the country. Speakers of Russian make up the largest group with circa 52,000 L1 speakers (in 2009), comprising up to 25 per cent of all foreign-language speakers. Speakers of Estonian form the second largest group with circa 24,000 speakers, while speakers of English (c.12,000) come in third place (Statistics Finland, 2009). In this changing sociolinguistic terrain, English has rapidly acquired the status of an international vernacular (Leppänen et al., 2011), and Russian is repeatedly mentioned as a language of importance for the future generation. Finland is an EU member state and is also cooperating with other Nordic and Baltic countries in a variety of institutional contexts (see Martin, this volume; Blomberg and Okk, 2008). In addition to the political, historical and social developments in Finnish society, the notion of multilingualism as a disruptive, impure and abnormal state of affairs highlighted in the present analysis is also the outcome of a strong nationalist cultural tradition (see also Salo in this volume). Its origins date from the days of the new Finnish nation and nation state,

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and the establishment of the nation state’s own version of ethnolinguistic ideology. A particularly influential formulation of this ideology can be located in the writings of the Finnish ‘national’ philosopher, J.V. Snellman, who was strongly influenced by, for example, the ideas of von Herder. In 1844, Snellman wrote that It is often thought that it does not matter which sound or language you use, they just express the same thoughts. But human beings do not only express their thoughts in their words, but they also believe, feel, know and desire in their words, and their thoughts, the whole of their rational being moves and lives in a language. How could the spirit of a nation express itself in any other language except in its own? [translation by SL] It is largely thanks to Snellman that in Finland, national identity has long been seen as crucially dependent on what were coined as the national language/s (see also Mantila, 2005, 2006). In this ideology, language has been taken to capture and express the fundamental essence of the nation. Even under Swedish rule, language was a key factor that contributed to the sense that the Finns were a distinct people. As suggested by Upton (1980, p. 4), the Finno-Ugric language, structurally quite distinct from the surrounding Germanic and Slavonic languages and spoken by the majority of the population, the common people, ‘reminded the Finns that they were a peculiar people’. The Finnish ruling class, however, had merged with the Swedish settlers and administrators and adopted the Swedish language. The situation changed radically in 1809 when Finland became a part of Russia. The old ruling class could no longer identify with the new imperial power. Language, religion, culture, and political and historical tradition divided them from the Russians, and as a result, they came to feel the need to establish a new identity as Finns. In the end this need required the ruling class to identify with the language of the common people, Finnish, one outcome of which was the birth of the Fennoman movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Snellman’s role in the movement was crucial: his programmatic view was that the ‘nation’, i.e. the common people, needed to be educated (or, literally, made ‘civilized’), and the civilized Swedish-speaking elite needed to be made part of the nation by learning Finnish and by making it a language of higher learning. Ultimately the goal of the Fennoman movement was to make Finland a monolingual nation and nation state (Paunonen, 2001, pp. 227–8). Up to the present day Finland, has, indeed, been marked by a strongly monolingual and monocultural self-imagination. As was suggested above, part of this is grounded in long histories of oppression and control by foreign powers, which have provided a backdrop for narratives of national uniqueness. Such narratives often refer to the exceptional features of the

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Finnish language, a Finno-Ugric language contrasting sharply with the predominance of Indo-European languages in that part of the globe. There is, thus, a quite well-articulated nationalist undercurrent, and language is a central feature of it.

Contents of the book As already sketched above, this book is organized around three themes and is divided, accordingly, into the parts of Order and Disorder, Purity and Impurity and Normality and Abnormality. While the settings and discourses discussed in the individual essays represent a great deal of variety, they all, in their own way, tackle the danger that multilingualism is assumed to pose to what is taken to be the orderly, pure and normal state of affairs in the land. They also highlight aspects of the conflicts and collusions that institutions, groups and individuals have with the diffusion, hybridity and fluctuations ensuing from late modernity. The first thematic part, focusing on order and disorder, includes four essays. The part begins with the essay ‘Finland’s Official Bilingualism – a Bed of Roses or of Procrustes?’ by Olli-Pekka Salo who, after giving a brief history of bilingualism in Finland, discusses the complex effects of official bilingualism – the bilingual order protected by law – on a variety of fields and domains within society. The author shows how, while seemingly well functioning in theory, official bilingualism in Finland also faces serious problems in some crucial societal fields, such as healthcare, law and education. The key challenge here is that the linguistic rights of the age-old Swedish-speaking minority need to be secured by educating, for instance, legal and medical experts who have a sufficient command of Swedish. On the other hand, there needs to be more willingness than there has traditionally been, to an open discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of keeping the second national language as a general school subject in basic education. The second essay in this part, ‘Linguistic Diversity as a Problem and a Resource – Multilingualism in European and Finnish Policy Documents’ by Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri, offers an analysis of Finnish and European language policy documents. In their essay the authors demonstrate how policies struggle to come to terms with the messy realities of an increasingly multilingual everyday social life, trying to create some balance and order in societies that are under a great deal of pressure. Multilingualism and its political representations are investigated for the purpose of shedding light on the societal tensions that are brought to the surface as policy actors at different levels meet, making societal change visible. One of the key conclusions of the essay is that in the era of superdiversity there is a renewed need for more control and coercion, revealed as growing emphasis on nation-state-oriented policies.

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The part finishes with two essays on Finnish schools. Both of them are motivated by the fact that in this era of globalization, increased immigration and mobility have posed new challenges to the uniformity of the nation state, creating new tensions between well-established systems originally designed for a relatively homogeneous society, and the linguistic diversification of an increasingly heterogeneous population. In their essay ‘Dealing with Increasing Linguistic Diversity in Schools – the Finnish Example’, Minna Suni and Sirkku Latomaa investigate how well Finnish society, with its long history as a bilingual country, succeeds in managing its increasing multilingualism. They do this with the help of a review of the development of language education policies in Finland and a report on how these are currently implemented with respect to immigrant students. The essay shows that the situation is far from being ideal, as there seems to be a clear discrepancy between the ideal order purported by recent language education policies aimed at securing language instruction for immigrants, and the actual implementation of these policies. Suni and Latomaa’s study is complemented by Sanna Voipio-Huovinen and Maisa Martin’s essay ‘Problematic Plurilingualism – Teachers’ Views’, which approaches the same issue with the help of interviews with teachers of immigrant students. The authors single out and discuss teachers’ typical attitudes to, and evaluations of, immigrant students’ plurilingualism. Their analysis shows how, despite the existence of explicit policy guidelines, schools and teachers are struggling to come to terms with the new challenges posed by the changed situation. The authors argue that one of the reasons behind the inability of schools and teachers to come to terms with the changed situation is that they are still relying on the old, pre-immigration order, against which the current situation in many schools with immigrant students appears to them as problematic. Both these essays focusing on Finnish schools thus foreground the confusion and ambivalence of teachers and schools, who have long been assisted in their operations by explicit educational policies but who are now faced with an increasingly disorderly situation in which the old, pre-immigration policies are no longer applicable. The second part of this book addresses issues of purity and impurity in language/s and language use. Each essay in this part demonstrates how the danger posed by late modernity to the alleged stability and integrity of national, regional or minority languages leads to a heightened concern with purity: the need to preserve and protect the local language from disruptive ‘foreign’ influences. The section begins with Mika Lähteenmäki and Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski’s essay ‘Hard Currency or a Stigma – the Russian–Finnish Bilingualism among Young Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Finland’. The essay reports on the findings of a survey of Russian-speaking students’ experiences regarding the use of Russian and Finnish in Finland. The authors argue that for such reasons as the tension-ridden relationship Finns have had – and to a great extent still have – with Russia (and the

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former USSR), Russian continues to be an actively disfavoured language. In addition, they suggest that discursive representations of Russia as a threat, which are deeply rooted in the Herderian Holy Trinity of language, culture and ethnicity, also function to emphasize the unity, self-containedness and purity of Finland, the Finnish language and culture. In their essay ‘Finnish Culture and Language Endangered – Language Ideological Debates on English in the Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007’, Sirpa Leppänen and Päivi Pahta argue that the nationalist language ideology, still robustly advocated, is one of the driving forces behind the language ideological debates in the Finnish press about the increasing visibility and significance of English for Finns. The authors show how, in these debates, English has often been cast into the role of the other – it is depicted as both the malicious attacker and the corruptive seducer – and argue that the ways in which the pervasiveness of this image of the foreign other – in this case the English language – has been rejuvenated in recent public discourses are in fact symptomatic of the crisis of societies moving from an era of ‘first modernity’ to late modernity. In such periods of crisis, language ideologies which fall back on national language as the essence of a nation and nation state have a certain appeal. The third essay of this part, ‘Multilingualism in Nordic Cooperation – a View from the Margin’ by Maisa Martin, moves outside Finland and, from the perspective of speakers of Finnish, looks at politically consensual language policy in pan-Nordic cooperation. The author shows how the requirement of skandinaviska (‘Scandinavian’) as the lingua franca in official Nordic activities and encounters is yet another example of how the ideological notion of purity is harnessed to the service of unity: skandinaviska is taken to enhance the sense of the Nordic area as culturally and ideologically unified territory, where all the nationalities can come together on an equal basis. In practice, Martin argues, the choice of skandinaviska creates a new kind of inequality, whereby the participants, Finns and immigrant participants in particular, for whom a Scandinavian language is a second or foreign language, are marginalized and disempowered. The second part concludes with the essay ‘The Dangers of Normativity – the Case of Minority Language Media’ by Sari Pietikäinen and Helen KellyHolmes. Using the case of Sámi and Irish minority language media as their illustrative cases, the authors discuss how normativity can be both dangerous and protective for languages and speakers. They show how, in principle, minority language media challenge the abnormal status accorded to multilingualism by the official policies of most nation states. However, in reality, in order to achieve media for minority languages, these media often adopt a typically high-modern strategy, whereby impurity – hybridity, multiplicity, crossing, the use of even smaller languages – is combated and denied. The third and final part of the book focuses on multilingualism as normality and abnormality. Despite their different foci of interest, all of the

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essays in this part shed light on processes, practices and ideological perceptions related to how (ab)normal multilingualism is taken to be in different domains and contexts. In the first essay of the part, ‘Discourses of Proficiency and Normality – Endangering Aspects of English in an Individual’s Biography of Language Use’ by Tiina Räisänen, multilingualism appears as a problem: Räisänen shows how the value and usefulness of the multilingual repertoires of globalized employees vary and shift according to the changing normativities in operation in the different settings these employees find themselves in at work. More specifically, Räisänen’s chapter explores the trajectory of an individual, a young Finnish engineer, from being a learner of English as a foreign language, through a stay abroad in Germany as a student, to a position as employee of a globalized company operating in China. With the help of this particular case, the author shows how English actually prevents individuals, like the young Finnish employee, from fully engaging in social activities that would be important for them to manage well in globalized working life. On the basis of this case, the author also shows how, in the kind of discursive work that her subject engages in, such individuals must recurrently struggle with questions of language proficiency, normality and abnormality. Multilingualism also proves problematic in everyday informal, interactive web discussion forums, as discussed by Samu Kytölä in his chapter ‘Peer Normativity and Sanctioning of Linguistic Resources-in-Use – on Non-Standard Englishes in Finnish Football Forums Online’. The author shows how the domain under investigation in his essay is relatively free of high modernist demands for purity, but how it, nevertheless, illustrates a heightened concern with norms and normativity: the ways in which multilingual resources can be and should be used – their normality – is heavily regulated and policed at the grassroots level by the interactants. The ascription to and use of particular language resources are taken to be a key for full participation rights, agency and belonging. With two cases, both highlighting multilingualism, Kytölä shows how they give rise to intense normative peer evaluation, harsh humour, mockery and discrimination, finally leading to the exclusion of some participants. The third essay in this part, ‘Experiencing Multilingualism: the Elderly Becoming Marginalized?’ by Anne Pitkänen-Huhta and Marja Hujo, discusses how the allegedly positive effects and outcomes of multilingualism are for some social groups unattainable and may, in fact, contribute to their social exclusion and marginalization. With the help of interviews with an elderly Finnish monolingual couple living in a remote rural area in Finland, the authors report on the couple’s grassroots-level story of language contact and struggle with the strange and foreign in their environment, of marginalization and coping. The essay shows how ordinary people are touched by multilingualism, how they experience it and live through it willingly or unwillingly. The authors show how the elderly may

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well be fully aware of the processes of globalization and multilingualism in their environment, but how this awareness is not enough to prevent their self-perception as someone abnormal in society, despite their capacity to conduct their everyday lives completely monolingually. At the societal level, the story of the elderly illustrates how increasing multilingualism may lead to a societal division between those who have the necessary skills for full participation and upward mobility in society, and those who, because of their monolingualism, are excluded. The final essay of the part, ‘When One of Your Languages Is Not Recognized as a Language at all’ by Elina Tapio and Ritva Takkinen, presents an extreme case of linguistic abnormality: the case of the multilingual Deaf whose right to learn and use sign language is questioned, resented and made difficult by educational and medical institutions and their dominant discourses. With the help of interviews of parents of deaf children as well as deaf adults, they show how there has recently been a conservative and oralist backlash in attitudes to and practices related to the Deaf, and how in these sign language and its speakers are regarded as fundamentally abnormal. This is because they are unwilling or refuse to communicate orally, although modern medicine, with the help of the cochlear implant, is now capable of converting many of them into oral communicators. The essay also describes the battles the Deaf have to go through when they seek recognition of their linguistic repertoires and, in actuality, of their right to be considered ‘normal’. It also effectively foregrounds how a language can be seen as a danger to the mainstream society, and how its learning and use are then effectively policed and disciplined by scientific and educational discourses about language.

Conclusion Before we hand over this book to the reader, we need to make the following final point. In many ways, this book continues an old tradition in sociolinguistics in which multilingualism was seen as a problem to be confronted and solved. Some titles speak for themselves. The ground-breaking collection of studies by Fishman et al. (1968) was called ‘Language Problems of Developing Nations’, and a leading journal on language planning, founded in 1976, is called ‘Language Problems and Language Planning’. The assumptions that multilingualism was a problem and that sociolinguistics should address that problem were uncontroversial in that era, and our book reasserts them. At the same time, this book represents a rather fundamental break with that older tradition, and the reasons for this have been given above. In the older tradition the ‘problem’ of multilingualism was defined in modernist terms, and recommended solutions consequently drifted in the direction of the modernist forms of hierarchical ranking, standardization and development we discussed earlier. Thus, problems with multilingualism were

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generally seen as problems of (dis)order, and the solutions that emerged out of such analyses rarely brought real benefit to the multilingual subjects to whom they were addressed. The reason for this failure was that sociolinguists of that era tended to overlook the complexity of the phenomenology of multilingualism-on-the-ground. When people mostly speak a mixed, hybrid variety of language – a typical urban variety of language, in other words – they are not well served when their language is dissected and regarded as being composed of two or three other ones, only one of which will then be used in schools and in public administration. They are then at risk of seeing their language disqualified, taken away from them, defined as a sublanguage, a ‘pidgin’, ‘jargon’ or ‘sabir’; of becoming literate in a language or variety they do not use in other parts of life and remaining illiterate in the language or variety they use most; and of seeing their language disappear from linguistic maps, atlases and Ethnologue inventories. Many effectively ‘endangered’ languages in the world belong to this category of mixed and hybrid varieties, and the remarkable thing is that they are usually not even recognized as endangered languages. The task is therefore to come up with better, more just and more equitable solutions to problems of multilingualism. This book consequently starts ‘with its feet on the ground’, so to speak, from a strong awareness that the phenomenology of language in society has changed, has become more complex and less predictable than we thought it was. We have the advantage over earlier generations of being able to draw on a far more sophisticated battery of sociolinguistic insights and understandings, and we intend to draw these more advanced tools into our discussions. Our diagnostic, as we said before, will revolve around a tension between two historical eras, high modernity and late modernity, and the problems we investigate are problems that emerge out of this tension. The long historical development from high to late modernity is a crucial backdrop for our approach, because we see dangerous multilingualism as part of the debris of high modernity still affecting late modern societies. High modernity has thus not disappeared, it has not been replaced by late modernity; both developments coincide and overlap, each at different levels of social structure. Late modernity defines reality-on-the-ground, while high modernity defines the ideological and institutional perception of this reality. This is why, in our view, we do not live in sociolinguistic postmodernity: the reality of language in society is to a large extent determined by the ideological and institutional responses to it, and these responses are those of high modernity. Our social and political systems are, in that sense, more modernist than ever before. The challenge for contemporary sociolinguistics is not to simply reject or dismiss these modernist reflexes and responses, but to understand them as real forces in our field and as features of any sociolinguistic reality we intend to address in the age of late modernity. This awareness (which we can call a ‘post-Fishmanian’ awareness) drives the discussions in this book, and to these we can now turn.

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References Auer, P. (ed.) (1998) Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge. Baker, C. and N. Hornberger (eds) (2001) An Introductory Reader to the Writings of Jim Cummins. Clevedon, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bauman, R. and C. Briggs (2003) Voices of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumann, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blomberg, J. and G. Okk (2008) Opportunities for Cooperation between Estonia and Finland 2008. Prime Minister’s Publications 10/2008. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 10 May 2011. Blommaert, J. (1996) Language planning as a discourse on language and society: the linguistic ideology of a scholarly tradition. Language Problems and Language Planning, 20 (3), pp. 199–222. Blommaert, J. (ed.) (1999) Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Blommaert, J. (2008) Artefactual ideologies and the textual production of African languages. Language and Communication, 28 (4), pp. 291–307. Blommaert, J. (2009) Language, asylum and the national order. Current Anthropology, 50 (4), pp. 415–41. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and J. Verschueren (1998) Debating Diversity. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Crawford, J. (2001) At War with Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Duchêne, A. (2008) Ideologies across Nations. The Construction of Linguistic Minorities at the United Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Extra, G. and M. Barni (eds) (2008) Mapping Linguistic Diversity in Multicultural Contexts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Extra, G., M. Spotti and P. Van Avermaet (eds) (2009) Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship: Cross-National Perspectives on Integration Regimes. London: Continuum. Fishman, J., R. Ferguson and J. Das Gupta (eds) (1968) Language Problems of Developing Nations. New York: Wiley. Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal. New York: Picador. Gorter, D. and G. Extra (eds) (2008) Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Green, N. and L. Haddon (2009) Mobile Communications. Oxford: Berg. Harris, R. (2006) New Ethnicities and Language Use. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan-Brun, G., C. Mar-Molinero and P. Stevenson (eds) (2009) Discourses on Language and Integration. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hymes, D. (1968) Linguistic problems in defining the concept of ‘tribe’. In J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Problem of Tribe. Seattle: American Ethnological Society and University of Washington Press, pp. 23–48. Hymes, D. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality. London: Taylor & Francis. Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.

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Kroon, S. and M. Spotti (2011) Immigrant minority language teaching policies and practices in The Netherlands: policing dangerous multilingualism. In V. Domovic, S. Gehrmann, M. Krüger-Potratz and A. Petrovic (eds) Europäische Bildung: Konzepte und Perspektiven aus fünf Ländern. Münster: Waxmann, pp. 87–103. Kroskrity, P. (ed.) (2000) Regimes of Language. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press. Leppänen, S. (2012) Linguistic and discursive heteroglossia on the translocal internet: the case of web writing. In M. Sebba, S. Mahootian and C. Jonsson (eds) Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. London: Routledge. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, A. Piirainen-Marsh, T. Nikula and S. Peuronen (2009) Young people’s translocal new media uses: a multiperspective analysis of language choice and heteroglossia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14 (4), pp. 1080–107. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, T. Nikula, S. Kytölä, T. Törmäkangas, K. Nissinen, L. Kääntä, T. Virkkula, M. Laitinen, P. Pahta, H. Koskela, S. Lähdesmäki and H. Jousmäki (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes. Helsinki: Research Unit for the Variation, Contacts and Change in English. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 13 September 2011. Makoni, S. and A. Pennycook (eds) (2007) Disinventing and Reinventing Languages. Clevedon, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Mantila, H. (2005) Suomi kansalliskielenä [Finnish as a national language]. In Johansson, M. and R. Pyykkö (eds) Monikielinen Eurooppa – kielipolitiikkaa ja käytän töä [Multilingual Europe – Language Policy and Practice]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Mantila, H. (2006) Kielipolitiikka ja suomalainen arki [Language politics and Finnish everyday life]. Tieteessä tapahtuu, 3 (2006), pp. 39–41. May, S. (2001) Language and Minority Rights. London: Longman. Mazrui, A. and A. Mazrui (1998) The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience. University of Chicago Press. Ministry of Justice (2009) Muut kielet [Other Languages]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 13 September 2011. Moore, R.E., S. Pietikäinen and J. Blommaert (2010) Counting the losses: numbers as the language of language endangerment. Sociolinguistic Studies, 4 (1), pp. 1–26. Nettle, D. and S. Romaine (2000) Vanishing Voices: the Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford University Press. Paunonen, H. (2001) Kansankielestä kansalliskieleksi [From the language of the common people to a national language]. Virittäjä, 105, pp. 223–39. Pavlenko, A. and A.J. Blackledge (2004) New theoretical approaches to the study of negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. In A. Pavlenko and A.J. Blackledge (eds) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–33. Phillipson, Robert (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006) Language and Late Modernity. Cambridge University Press. Ricento, T. (ed.) (2006) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. London: Blackwell. Sapir, E. (1921) Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

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Silverstein, M. (1996) Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds) The Matrix of Language. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, pp. 284–306. Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, pp. 401–26. Silverstein, M. (2000) Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. In P. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, pp. 85–138. Silverstein, M. (2003) The whens and wheres – as well as hows – of ethnolinguistic recognition. Public Culture, 15 (3), pp. 531–57. Snellman, J.V. (1844) Det enda nödvändiga icke blott för den inhemska litteraturen [The only necessary thing, and not only for our domestic fiction]. Saima, 24, 13 June 1844, pp. 2–4. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 25 January 2011. Spotti, M. (2011) Modernist language ideologies, indexicalities and identities: looking at the multilingual classroom through a post-Fishmanian lens. In L. Wei (ed.) Applied Linguistics Review, vol. 2, pp. 29–50. Statistics Finland (2009) Review of the Population Structure of Finland 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 12 September 2011. Statistics Finland (2010a) Number of Foreign-Language Speakers Exceeded 200,000. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 12 September 2011. Statistics Finland (2010b) Immigration, Emigration and Net Immigration in 1971–2010. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 12 September 2011. Upton, A. F. (1980). The Finnish Revolution, 1917–1918. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Van Avermaet, P. (2009) Fortress Europe? Language policy regimes for immigration and citizenship. In G. Hogan-Brun, C. Mar-Molinero and P. Stevenson (eds) Discourses on Language and Integration. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 5–43. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25. University of Oxford. Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), pp. 1024–54. Vertovec, S. (2010) Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, contexts and conditions of diversity. International Social Science Journal, 199, pp. 83–95. Williams, Glyn (1992) Sociolinguistics: a Sociological Critique. London: Routledge.

Part I Order – Disorder

2 Finland’s Official Bilingualism – a Bed of Roses or of Procrustes? Olli-Pekka Salo

Introduction Finland is a country with two national languages,1 Finnish and Swedish. Finland is by no means the only officially bilingual country in the world, but opposite to the situation in many other countries, Finnish bilingualism is highly appreciated internationally, as it is regarded as well functioning (see e.g. McRae, 1999). Compared to two other well-known examples of officially bilingual countries, Canada and Belgium, Finland excels by truly attributing both languages equal status, whereas in the other two the formal recognition of the minority language in the public sphere has remained essentially symbolic (Schnapper, 2004). So, multilingualism being a catchword of today, Finland seems quite successful in that respect. However, this model state of bilingualism faces serious problems despite the noble intentions of ensuring its citizens’ constitutional rights through the use of their mother tongue. This can be seen, for instance, in cases where public authorities lack sufficient command of the other national language to be able to serve the citizen in his/her native tongue. As the state aims at avoiding these kinds of shortcomings, both national languages are part of the national core curriculum for basic education (National Board of Education, 2004) to provide the citizens with language skills in the other national language. However, not everybody is satisfied with an educational practice in which the large majority is obliged to study the minority’s language for a three-year minimum. In this chapter I am going to shed some light on Finland’s official bilingualism – linguistic order protected by law – by introducing a variety of fields which illustrate the complexities and somewhat disorderly realities of the issue. For instance, I examine the sometimes vital consequences of high demands of language competence within public authorities such as the medical profession and the police, as well as the impacts of having the other national language (in this case Swedish) as a compulsory subject in the Finnish national core curricula with regard to the study of foreign 25

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languages. Before getting into detail with these issues, I give a brief summary of the relationships between these two languages in the history of Finland.

A brief history of Finland’s bilingualism As the French historian Marc Bloch (1953, p. 43) points out, one can only understand the present by the past. Thus, to understand the present linguistic situation in Finland, it is essential to briefly outline the history of the relationship between the nation’s two languages. Due to its northern location, Finland’s demographic history is fairly short, but the country has been continuously populated ever since the last Ice Age (see e.g. Huurre, 2005). We know very little of these first people: there is no certainty of where they came from or what language they spoke. However, research on loanwords (see e.g. Koivulehto, 2001) has shown that there are very old Indo-European loanwords in Finnish, which implies that some kind of pre-Finnish must have been spoken relatively close to the Baltic Sea already quite early, that is, around 1900 BCE. It has been suggested that the Baltic Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sámi was separated around 1500–1000 BCE, and research indicates that there were at least three proto-Finnic dialects at that time (see e.g. Laakso, 2001). Apparently, Finnish was a living oral language when Swedish-speaking settlers arrived in the coastal regions during medieval times. Finland was annexed to Catholic Sweden, and Swedish kings established their rule in 1249 (Sawyer and Sawyer, 1993). In the Middle Ages, the language of business was Middle Low German, and religious activities were conducted in Latin. Swedish, then again, was the main language of jurisdiction, administration and, to a certain extent, of higher education, which meant that the majority of the population in Finland had few possibilities to use their mother tongue in situations other than daily chores. Despite the underprivileged position of Finnish, the first comprehensive writing system for the language was created as early as the sixteenth century. This was done by a Finnish bishop, Mikael Agricola, whose endeavour can be seen as a natural part of the Christian reform movement in Europe, during which vernacular languages were considered of utmost importance in conveying religious information (see e.g. McGrath, 1999). Even if vernaculars replaced Latin as the language of religion throughout Europe, it was not enough for Finnish to become a recognized cultural language. In fact, when Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire some 200 years later in 1809, Swedish remained the only official language. Language was not an issue during the first 50 years of the Grand Duchy, which can be characterized as a period of consolidation, during which the authorities succeeded in convincing the Russian court not only of their own loyalty, but of that of all Finns. However, this was followed by a period of increased independence, during which Finnish

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was elevated from a language of the common people to a national language equal to Swedish. This increased independence strengthened the national spirit to an extent that made the Russian authorities feel uncomfortable about the possible outcome. As a result, Russia introduced decrees, such as the language manifesto of 1900 which made Russian the state language of Finland. This 20-year era of attempted Russification (1899–1917) ultimately turned out to be unsuccessful and detrimental to Finland’s relationship with the Russian Empire. The era of the autonomy was characterized by national romanticism, which in Finland was not only seen as an attempt to separate from Russia, but also as an emancipation from the lingering Swedish influence in society and culture. This resulted in the rise of a strong movement that promoted the use of the Finnish language in education, research and administration. The idea that the state would be administered in a language not spoken by almost 90 per cent of the population was considered outmoded. Interestingly enough, it was the Swedish-speaking academia who worked deliberately to strengthen the position of the Finnish language. Consequently, many influential Swedish-speaking families learned Finnish, fennicized their names and changed their everyday language to Finnish, sometimes not a very easy task. As the educated class was almost entirely Swedish-speaking, the first generation of the Finnish nationalists and Fennomans came predominantly from a Swedish-speaking background. For instance, such national Finnish icons as J.L. Runeberg, Z. Topelius and J.V. Snellman all wrote in Swedish about the importance of giving Finnish a higher status in the society. Runeberg’s Vårt land (‘Our Land’), the first poem in an epic collection on the Finnish War 1808–9, even became the Finnish National Anthem. This rising awareness of the recognition of a separate Finnish identity can be summarized in a phrase expressed by A.I. Arwidsson: ‘Swedes we are no longer, Russians we do not want to become, let us therefore be Finns.’ Even if there was a strong nationalist movement seeking a unified national identity during the autonomy, there nevertheless were language conflicts between speakers of Swedish and Finnish. Swedish speakers clearly realized that they needed to appeal to the large Finnish-speaking majority to promote their ideals, and many upper-class Swedish speakers started speaking Finnish. Soon, however, a countermovement was born, as the Swedish speakers understood that they needed to secure the future of their own language as well. The Swedish-minded feared that the Swedish language in Finland would eventually die out and that a change of language would weaken Finland’s bonds with Western civilization and Western Christianity. Furthermore, they saw aggressive Russian nationalism as a threat and dreaded that it would eventually lead to the Russification of the country. The Swedish-minded came up with a slogan: ‘Swedish today – Finnish tomorrow – Russian the day after tomorrow’. These fears made the Swedish-minded believe that it was their patriotic duty to defend the

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Swedish language in Finland. However, they were extremely aware of the fact that keeping Swedish as the sole language of administration would be unrealistic, and therefore they fought for a maximum of official bilingualism. The Finnish-minded elite, led by J.V. Snellman, thought that the best idea was to have one national language and to recognize Swedish as a regional minority language. It needs to be emphasized that the language issue was not primarily an issue of ethnicity, but rather an ideological and philosophical issue as to what language policy would best preserve Finland as a nation. This also elucidates why so many educated Swedish speakers changed to Finnish: it was motivated by ideology. Both parties had the same patriotic objectives, but their methods were completely opposite. By the time of Finland’s independence in 1917, Finnish clearly dominated in government and society. However, language conflicts continued throughout the first decades of independence, especially in the early 1930s when there were even street fights between the language groups (Hämäläinen, 1968). The Second World War put an end to these clashes, and in recent decades the language dilemma has been confined to occasional editorials and letters to the editor as well as classrooms where teachers teaching Swedish as the second national language face unmotivated, sometimes even verbally aggressive, pupils (Salo, 2009). Despite the language conflicts Finland has remained a bilingual country with a Swedish-speaking minority (5.4 per cent of mainland Finland’s population in 2009) living mostly in the coastal areas of southern, south-western and western Finland. During the twentieth century, the urbanization following the Industrial Revolution led to large majorities of Finnish speakers in all major cities. For instance, the capital Helsinki became predominantly Finnish speaking as early as around 1900. Today, there are approximately as many speakers of Swedish in Helsinki as there were 100 years ago, but the percentage has declined from about 45 per cent to mere 6.1 per cent in 2008 (Facts about Helsinki, 2008).

The official bilingualism in theory According to the Finnish Language Act (423/2003) Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. The purpose of this Act is, for instance, to ensure ‘the constitutional right of every person to use his or her own language, either Finnish or Swedish, before courts and other authorities’ as well as ‘the right of everyone to a fair trial and good administration irrespective of language and to secure the linguistic rights of an individual person without him or her needing specifically to refer to these rights’. The new Language Act of 2003 is to a great extent based on the old Act of 1922, both in terms of how the municipalities are categorized according to language and concerning the duties of the authorities. According to the

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Language Act, both Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking Finns have the right to use their own language in contacts with central government authorities and with the authorities in bilingual municipalities. The right to use Swedish applies both in contacts with the authorities concerning some matter to be dealt with, and when requesting information. The authorities are required to provide service in both national languages on their own initiative, without being asked to do so. They are also required to ensure that signs, forms, brochures and other written materials are available and on display in both languages. The management of each public authority is ultimately responsible for this. It should also be possible to submit a complaint to the management concerning shortcomings in Swedish services. The enforcement of the Language Act is monitored by the Ministry of Justice, which may also take initiatives to correct any deficiencies. As can be read in the Language Act, Finland’s bilingualism is twofold. On one hand, it secures the citizens’ right to use their own language in contacts with central government authorities, and with the authorities in bilingual municipalities on the other. In practice this means, for instance, that a person who is registered as a Swedish speaker gets all the state-level documents, such as tax declarations and information on presidential and parliamentary elections, in Swedish. Then again, on the municipal level the language of services may be dependent on whether the municipality is officially bilingual or not. The Finnish situation is an apt example of two types of bilingual territoriality – fixed and flexible (see e.g. MacRae, 1999). The flexibility is seen, for instance, in the principles according to which municipalities are designated either uni- or bilingual. As stated in the Language Act (423/2003), a municipality is designated bilingual ‘if the population includes both Finnish and Swedish speakers and the minority comprises at least 8 per cent of the population or at least 3000 persons’. Even if the proportion of the minority decreases below 8 per cent, a bilingual municipality is not automatically designated unilingual. Instead, its proportion needs to decrease below 6 per cent, and, in addition, on the recommendation of the municipal council, ‘Government may determine by a Government Decree that the municipal is bilingual for the following ten-year period even if the municipality would otherwise be unilingual.’ Fixed territoriality, then again, refers to the bilingual Finnish authorities, in other words the central state administrative authorities. In recent years, Finland has seen a strong movement of consolidation of municipalities. In 2004 there were 444 municipalities in Finland, and seven years later the number had come down to 336 and new consolidations are constantly being planned. However, these fusions seldom affect the linguistic balance of the area, even if the number of bilingual municipalities has diminished. In most cases, it has actually strengthened the position of the minority by ensuring the continuation of bilingual administration. On the

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other hand, as Latomaa and Nuolijärvi (2002) point out, no matter what kind of laws we have, the laws as such cannot provide services. What is needed is enough funds to secure services in both national languages.

The official bilingualism in practice: Part 1 – the public authorities In June 1996, the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (also known as the Barcelona Declaration) was adopted at the conclusion of the World Conference on Linguistic Rights held in Barcelona. The document was signed by UNESCO, the PEN Clubs, and several non-governmental organizations to support linguistic rights, especially those of endangered languages. The declaration states, for instance, that ‘everyone has the right to carry out all activities in the public sphere in his/her language, provided it is the language specific to the territory where s/he resides’ (First Title, Article 12, see UNESCO, 1996). In practice, this article indicates that Swedish speakers in Finland, for instance, have the right to obtain medical treatment in Swedish in bilingual municipalities. This, in turn, requires personnel who know enough Swedish to be able to treat Swedish-speaking patients. This is not always the case, which makes it an issue that many Swedish-speaking Finns find particularly problematic. Even if language rights are enshrined in the Language Act and the authorities are required to provide services in both languages, in practice it is each speaker’s personal responsibility to ensure that the law is put into practice. Unless there is demand for services in Swedish, the authorities will have no real incentive to provide it or to create language programmes to teach their personnel Swedish. A few years ago, the Swedish Assembly of Finland (Folktinget, 2006) published a report on how the legal rights of the patient to use their mother tongue in health care are recognized in practice. The report presented several worrying examples where the linguistic rights of the citizen were infringed, often without any reasonable cause. A case in point was a 92-year-old Swedish-speaking lady called Alma from Espoo (a bilingual city next to Helsinki) who could only say one word in Finnish (‘Kyllä’, ‘Yes’). She had been taken to a local hospital (part of a bilingual hospital district) after falling down and hurting herself severely. In the hospital, she kept coughing and vomiting blood. As the doctor was explaining in Finnish what the matter was with her, Alma kept replying: ‘Kyllä, kyllä.’ The doctor continued his round convinced that Alma had understood him, as she had been responding to his account. Later, the patient in the neighbouring bed gave her a rough Swedish translation of the doctor’s words (Folktinget, 2006). Another example illustrates the occasional inflexibility of the bureaucracy. Fjalar, an elderly Swedish-speaking man from a bilingual town west of Helsinki, had had a Swedish-speaking doctor for years. At one point, the municipality decided to change the borders in the personal doctor

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organization, and as a result Fjalar got a new doctor with Finnish as a mother tongue. All this, despite the fact that Fjalar still lived at the same address and that there were several Swedish-speaking doctors and other personnel in the municipality. However, Fjalar’s case had a happy ending, as he decided to fight for his rights and consequently, after persistently contacting the authorities, Fjalar was allowed to have his old doctor back (Folktinget, 2006). According to the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (Stakes, 2008), it is fairly common that there are no Swedish-speaking personnel on duty in healthcare centres in big bilingual municipalities in southern Finland. Even if Swedish-speaking Finns are well aware of their rights, many of them are hesitant to stand up for them, if there are more important issues in question. For instance, no matter whether they consider an individual’s linguistic rights extremely valuable, they understand that there are more profound human rights that exceed it, like the right to life (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 3). For instance, the bilingual municipality of Sibbo/Sipoo north-east of Helsinki used to have a Swedish-speaking majority for centuries, but as it has gradually turned into a Finnish-majority municipality, it has become more and more difficult to get medical treatment in Swedish. However, as a Sibbo resident points out, För tio år sedan var det självklart att man mötte en svensk läkare på hälsocentralen här i Sibbo. Nu har man tur om de kan ta till svenska. Men då får man kompromissa, det är ändå viktigare att få bra vård än att man får den på sitt eget språk. (Gabrielsson, 2004) [Ten years ago it was self-evident that there were Swedish-speaking doctors at the health centre in Sibbo. Now you’re lucky if they know some Swedish. But one has to compromise, it is still more important to get good treatment than to get treatment in your own language. Transl. OPS] Because of the high level of language proficiency required of medical experts in bilingual hospital districts, many professionally competent applicants have not been able to be selected for open vacancies. Therefore, for instance, the Vaasa Hospital District recently decided to lower the requirements regarding language skills for competent medical experts (YLE, 2008). According to the VD (chief executive) of the Hospital District, the aim with these new principles is to make it easier to employ people based on their level of competence, especially for vacancies that have been open for a long time. A few months later, the principle to lower language requirements was also applied to technical personnel (Vasabladet, 2008), due to difficulties in obtaining qualified employees. A year later, the City of Vaasa decided to lower the requirements for employees in additional fields of service (e.g. rehabilitation and home service in child protection). Instead of having ‘an excellent ability to speak and write the language of the majority in the

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authority’s district’, it is now sufficient to have ‘a satisfactory ability’ to use the language in question (YLE, 2009). It is stated in the Finnish constitution that people are equal before law, but in actual fact the proceedings in Swedish cases can be almost twice as long as in Finnish ones (Valtioneuvosto, 2009, p. 59). Therefore, Swedish speakers occasionally decide to use Finnish to speed up the procedure. In addition, there are often linguistic breaks in the procedural chain. Instead of being able to conduct a legal case solely in Swedish from beginning to end, one may need to switch between Finnish and Swedish at various points during the process. The core of the problem seems to lie in the lack of police officers with a good command of Swedish, which often results in having the preliminary investigation in Finnish. This, in turn, is often replicated in the later phases of the procedure, even though it is against the law. According to the Finnish Council of State (Valtioneuvosto, 2009, p. 80), the most alarming deficiency in the court of law is the fact that instead of recognizing the linguistic rights of the litigant as the starting point, the language skills of the attorney or the judge seem to be more essential.

The official bilingualism in practice: Part 2 – the study of the second national language Finland is strongly dedicated to reaching the target of ‘mother tongue plus two’ set by the European Union, and thus the national core curriculum for basic education (see National Board of Education, 2004) puts a great deal of weight on second and foreign language teaching (Table 2.1). This results in the fact that all Finnish students are supposed to learn at least two additional languages during their basic education. One of them is either Swedish (usually B1) or Finnish (usually A1 or A2), and the other usually is English (99.2 per cent in 2007). Despite the general recognition of the importance of multilingualism both on the individual and societal levels, Finns’ command of foreign languages is declining: the skills are of poorer quality and the scope of languages is getting narrower and narrower (Pöyhönen and Luukka, 2007; also Dufva and Salo, 2009). One of the reasons behind this development is that Table 2.1

Language studies in the national core curricula in Finland

Language

Grade

A1 A2 B1 B2 B3

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Upper secondary school --------------------- Compulsory ----------- Optional Compulsory ----------- Optional Optional

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people generally believe that a good command of English suffices. In fact, the public opinion of the majority – according to the 2006 Eurobarometer survey – is that the 1⫹2 target is too high and that only one foreign language (read: English) would be sufficient. The survey shows that Finns perceive English to be by far the most useful language to know (88 per cent) (Eurobarometer, 2006). Interestingly enough, however, as Leppänen and Nikula (2008) point out, English has become such an everyday means of communication which is seen and heard everywhere that it could be discussed whether some resources from the teaching of English could actually be directed to teaching other languages. Another reason behind the declining language skills might be the mandatory second national language in the curriculum. According to the Basic Education Act (628/1998), the second national language is a core subject in the basic education syllabus, which means that every pupil studies it either as the first, second or third foreign language.2 However, many Finns feel reluctant to study Swedish for no apparent reason, but it can be argued that the layered historicity of discourse (Blommaert, 2005) affects contemporary classrooms. These negative attitudes are so prevalent that every second teacher of Swedish mentions attitudinal problems as the most depressing aspect of their work (Salo, 2009). In recent years, the future of mandatory Swedish has been discussed widely in public, partly thanks to a significant rise in the popularity of the populist Finns Party. A few weeks before the 2011 parliamentary elections the party, which openly opposes teaching mandatory Swedish, was strongly challenging the big three traditional parties, the Social Democratic Party, the National Coalition Party and the Centre Party of Finland. In addition, the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity has actively worked for the abolition of mandatory Swedish since the early 1990s, for instance by releasing a language programme that has a monolingual Finland as the ultimate goal and by ordering surveys that have constantly shown how the majority of Finns (varying between 63 and 69 per cent in the past ten years) answer ‘Yes’ to a question whether teaching of Swedish should be voluntary for all Finnish-speaking pupils. On the other hand, the surveys initiated by two different Swedish-speaking organizations in 1998 and 2006 showed that a slight majority of Finns (50 and 52 per cent) think that studying Swedish should be mandatory in Finnish schools also in the future. Paradoxically enough, the language programme of today’s Association of Finnish Culture (founded in 1906) conflicts with the strong appeals for a bilingual Finland put forward by the association’s founding fathers at the birth of the nation. For instance, the renowned linguist E.N. Setälä (Karlsson, 1999), a member of the association’s first central committee, played an integral part in formulating the first Language Act of 1922, which declared that Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. Obviously, the Finland of today is not the same as the Finland in the early 1920s, but

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one can question whether this is a good enough reason for abolishing the nation’s official bilingual policy which guarantees its citizens’ linguistic rights.3 However, it is another question whether mandatory Swedish as a school subject has equally unquestionable reasons to be preserved. The arguments both for and against having the other national language, which for the 94 per cent majority is Swedish, as a mandatory subject at school are often vague and misplaced (Salo, 2010). On the one hand, supporters see the teaching of Swedish to all Finns as a precondition for the survival of Swedish in tomorrow’s Finland. On the other hand, opponents believe that abolition would free resources which, thus, would increase the study of other languages. Both arguments lack evidence. All in all, however, the arguments against mandatory Swedish seem to be more logical, and even language professionals have increasingly started to question the meaningfulness of teaching reluctant pupils something that cannot be reasonably argued for. For instance, a professor of Nordic philology has pointed out that the pupils’ skills in Swedish would apparently improve, if pupils studied the language voluntarily instead of being obliged to do it (Sundman, 2010). However, Sundman argues that Swedish should be studied in higher education. Marjatta Huhta, whose PhD thesis dealt with language needs analysis, states that even if Swedish has its place in Finland, not everyone necessarily would need to study it. According to Huhta, the needs of working life would be met if 60 per cent of each language cohort achieved level B1 in Swedish (Sivula, 2010). In practice this could mean that Finnish speakers would start studying Swedish at the upper secondary level at the latest, and they would also need to demonstrate a sufficient command of Swedish while studying in higher education. Despite the heated public discussion, however, there will probably be no changes in the curriculum in this respect in the near future, as Finland has recently signed the Declaration of Nordic Language Policy in which one of the goals is to strengthen the teaching of Scandinavian languages as a helping language and as a foreign language at school (Nordic Council, 2006).

Language purism – norms and regulations As Martin (this volume) points out, Finland has ‘a strong tradition of striving for linguistic purity and adherence to norms and a prescribed standard’. This regulatory approach to language use, reflecting language-ideological evaluations providing a basis for hierarchical ordering of linguistic varieties, aptly illustrates the theory of high modernity operating along three basic parameters (order–disorder; purity–impurity; normality–abnormality) (see e.g. Blommaert et al., this volume), as the aim to officially define correct or good use of language clearly meets all the three criteria. One can only speculate about the reasons for this kind of language cultivation, but the following two explanations can be considered plausible. First, as described

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above, under Swedish rule the Finnish language had hardly any official status in society. Thus, during the era of autonomy, in the growing hope of an independent nation state, the role of Finnish was strongly put forward and it gained a foothold surprisingly fast. According to Allardt and Starck (1981), it took a mere 40 years from the 1863 Language Decree, which stated that Finnish should become an official language of government and should be on equal terms with Swedish for litigants in the courts, for Finnish to overcome Swedish as the dominant language of the country. In 1902, the principles for language use in municipalities were enacted, and these principles set the foundation for the very first Language Act of the independent Finland a few decades later, thus providing the basis for the official linguistic order of the new nation. The need for a prescribed standard form of language has been so strong in Finland that Svenska språkvårdsnämnden i Finland (‘The Swedish Language Cultivation Council in Finland’), founded in 1942, was actually the first of its kind in the Nordic countries (Laurén, 1992). The variety of Swedish spoken in Finland, finlandssvenskan, has naturally been influenced by Finnish, which has occasionally been regarded as a threat, as it has resulted in a variety that deviates from the Swedish spoken in Sweden to an extent that has made some scholars argue, more or less seriously, that finlandssvenskan should be classified as a language of its own (see e.g. Oksaar, 1990). This leads us to the second reason behind the serious desire for a strict linguistic regulation: the size of the Finland Swedish minority. The number of Swedish speakers has remained more or less stable during the past century, but their relative proportion has shrunk from 12.9 per cent in 1900 to 5.5 per cent in 2007 (Statistics Finland, 2009). In actual fact, the alleged linguistic deviations, so-called finlandismer (‘Finnishnesses’), are few and far between, as there are on the average only five instances in a thousand words (Laurén, 1992). In fact, the present situation owes a lot to Hugo Bergroth and his classic description of Finland Swedish from 1917, in which he states that Att vårt finländska modersmål med tiden skall utvecklas till ett särskilt språk, som inte längre kan kallas svenska, behöva vi väl inte under några omständigheter på allvar befara. Skulle så ske, är vår nationalitet i och med detsamma dödsdömd. (Bergroth, 1917, p. 18) [We need not in any circumstances be worried about that our Finnish mother tongue will in time develop into a specific language which cannot any longer be called Swedish. Should this happen our nationality would immediately vanish. Transl. by OPS] This striving for order and purity in the name of survival sometimes results in situations where institutions, such as kindergartens, try to control language use. This has been a common phenomenon in many parts of the world, but surprisingly, there were at least two cases like this in Finland in spring

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2009: a Swedish-language kindergarten in Vaasa prohibited children from speaking Finnish (Pohjalainen, 2009) and a Finnish-language kindergarten in Imatra prohibited children from speaking Russian (Etelä-Saimaa, 2009). (For a discussion of a similar case in a Helsinki school, see Voipio-Huovinen and Martin, this volume.) These two examples illustrate two different views of the problems that multilingualism can bring with it. In the former case, the authority’s aim to maintain order by keeping the kindergarten monolingually Swedish is to secure, paradoxically enough, the living bilingualism in Finland. This is to say, as Allardt (2000) argues, that no linguistic minority can survive unless it has its own institutions, organizations and forms of interaction on its own terms. In addition, bilingual institutions and organizations tend to become monolingually Finnish rather rapidly without any conscious effort. This is due to the fact that most Swedish speakers are bilingual and therefore do not suffer from the use of Finnish for practical reasons. This development, then again, easily leads to monolingual practices in the long run (Allardt, 2000). In the latter case, the reason for prohibiting the use of Russian probably has to do with the authorities’ aim to maintain order by accommodating (or rather assimilating) the immigrant population into the society. The cause is most likely well meaning and innocent, as command of the national language is vital for full participation in societal matters. For instance, it is only possible to gain citizenship after passing a language test at an appropriate (B1) level (cf. Blommaert et al., this volume). However, it is questionable whether violating an individual’s linguistic rights is an approach to be recommended. Even though Swedish-speaking Finns form a community that is constantly diminishing in relative terms, they are, according to a recent study (Folktinget, 2005), relatively happy with their contemporary situation, and most of them have a realistic view of the future. For instance, 48 per cent of them consider it understandable, though poignant, if their children or grandchildren choose Finnish as the language spoken at home. It needs to be pointed out that Swedish-speaking Finns are not a homogeneous group, as there are significant differences in their socio-economic position. On the one hand, as Swedish was the former dominant language of government and business, Swedish-speaking Finns are over-represented among lawyers, doctors and business executives and they are 3.3 times more likely to own stocks and shares (Saarela, 2006). On the other hand, statistics show that the two language groups have almost the same distribution by industry and socio-economic position at the national level; the differences are regional rather than socio-economic (Finnäs, 2003). In Osthrobotnia (a north-western, coastal province), Swedish is dominant in many municipalities, whereas it seems that in the Helsinki region Finnish tends to dominate Swedish in the public sphere (Folktinget, 2005). Thinking about the strong Finnish tradition of unofficial normative language policy, it is somewhat paradoxical that some of the people who

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want to get rid of the mandatory Swedish use the impure nature of the Finnish variety of Swedish as one of their arguments.

Conclusion It seems obvious that the official bilingualism in Finland is not only a bed of roses, but also a bed of Procrustes: it is seemingly orderly and well functioning in theory, but it also faces serious problems in some crucial societal fields, such as health care, law and education. On the one hand, the state needs to maintain the linguistic rights of the age-old Swedish-speaking minority by educating, for instance, legal and medical experts who have a sufficient command of Swedish, but, on the other hand, we need to be prepared to openly discuss the pros and cons of having the second national language as a general school subject in basic education.

Notes 1. In addition, Sámi languages, Finnish sign language and the Roma language all have certain rights recognized in for example the Constitution and the Language Act. The number of residents whose mother tongue is not Finnish, Swedish or Sámi is 3.6 per cent of the population (Statistics Finland, 2010). 2. Even if Swedish is officially the second national language, it nevertheless appears to be a foreign language for most Finnish pupils. Instead, English seems to have obtained the status of a second language in many young people’s linguistic repertoire (see e.g. Leppänen et al., 2008). 3. Naturally, this does not apply to all citizens (e.g. refugees and immigrants), but only to speakers of Finnish and Swedish, and to some extent also the speakers of Sámi languages, Finnish sign language and the Roma language.

References Allardt, E. (2000) Vårt land, vårt språk. Kahden kielen kansa. En attitydundersökning om det svenska i Finland. Suomalaisia asenteita ruotsin kieleen Suomessa [Our Country, Our Language: Bilingualism, the Attitudes of Finns, and the Status and Future of Swedish in Finland]. Finlandssvensk rapport nr 35. Helsingfors: Folktinget. Allardt, E. and C. Starck (1981) Språkgränser och samhällsstruktur. Finlandssvenskarna i ett jämförande perspektiv [Language Borders and Structure of Society: the Finland Swedes in a Comparative Perspective]. Stockholm: AWE/Gebers. Bergroth, H. (1917) Finlandssvenska: handledning till undvikande av provinsialismer i tal och skrift [Finland-Swedish. A Manual for Avoiding Provincialisms in Speech and Writing]. Helsinki: Holger Schildts. Bloch, M. (1953) The Historian’s Craft. New York: Vintage Books. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: a Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dufva, H. and O.-P. Salo (2009) Languages in the classroom – institutional discourses and users’ experiences. In J. Miller, A. Kostogriz and M. Gearon (eds) Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms: New Dilemmas for Teachers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 252–70.

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Etelä-Saimaa (2009) Päiväkoti kielsi Imatralla pikkupoikia puhumasta keskenään venäjää [A day care centre forbade young boys from speaking Russian among themselves]. Etelä-Saimaa, 16 March 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Eurobarometer (2006) Special Eurobarometer 243. Europeans and Their Languages. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 15 March 2009. Facts about Helsinki (2008) [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Finnäs, F. (2003) The Swedish-speaking population on the Finnish labour market. Yearbook of Population Research in Finland 39. Helsinki: The Family Federation of Finland, pp. 91–101. Folktinget (2005) Identitet och framtid. Folktingets undersökning om finlandssvenskarnas identitet/Suomenruotsalainen identiteetti. Folktingetin kyselytutkimus [Identity and Future. A Study by the Swedish Assembly of Finland on the Identity of Finnish Swedes]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Folktinget (2006) Pohje, vad är det? Om rätten till hälsovård svenska [The calf, what is it? About the right for Swedish in health care]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Gabrielsson, Å. (2004) Tema/finlandssvenska. Ett land, två språk [Theme/Finnish Swedish. One country, two languages]. Tidningen Vi, 10, June/2004. Hämäläinen, P. K. (1968) Kielitaistelu Suomessa 1917–1939 [Language Battle in Finland 1917–1939]. Porvoo: WSOY. Huurre, M. (2005) 9000 vuotta Suomen esihistoriaa [9000 Years of Finnish Pre-History]. Keuruu: Otava. Karlsson, F. (1999) E. N. Setälä vaarallisilla vesillä. Tieteellisen vallankäytön, käyttäy tymisen ja perinteen analyysi [E.N. Setälä on Dangerous Waters. An Analysis of Scientific Power, Behavior and Tradition]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Koivulehto, J. (2001) The earliest contacts between Indo-European and Uralic speakers in the light of lexical loans. In C. Carpelan, A. Parpola and P. Koskikallio (eds) The Earliest Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archeological Considerations. Helsinki: Mémoires de la Société finno-ougrienne 242, pp. 235–63. Laakso, J. (2001) The Finnic languages. In Ö. Dahl and M. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds) Circum-Baltic Languages. Vol. 1: Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 179–212. Latomaa, S. and P. Nuolijärvi (2002) The language situation in Finland. Current Issues in Language Planning, 3(2), pp. 95–202. Laurén, C. (1992) Finlandssvensk jubileumskonferens [Finland Swedish Jubilee Conference]. Språkbruk [Language Use], 4/1992, pp. 10–13. Leppänen, S. and T. Nikula (2008) Johdanto [Introduction]. In S. Leppänen, T. Nikula and L. Kääntä (eds) Kolmas kotimainen. Lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language. Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, pp. 9–40. Leppänen, S., T. Nikula and L. Kääntä (eds) (2008) Kolmas kotimainen. Lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language. Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.

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McGrath, A. (1999) Reformation Thought: an Introduction, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. McRae, K.D. (1999) Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Finland. Rauma: Lainet Oy. National Board of Education (2004) National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2004. Helsinki: National Board for Education. Nordic Council (2006) Deklaration om nordisk språkpolitik [Declaration of the Nordic Language Policy]. Copenhagen: Nordic Council. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Oksaar, E. (1990) Språket i sociokulturell kontext. In K. Nikula and A.J. Pitkänen (eds) Svenskan i Finland [Language in the Sociocultural Context]. University of Tampere: Institutionen för filologi II, pp. 1–26. Pohjalainen (2009) Vaasalaisisä taistelee suomen kielen käyttökieltoa vastaan [A father from Vaasa fights against the ban of using Finnish]. Pohjalainen, 5 April 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Pöyhönen, S. and M.-R. Luukka (eds) (2007) Kohti tulevaisuuden kielikoulutusta. Kielikoulutuspoliittisen projektin loppuraportti [Towards the Language Education of the Future. The Final Report of the Project on Language Educational Policy]. University of Jyväskylä: Centre for Applied Language Studies. Saarela, J. (2006) Wealth in two ethnic groups: the role of internal migration background. Finnish Yearbook of Population Research 42. Helsinki: The Family Federation of Finland, pp. 43–64. Salo, O.-P. (2009) Ruotsin opettamisen ihanuus ja kurjuus – ruotsinopettajien ajatuksia oppiaineestaan [The pleasures and pain of teaching Swedish – Swedish teachers’ views on their subject]. In E. Ropo, H. Silfverberg and T. Soini-Ikonen (eds) Pelit, opetussuunnitelma ja didaktiikka [Games, Syllabus and Didactics]. University of Tampere: Publications of the Department of Teacher Education A31, pp. 353–66. Salo, O.-P. (2010) Ruotsin opettaminen tänään ja huomenna – mitä ruotsinopettajat ajattelevat? [Teaching Swedish today and tomorrow – what do Swedish teachers think?]. Kieli, koulutus ja yhteiskunta [Language, Education and Society], 31 May 2010. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Sawyer, B. and P. Sawyer (1993) Medieval Scandinavia. From Conversion to Reformation, circa 800–1500. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schnapper, D. (2004) Linguistic pluralism as a serious challenge to democratic life. In P. Van Parijs (ed.) Cultural Diversity versus Economic Solidarity. Brussels: De Boeck Université, pp. 213–26. Sivula, A. (2010) Kielikoulutuspolitiikka täytyy uudistaa perusteellisesti [Language education policy needs a thorough reform]. Tempus, 3/2010, pp. 6–7. Stakes (2008) Omakieliset sosiaali-ja terveyspalvelut kaksikielisissä kunnissa [Social and Health Services in One’s Own Language in Bilingual Communes]. Raportteja [Reports] 4/2008. Helsinki: Valopaino. Statistics Finland (2009) Swedish-Speakers’ Proportion of the Population in 1900–2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Statistics Finland (2010) Country of Birth, Citizenship and Mother Tongue of the Population 31.12.2010. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 20 August 2011.

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Sundman, M. (2010) Svenskämnet i kris? [The Swedish subject in crisis?]. Källan, a Special Issue of Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 125 Years [Källan, a Special Issue of the Swedish Literature Society]. February 2010, p. 85. YLE (2008) Lägre språkkrav för läkare [Lower language requirements for doctors]. Yle.fi, 25 August 2008. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. YLE (2009) Vasa tummar på språkkraven för att säkra servicen [Vaasa overrules language requirements to save services]. Svenska.yle.fi, 18 December 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. UNESCO (1996) Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Valtioneuvosto (2009) Report of the government on the application of language legislation 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011. Vasabladet (2008) Lägre språkkrav för teknisk personal [Lower language requirements for technical staff]. Vasabladet, 8 December 2008. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 4 September 2011.

3 Linguistic Diversity as a Problem and a Resource – Multilingualism in European and Finnish Policy Documents Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri

Linguistic diversity – a factor in societal processes and policy documents Societal background Societies in Europe and across the world are under constant pressure to cope with increasing multilingualism and multiculturalism. This development has its roots in different global and local societal and economic processes. On the one hand, globalization is putting pressure on the economy in that more varied language resources are needed in society. On the other hand, immigration is constantly on the increase, giving rise to what Vertovec (2006) has termed super-diversity, a ‘condition distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants’. Super-diversity has made the language situation in Europe – the focus of our analysis – increasingly diverse over the last decades. This concerns particularly the old immigration countries. Currently, there are over 300 languages of almost 200 nationalities spoken within the boundaries of the European Union. While the official policy of the EU is to promote the freedom of its citizens to speak and write their own language, it is the 23 official languages and to some extent the 60-odd heritage languages which are given priority. In Finland the language situation has traditionally been viewed as fairly homogeneous. There are two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, but since the Swedish-speaking Finns comprise only about 6 per cent of the whole population, the social reality of most Finns can be described as relatively monolingual. In addition to Finland’s official bilingualism, Sámi as indigenous people, Roma and ‘other groups’ have the constitutional right (Finnish Constitution, 1999, §17) to ‘maintain and develop their own 41

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language and culture’; this right is thus as much cultural as linguistic. Users of Finnish sign language are also mentioned in the Finnish Constitution, but in terms of physical disability rather than as a cultural or linguistic minority (Tarnanen and Huhta, 2008; Conama, 2009; for Finnish sign language, see also Tapio and Takkinen, this volume). As regards multilingualism in society, a recent survey on English in Finland (Leppänen et al., 2011) shows that even though Finns perceive themselves as largely monolingual, their social environments have become increasingly multilingual. Nevertheless, the idea of a homogeneous language situation is maintained, mostly due to language minorities in Finland being both relatively and absolutely small in comparison to those in other European countries (Latomaa and Nuolijärvi, 2005; Pöyhönen, 2009). In a similar vein, the dogma of homogeneism (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998) is also in use at the European level, both to describe social cohesion within the EU and to maintain a sense of national place and identity (Horner, 2009). The above descriptions give a typical, high-modern picture of language situations in certain geopolitically restricted areas: languages are classified, numbered and placed in different positions in the hierarchies of languages as ‘official’, ‘national’ or ‘other’, to structure the diversifying situation rationally. But as Makoni and Mashiri (2007) point out, this kind of enumeration and representation of the language situation is already language-ideological work, an attempt to essentialize languages into countables that can be labelled, contained and controlled. In a situation where these categorizations and enumerations are needed, the warm and fuzzy understanding of multilingualism (in Europe as in Finland) is truly challenged. Beneath official policies at supranational and national levels there is a complex and messy reality which does not conform to the hygienic and politically correct descriptions of language situations. As Hélot and de Mejía (2008) observe with reference to bilingualism, there is a double vision in that while bilingualism is presented as something that may bring advantages, prestige and power, it is also referred to as something that can give rise to problems and disadvantages. These advantages and disadvantages may be societal (i.e. increased diversification both as a source of cultural richness and as political problems of societal incoherence) or individual (i.e. increased diversification as a personal resource and as an obstacle to particular societal trajectories; Blommaert et al., this volume). The same appears to be true of understandings of multilingualism. While multilingualism may be celebrated for its ability to enrich society, it may also be viewed as abnormal, even dangerous, for a nation state struggling to maintain its identity (see ibid.). We approach constructions of languages and multilingualism as indicative of social change. Following Blommaert et al. (this volume), we argue that the documents we have analysed show a tendency towards ordering the messy realities of everyday social life, or bringing some kind of balance to societies

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that are under pressure. Multilingualism and its political representations (in our case in the policy documents) provide an insight into the different societal tensions that are brought to the surface as policy actors at different levels meet, much like tectonic plates (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2000, p. 21), making societal change visible. In other words, we see policies of multilingualism as a case of ‘governmental rationality’ or ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). As Rose (1999, p. 1) suggests, conventional forms of political thought are more or less framed for the centralized (controlling, regulative) nation state, with one collective actor who exercises legitimized power over a geographical area. Consequently, ‘power’ becomes power to control individuality (see also Foucault, 2003), whereas freedom may be defined as absence of coercion or domination (Rose, 1999, p. 1). Disorder, in turn, appears as something that needs to be governed to maintain order, whereas ‘good order’ leads to ‘the security, tranquillity, prosperity, health and happiness of the authorities’ (Rose, 1999, p. 5). Disorder, then, is a consequence of societal exclusion. It may be that the era of super-diversity will create a need for further control and coercion (as Etzioni suggests happened in the 1970s and 1980s, as cited in Vertovec, 2006), revealed as a growing emphasis on nation-state-oriented policies. How and whether this shows in policy texts that deal with language issues is a concern of the present chapter. Introducing the analytical framework and data In this chapter, we investigate the ways in which multilingualism and the multiplicity of languages are presented in supranational (EU) and national (Finnish) policy documents. Key questions here are ‘what kinds of language hierarchies emerge and what kinds of values are expressed when labelling and controlling languages (Makoni and Mashiri, 2007), implicitly or explicitly?’, ‘how is multilingualism governed (see Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999)?’ and ‘how are diversity and cohesion dealt with in order to create a ‘manageable’ multilingual space in Europe?’ Like Heller and Martin-Jones (2001, p. 4), we also believe that it is important to explore how linguistic and cultural differences are used in policy documents as a ‘resource for constructing, levelling, contesting and blurring boundaries’. In other words, policy documents not only reflect social realities but play an important role in constructing, ordering and structuring them, thus acting as instruments of governance, or ‘governmental rationalizing’ (see Rose, 1999). It is therefore all the more important to investigate what kind of values, meanings and ideologies are attached to different languages, and consequently to ‘multilingualism’ in EU and Finnish (language education) policy documents. As Bailey (2007, p. 258) suggests, ‘languages or codes can only be understood as distinct objects to the extent to which they are treated as such by the social actors’. Consequently, ways of representing languages are also indicative of the language ideologies and values of the social actors involved. In short, we analyse how order is brought to the simultaneously ordered and messy European language policy

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situation (Wright, 2004), what underlying values and ideologies are present, and what are the implications for language education policy. We view ‘ideologies’ in critical terms as mediators and legitimizers of existing hierarchies and power relations (Thompson, 1990; Chiapello and Fairclough, 2002). Values, in turn, are ideological systems which can be appealed to or invoked in order to achieve the desired effects (Fairclough, 2003; Bacchi, 2000). Our data consist of four policy documents from the EU and from Finland that deal with languages and (language) education (see Table 3.1). All the documents were published in 2007–8, and represent a particular societal situation. Multilingualism was given a separate portfolio in the European Commission for a three-year period from the beginning of 2007 under Leonard Orban; since the beginning of 2010 it has been amalgamated into the portfolio of Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. In Finland, political discussion of multilingualism is less common, and it mainly concentrates on the official bilingualism and the wide range of foreign language provision. Both the EU and Finnish documents reflect an attempt to balance the needs of both global and local (national) policies. These discourses create and support ideologies as mediators of power relations, as defined above. There may be connections between the two sets of documents but here we are not investigating whether European documents influence Finnish ones, or whether there is any linear relationship between the supranational and national documents. Rather, we explore these policies side by side, to see how multilingualism is constructed in a supranational and national European context at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a period of time that, in the words of Heller and Duchêne (2007, p. 5), can be described as ‘one of consolidation of a globalized new economy based on services and information […] but in which nation-states continue to play an important role’. In policy documents, some policy views and problems are inevitably foregrounded, which simultaneously narrows the space for alternative views (see Ball, 1993, p. 15). Consequently, the documents also perpetuate particular political views of social reality (Muntigl, 2002), and ultimately exercise power. Apart from their explicit attempt to affect societal circumstances, policy documents also often serve as a source for other texts and thus, through processes of intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Blommaert, 2005), their power to influence both official and public opinion about multilingualism increases. The rationale for exploring policy documents arises from this power they have to affect both official policies and general opinions. As regards the image constructed of multilingualism in policy documents, it is a result of discursive power at play, as these discourses have historical, social and institutional implications (Foucault, 2002, p. 131). Hence, the documents are ‘archives’ of particular institutional practices or policies on multilingualism, and as such well worth investigating. Table 3.1 offers an overview of the data. The documents differ in style and orientation. This means that to do full justice to them each one would

Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri 45

Table 3.1

The data

Document name

Description

Length

Document 1 (EU): Communication 2008. Multilingualism: an Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment

The Communications of the Commission are proposed legislation and recommendations to the Council and member states rather than binding directives. Member states are, however, ‘invited’ to adopt actions proposed by the Commission. This particular Communication approaches multilingualism in general terms, not only in connection with education. The goal of policy is to ‘mainstream’ multilingualism into different EU policy areas.

15 printed pages, in English

Document 2 (EU): High Level Report 2007. Final Report of the High Level Group on Multilingualism

As preparatory work for the strategy on multilingualism, the Commissar for Multilingualism appointed a High Level Group of 11 experts to discuss aspects of multilingualism in the EU. The final report has no direct authority over multilingualism policies but gives general recommendations to the European Commission and to educational institutions. The document emphasizes the importance of a stronger foothold for multilingualism – or, to be precise, mainstreaming multilingualism – in the policymaking processes of the EU.

32 printed pages, in English

Document 3 (Finland): Development Plan 2008. The Development Plan for Education and Research 2007–2012

Development plans are central documents in Finnish education policy: they set the framework for education policies for each five-year period that they cover. They also form a bridge between the more abstract goals of government programmes and the more practical, operationalized policy goals and actions in contracts between the Ministry of Education and educational institutions. This document covers the whole field of education, language education only comprising a small part of it

61 printed pages, in Finnish

(continued)

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Dangerous Multilingualism

Table 3.1 Continued Document name

Description

Length

Document 4 (Finland): KIEPO 2007. The Central Recommendations of the National Project on Finnish Language Education Policies (KIEPO)

The KIEPO project was funded by 50 printed pages, the Ministry of Education and the in Finnish University of Jyväskylä and was set up to examine language education as widely as possible, with particular emphasis on language education as a continuum and on issues of lifelong learning. It had no direct authority or mandate over language education policies but several suggestions found their way into the Development Plan. While the present analysis focuses on the central recommendations with minimal explanation and background of the project, a wider (500 page) final report is also available.

have to be analysed in its entirety. However, as this is not possible within the confines of a single chapter, we will only focus on those instances of policy texts that clearly have to do with language(s) either explicitly or by implication, since they can be regarded as key elements in the construction of meaning around multilingualism. To ensure consistent treatment of each document we applied the same analytic grid to each, tracking ‘diversity’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘competitiveness’ in each one, all three representing crucial and recurrent aspects of the policy discourse. In practice, we sought to identify all explicit and implicit references to language(s) and the learning of languages, with particular attention to the following three dimensions: (i) is diversity implied, in either positive or negative terms?, (ii) how is social cohesion mentioned, in society at large or in smaller communities?, and (iii) are multiple languages (or a lack thereof) discussed in the light of the economy, competitiveness or advantages/disadvantages on an individual level or in the labour market? Our focus on diversity and cohesion is inspired, firstly, by a Durkheimian viewpoint (Durkheim, 1964), according to which the existence of societies is based on the coexistence of divisive and cohesive powers. The cohesion of pre-modern societies was brought about by what Durkheim calls ‘mechanical solidarity’; that is, unquestioned societal norms pressing members of society towards similarity. Modern societies, however, were characterized by ‘organic solidarity’; in other words, individuals with different characteristics and skills all having their place in the societal division of labour. In the

Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri 47

Durkheimian sense, within ‘good’ diversity all individuals have to develop and maintain specialized skills and tasks in a society where the division of labour is highly advanced. In ‘bad’ diversity, on the other hand, this division of labour ceases to have a specialized role and begins to undermine societal ties instead of strengthening them. Secondly, diversity and cohesion have also been addressed in earlier studies on multilingualism, for instance by Milani (2007), who discusses these processes by drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) ideas of ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ voices; or by Horner (2009), who discusses language requirements as a ‘solution’ to the migration ‘problem’, viewing social cohesion as the dogma of homogeneism and diversity as a ‘European mosaic’. The question of competitiveness in our analytical grid arises from those trends of globalization that largely see society in economic terms and competitiveness as a self-evident value (see Saarinen, 2008 on competitiveness as a built-in value of OECD and EU education policies). Our preliminary analysis of the documents also showed that the knowledge of languages is presented as an individual and social asset and an economic commodity. ‘Competitiveness’ and language as a social commodity have also been discussed by Grin (2001) and da Silva et al. (2007). Throughout, we also paid attention to the various ways in which languages are conceptualized in the documents and how these descriptions relate to each other. We were interested both in the different terms used to refer to the multiplicity of languages and whether any hierarchies are implied in the way these labels are used.

The European dimension – united in diversity or managing diversity? The two European policy documents which we analysed show that multilingualism in Europe presents itself as both a central and a problematic issue (see Blommaert et al., this volume). Different sources of tension can be recognized. Firstly, there is tension between societal and individual multilingualism. While multilingualism within the EU is a given due to the wide range of languages in the member states, at the level of the individual multilingualism is something that needs to be supported and enhanced; current political aims are to make all EU citizens multilingual and to help them recognize and fully exploit the potential that multilingualism can offer in the different areas of their lives. The second type of tension has to do with the many different values attached to multilingualism. On the one hand, it is an asset that needs to be fostered as it can be of service both economically and culturally: multilingualism within the EU is seen as both an economic advantage and a valuable resource in promoting intercultural understanding and overcoming intercultural barriers. On the other hand, increasing multilingualism is also a problem that needs to be

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managed as it can at its worst threaten social cohesion within the EU. This problematic side of multilingualism reveals that there are, in fact, different types of multilingualism, both ‘good’ (visible and socially accepted) and ‘bad’ (invisible and undervalued) versions (cf. Hélot and de Mejía, 2008). As regards the three central dimensions of analysis introduced above – diversity, cohesion and competitiveness – they all become an issue but with different emphases. Diversity is the one that occupies the central position in the documents as something that can, in the Durkheimian sense, be either beneficial or detrimental to society. Diversity also appears as something that needs to be governed in order to ensure societal competitiveness. In the following, these observations will be discussed in more detail. From celebratory to managerial discourses As stated above, diversity is linked to intercultural understanding and multiculturalism in both European documents. In such contexts, multilingualism and diversity clearly have a celebratory tone. For example, according to the Final Report of the High Level Group on Multilingualism from 2007 (henceforth High Level Report), ‘Europeans’ are encouraged to learn other languages besides their mother tongue because languages open doors to other cultures and make people willing to interact with each other. In the Commission’s Communication Multilingualism: an Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment from 2008 (henceforth Commission’s Communication), the linguistic diversity brought by multilingualism is seen as something that can be ‘an asset for Europe’, as already suggested by the title of the document. Multilingualism is referred to as ‘the harmonious coexistence of many languages in Europe’ and languages are seen as ‘part of a shared inheritance’. Moreover, the goal of the multilingual EU is to be ‘united in diversity’. The expressions used present linguistic diversity as something valuable that can become a ‘precious’ asset in enhancing intercultural dialogue and social cohesion, in increasing people’s life opportunities and in giving them access to different services. While multilingualism is seen as something of benefit to all EU citizens, the documents also suggest that for this benefit to be realized, multilingualism needs to be approached in a certain way: it needs to be controlled and managed. For example, it is recognized that without an ‘appropriate multilingualism policy’ multilingualism can create big ‘challenges’, for example giving the multilingual an advantage over the monolingual and making communication between citizens and cooperation between the member states more difficult. Its absence can also reduce companies’ competitiveness. Therefore the main objective is to overcome these challenges and enable everybody – at individual, national and European levels – to make the most of multilingualism. According to the Commission’s Communication, multilingualism is also ‘a shared commitment’ as the document suggests that every EU citizen has a responsibility to contribute towards making the EU even more

Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri 49

multilingual and to take advantage of the existing opportunities, thus benefiting ‘European society as a whole’. Multilingualism also has an important role in enhancing intercultural dialogue in the external relations of the EU. The need to manage multilingualism becomes evident in the ways in which languages are described in the documents. The canonized description of the diverse linguistic landscape starts with the official languages of the EU, then goes on to regional and minority languages, and finally to migrant languages. Although not explicitly stated, this ordering seems to be based on an inbuilt hierarchical ranking of languages. Such hierarchies mostly derive from EU legislation but there seem to be cultural rankings as well. For example, multilingualism is described in the High Level Report as a demographic fact: An increasingly large number of people living in the Union are multilingual or even multiliterate because they (i) speak an autochthon regional or minority language in addition to the (major) national language, (ii) speak a migrant language in addition to the language of the host country, or (iii) grew up in mixed language families or other multilingual environments (the Erasmus phenomenon). In addition to the usual jargon of EU legislation the High Level Report also uses concepts like ‘intra-European languages’ or ‘major non-European world languages’, which further suggests a need to manage and govern linguistic diversity by grouping and ranking languages. In the Commission’s Communication the diversity of languages in the EU is also demonstrated by a large repertoire of terms which effectively categorize languages into different subgroups. The scale goes from an individual perspective (e.g. mother tongue, own language, first language, second language, foreign language) via a local perspective (e.g. regional language, local language), to the national perspective (e.g. national language, host country language) to a more global and European (e.g. EU and non-EU language) or official perspective on languages (e.g. official language, business language, the court’s language) not forgetting the Commission’s advisory group’s (Maalouf et al., 2008) concept of a ‘personally adopted language’. Thus, there seems to be a constant need to label languages and language users. These categories serve as instruments of governmentality: they are used to create order and hierarchies in the messy reality of multilingual Europe. Figure 3.1 presents how languages are labelled in the documents, and suggests how they can be grouped to form a scale where the emphases range from individual to global concerns. Diversity in the European documents thus gets concretized as a ‘shopping list’ of languages. By ‘shopping list’ we refer to the listing, labelling and

INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVE

Figure 3.1

Terms used to categorize languages

culture, l. of their company

business, l. of popular holiday destinations, l. of

e.g. official l., working l., court’s l., business l., l. for

OFFICIAL PERSPECTIVE

l., specific l., (an)other l.

instruction, target l., less widely used

and taught l., lesser-studied l., A l., B or C l.

more l., multiple l., some l., different

e.g. immersion l., long l., short l., l. of

e.g. all (imaginable) l., small l.,

OTHER

l., (own) mother tongue, own l.

e.g. foreign l., first l., second l., third

additional l., many l., several l.,

world l., international l.

European l., (quasi) lingua franca, (major)

Community l., European l., (major) non-

e.g. EU l., Community l., non-EU l., non-

PERSPECTIVE

GLOBAL and EUROPEAN

l., autochthon l., local l.

EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

migrant communities, community l.

l., majority l., migrant l., lesser-used l., the l.of

l., l. of the host country/community/society, minority

e.g. (major) national l., host-country l., host country’s

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

LOCAL PERSPECTIVE e.g. heritage l., regional l., indigenous

50

Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri 51

categorizing of languages that creates the illusion of a linguistic situation that is controllable. This may have a dual purpose: firstly, it may serve as a form of consciousness-raising of the multiple linguistic realities. Secondly, while the listing of different languages may indeed highlight the need to promote ‘harmonious coexistence’ between them in society, the fact that languages are grouped into different categories also suggests that they have different statuses. As regards multilingualism, it seems to translate into the enumeration of different languages and their parallel coexistence, issues of hybridity and multiple identities brought about by multilingualism remaining in the shadows. This kind of listing, in other words, turns multilingualism into different categories of ‘EU-lingualism’, ‘minority lingualism’, ‘national lingualism’ and so on, which in turn disempowers actual multilingual practices, as they fit these categories poorly. One exception to the overall hygienic discourse is the use of the term ‘mother tongue’ in the High Level group document. The mother tongue is mentioned in connection with both migrants and ‘members of the host society’ (High Level 2007, p. 11), yet it is explicitly stated that mother tongue is no longer a valid concept: ‘it would probably be more appropriate to speak of people’s first language or even first languages, as the case may be’ (High Level 2007, p. 6). Social cohesion and migrants as a problematic resource Besides diversity, social cohesion is another important factor that gets mixed up in discussions about diversity and multilingualism, especially in settings where diversity needs to be managed. The High Level Report emphasizes skills in a variety of languages and argues for multilingualism through diversity, but it also argues for social cohesion in European societies. In the report, multilingualism and social cohesion are mostly dealt with when discussing either migrant communities, integrating migrants into societies, or ‘the coexistence of different language communities’; in other words, cases which pose a potential threat to social cohesion. Diversity as potentially threatening social cohesion is also revealed by ‘members of the host society’ being encouraged to learn migrant languages. One general message conveyed by the Commission’s Communication seems to be that all languages in Europe are equal: no hierarchies between languages are explicitly presented. However, the listing, labelling and ranking of languages described above serves as an implicit indication that hierarchies do exist. Moreover, when later on in the document valuing all languages is at issue, it is also pointed out that due to increased migration and mobility, mastery of the ‘national language(s)’ is very important when an immigrant is integrating into a new home country, which implies that national languages have, in fact, more value than migrant languages. At the same time, however, there is awareness of the need to raise the status of different mother tongues and other languages which are used more informally. When the diversity of the EU is described,

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Dangerous Multilingualism

migrant languages are also mentioned – but only after the official EU languages and other languages. The Commission’s Communication also suggests that migrant children may be a problem for schools because the language of instruction is a second language for them. This, in turn, necessitates that teachers also acquire teaching skills in teaching their own language as a second or foreign language. In sum, the ideal presented in the document seems to be that, on the one hand, migrants need to learn the ‘host-country language’, but on the other, ‘their heritage or community languages’ should be better taken into account. In other words, ideally the languages of both the host country and the migrants need to be respected. Apart from these references to migrants, however, migrants and their languages do not form a specific focus of attention in the Commission’s Communication. Whose multilingualism is being talked about? Diversity and social cohesion are often conveyed through references to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, us and them, especially in discussions of migrant languages and communities. For example, the High Level Report states that ‘by giving value to migrant languages in our midst, we may well enhance migrants’ motivation to learn the language of the host community, and – indeed – other languages, and enable them to become competent mediators between different cultures [emphases added]’. The use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ in this passage marks a clear boundary between us and them, as the pronouns are used authoritatively: ‘we’ have the power to give value to ‘them’, or to exclude ‘them’ as outsiders rather than include ‘them’ (see Íñigo-Mora, 2004 on the different uses of ‘we’ in communities). One way of concretizing multilingualism is to discuss particular languages. In the High Level Report, 11 languages are mentioned. It is worth noting that European languages are not among those mentioned, perhaps to maintain an image of equality between the official EU languages. Instead, the languages referred to are ‘major world languages’, which in practice means non-European languages. It is, for example, argued that ‘there is a growing demand for major world languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Russian, which is currently not matched by provision’. Many of these ‘major world languages’ are also migrant languages in Europe, but not referred to as such. The document seems to suggest that it is EU citizens who are required to learn these languages; the migrants’ own multiple linguistic repertoires are not explicitly considered in discussing a broad range of language skills in formal education. Thus multilingualism is mainly seen from the perspective of an EU citizen and the documents are written exclusively to allegedly authentic members of the EU, rather than inclusively, encompassing a larger population. For example, in the Commission’s Communication the aim is to describe how multilingualism can be utilized by an individual living in the EU. In the document the Barcelona objective (mother tongue plus two languages) is

Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen and Teija Kangasvieri 53

described as the goal that needs to be reached in order to realize all the opportunities that the linguistic diversity of Europe can offer. However, many ‘citizens’ do not yet have access to these advantages (e.g. monolinguals, school dropouts, senior citizens) and a lot of work needs to be done ‘to raise awareness’ about the advantages of linguistic diversity. On the other hand, particularly multilingual EU citizens speaking many different languages are seen as extremely important because they can function as a link between people coming from different cultures. English – a special case While the High Level Report refers to a number of specific languages, in the Commission’s Communication English is the only language actually mentioned by name, referred to on two occasions. The first reference is in connection with competitiveness. English is seen as the leading language in business, but it is emphasized that also knowing other languages is the real key to enhancing competitiveness and creating new business relations. English is mentioned for the second time in the context of lifelong learning. It is said that although many EU countries improved their language teaching between the late 1990s and 2005, as was recommended by the two previous Commission’s Communications, it was mainly English that was taught more in primary and secondary education. More effort should therefore be directed towards learning other languages. All in all, English is acknowledged as the leading language in business and the most commonly taught language in schools in the member states, but the point is made that other languages are also very much needed as, for example, they give companies a major economic advantage, one that will ‘allow them to conquer new markets’. The economic value of English thus seems to get highlighted even if, as Grin (2001) shows, the extent to which English in fact has, and will continue to have, economic value is a highly complex issue. In the High Level Report English has a more visible role: it is referred to on several occasions, and closer examination of the occurrences reveals that the report’s relationship to English is riddled with tensions, which is not surprising given that the spread of English has recently been hotly debated the world over (see e.g. Phillipson, 2003; Graddoll, 2006; Pennycook, 2007). An obvious tension is visible in the High Level Report when it recognizes the usefulness of English as an international lingua franca while at the same time expressing concern about the threat it poses to European multilingualism. This resembles Sergeant’s (2008, p. 218) view that discourses on English often have ‘vacillated between two poles’. To concretize this vacillation, the High Level Report on the one hand posits that ‘English has been further gaining ground as a means of non-mediated intra-European and international communication’ and ‘the fact that many people operating at a European level now have a good command of English is bound to

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have an effect on the demand for interpreting at European level’. General proficiency in English is thus linked to economic gains. However, at the same time there are concerns relating to the threat that English poses for both multilingualism and the learning of a wide range of languages: the document strongly argues in favour of the learning of several languages and against this background such a big proportion of Europeans studying English is of course problematic. The fact that ‘many policy-makers and decision-makers – including parents – firmly believe that all that children at the beginning of the 21st century need to acquire is a good command of English’ is also presented in the High Level Report as undermining the European ideal of multilingualism. Thus it could be argued that while the wide spread of English would in principle make it a practical tool for governing linguistic diversity in Europe, it is politically unsuitable as it does not fit into the ‘harmonious diversity’ image of Europe where all national languages are treated equally. This resonates with Wright’s (2000, pp. 129–30) reasoning about why it ‘still remains in the realms of fantasy’ that any single language would ever be imposed top-down as a shared language in Europe: A lingua franca, particularly if it were to be English, would be perceived as a threat, carrying with it the distinct possibility of undermining other languages and cultures. Anglicisation might worry many Europeans as much – if not more – than the democratic deficit caused by the lack of a European community of communication. In the European-level documents, multilingualism thus poses itself as both a valuable asset and a challenge. The inherent value of multilingualism is recognized, but managing diversity to make it both economically and culturally advantageous to Europe presents itself as a problem. The most problematic aspect of multilingualism seems to be the one brought about by migration. However, no particular attention is paid to migrants in the documents, at the heart of which seems to lie an idealized notion of ‘European citizens’ which, effectively, excludes migrant populations. Moreover, both documents seem to treat individuals – both citizens and migrants – mainly as monolinguals with one ‘mother tongue’. This picture of multilingualism is what Heller (1999, p. 5) describes as ‘as a set of parallel monolingualisms, not a hybrid system. What is valued also is a mastery of a standard language, shared across boundaries and a marker of social status.’ The role of English as a lingua franca is also problematic as its prevalence brings ‘injustice and inequality into the situation’ (Wright, 2009, p. 111) and is seen to hamper rather than foster European multilingualism. In short, then, the European documents highlight the dissonance between inspirational and cautionary discourses on multilingualism: making diversity and social cohesion mutually compatible is not an easy task.

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The Finnish dimension – protecting national interests and reaching out to global spheres The Finnish policy documents under examination were produced at around the same time as the European documents – at the beginning of the new millennium – and language issues are a shared concern. However, the Finnish documents do not explicitly focus on multilingualism but are both documents on education. The Development Plan for Education and Research (henceforth the Development Plan) looks at education in its entirety; this analysis deals only with those parts where languages are relevant. In the Central Recommendations of the National Project on Finnish Language Education Policies – KIEPO (henceforth the KIEPO recommendations) the focus is specifically on language education. As shown above, the European documents responded to the diversity brought about by multilingualism with both celebratory and alarmist discourses. The Finnish documents show responses at a national level, which have some similarities but also some different emphases. Firstly, the division into positive and problematic, or in Hélot’s and de Mejía’s (2008, p. 1) terms ‘visible and socially accepted’ and ‘invisible and undervalued’ forms of multilingualism, is also borne out by the Finnish documents, with a clear division between Finnish nationals and migrant groups, and different requirements and expectations as regards languages for each. Whereas Finnish nationals are expected to attain wide language repertoires, migrants are faced with pressure to fit in and concentrate on acquiring the national language, Finnish. The documents also show that in the era of globalization the protection of national languages is as much an issue as promoting multilingualism. The documents suggest that in Finland reconciling the country’s official bilingualism with the increasingly multilingual social reality is not an easy juggling act. There seems to be a fear, if not explicitly stated at least implied, that the growing multilingualism brought about by super-diversity will threaten and undermine the national languages which, consequently, need to be supported and protected. The policy documents that we studied can be seen as a type of supportive act as they attempt to spell out the characteristics of Finnish (language) education, in the process making clear the special status of Finnish and Swedish as national languages, placing them at the top of the language hierarchy. In the process, the increasingly multilingual reality of Finland gets little attention and the speakers of ‘other languages’ – a total of 190,538 people in 2008 according to Statistics Finland (2011), with speakers of Russian (c.47,000 speakers), Estonian (c.22,000), English (c.12,000) and Somali (c.10,000) as the biggest groups, followed by Arabic, Chinese, Kurdish and Albanian, all with 5000–10,000 speakers, and various other languages with less than 5000 speakers apiece – remain largely invisible.

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Janus-faced diversity As pointed out above, language diversity is a concern in both Finnish documents: there are obvious tensions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diversity (cf. Hélot and de Mejía, 2008). This tension is particularly clear in the Development Plan, which depicts diversity as both desirable and threatening. Diversity is constructed as desirable when the speakers of heritage languages (Sámi, Roma) are mentioned and described as minority groups whose ‘protection’ requires that their access to their heritage language and the possibility of maintaining their language and the associated culture must be ensured – in addition to maintaining the two national languages. More often, however, desirable diversity in the Development Plan is associated with developing school curricula that offer the mainstream population better chances to study a broad selection of foreign languages. Rather than being seen as threatening, this kind of multilingualism is depicted as valuable, an important asset that will help the nation cope in an increasingly international world. Connecting skills in many languages to internationalization shows, for example, in the arguments that in general ‘international competence rests on good and diverse linguistic skills’ and that students and staff in higher education in particular need to be ‘provided with sufficient linguistic skills for international cooperation in studies and working life’. In other words, while questions of cultural identity emerge in the multilingualism of minority groups, the multilingualism of the mainstream population is seen in more instrumental terms as a useful tool needed in the increasingly international working life. By implication, an ideal Finnish citizen of the future will thus be a mobile worker proficient in several languages. Which languages exactly constitute this desired multilingualism that will help Finns to operate in the global sphere is left open: the Development Plan refrains from mentioning any specific foreign languages in this connection. Instead, there are general calls for more varied language programmes in schools, and for encouraging the study of ‘rare’ or ‘less studied’ foreign languages, that is, by implication, others than the most widely studied foreign language, English. However, general discourses around language education in Finland show that knowing various languages is usually conceptualized as skills in German, French and Russian in particular, in addition to English and Swedish (e.g. Pöyhönen, 2009; Nikula et al., 2010). These discourses of multilingualism as desirable are counterbalanced in the Development Plan by discourses addressing the problematic nature of increasing diversity. These discourses revolve around immigrant groups in particular and the challenges that increasingly diverse student populations pose in education. The emphasis lies on providing students from immigrant backgrounds with an education which will guarantee ‘sufficient’ skills in Finnish or in Swedish; what counts as sufficient is not dealt with in the documents, which of course leaves considerable leeway for organizers of education

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to interpret this requirement as they see fit (see also Suni and Latomaa, this volume). What also emerges clearly is that knowledge of the national languages is seen as a prerequisite for the immigrants’ full functioning in society. For example, it is unequivocally stated that ‘Good Finnish or Swedish language skills are prerequisites for integration into Finnish society, success in studies and employment.’ Although the immigrants’ right to maintain and develop their own languages is also mentioned, the main concern in the Development Plan is how these groups can adapt to Finnish society; the impression is that the linguistic diversity brought about by immigrant groups needs to be subdued rather than encouraged in order to maintain social cohesion. Cohesion thus seems to be the motivating force when discussing the language situation of immigrants. Interestingly, studying foreign languages is not mentioned at all in connection with immigrants; their multilingualism beyond their mother tongue and one of the national languages of Finland does not seem to be an aim. It is also worth noting that when immigrants’ education is discussed there is no mention of what their specific languages are nor, indeed, is the label ‘immigrant languages’ used; their various languages thus do not seem to be considered an asset. The KIEPO recommendations regard as one of the aims of language education to enhance and develop multilingualism at both the individual and the social level. Because an overarching aim of the document is to affect political decision-making by showing how foreign language education in Finland could be made more varied, diversity in this context is seen as desirable, something required for example by ‘the increasingly technological and global world’ and in most ‘professions in the knowledge society’ (cf. Durkheim, 1964 and the division of labour as a cohesive mechanism in society). Because the KIEPO document specifically deals with the provision of foreign languages and mother tongues in education, and because it makes recommendations for decision makers in the realm of language education, it operates on a more practical level than the Development Plan. It specifies a number of languages that would contribute to the diversification of Finns’ language repertoires: apart from the national languages, Finnish and Swedish, and the most frequently studied foreign language English, it is hoped that more students will in the future study German, French, and Russian in particular, that is, European languages that have a long history as school subjects in Finland but that are not studied as extensively as before. However, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic are also mentioned as languages for whose users there will probably be an increasing demand in the globalized labour market. As regards immigrants, their mother tongues are not specified in the KIEPO recommendations either. However, more attention than in the Development Plan is paid to the question of how best to establish the teaching of immigrants’ native languages in Finnish schools; immigrants’ mother tongues are also mentioned as a factor that diversifies the

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multilingual resources in the country (see also Suni and Latomaa, this volume). In short, then, diversity does not appear as tension-ridden in the KIEPO recommendations as in the Development Plan, which can be seen as evidence of parallel discourses around multilingualism in Finland. On the one hand, there are discursive positions that seem to undermine the multilingualism brought about by immigration, while, on the other hand, there are voices that acknowledge immigrant languages as a useful resource. These somewhat conflicting views seem to reflect the apparent political confusion regarding attitudes towards immigration in general. Discourses constructing nation-state interests As pointed out above, the Development Plan does not specify which foreign languages belong to the desired ‘broader array of languages’ that Finns ought to master in the future. Instead, there are references throughout the document to the two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. This happens particularly often when the Development Plan is dealing with education for students with immigrant backgrounds: the necessity for them to study either Finnish or Swedish is reiterated several times, as well as the need for ‘sufficient’ skills in these two languages. That this is done in the spirit of creating social cohesion in the nation state and advocating the monolingual norm rather than multilingualism is not only implied but also explicitly stated: as already pointed out above, knowledge of the national languages is constructed as a prerequisite for adapting into society and for helping immigrants find work (see Milani, 2007 for similar developments in Sweden and Horner, 2009 for a critical perspective on EU policies). There thus seems to be a strong belief (as is also shown in other chapters in this volume) in the interconnection between national languages and the nation state, with other languages forming a threat to social cohesion. The emphasis on the importance of national languages is accompanied by apparent reluctance to discuss immigrant languages in any detail: using all-encompassing references such as ‘students with immigrant backgrounds’ is a way to downplay the linguistic heterogeneity within this group, to create a false sense of unity rather than opening up the inherent diversity involved (see also Suni and Latomaa, this volume). Thus what Moyer and Martin Rojo (2007, p. 145) say about the status of immigrant languages in Spain also applies to Finland: ‘Rather than considering them an asset, these languages are treated as an obstacle to integration.’ The two national languages are, however, discussed not only in relation to immigrant groups. What is also at issue is the problematic relationship between Finnish and Swedish as national languages (see also Salo, this volume). Given that speakers of Finnish clearly outnumber those of Swedish, a language hierarchy seems to be at play, evident in the protectionist discourse related to Swedish. While education in the Development Plan is mostly dealt with in general terms, there are several references to ‘education

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in Swedish’ and to the special conditions or requirements relating to it (e.g. ‘in terms of sectors of education, the need for Swedish-language adult education and training is estimated to be slightly above average in polytechnics and universities’). However, there are no similar references to ‘education in Finnish’, which implies that Finnish is the ‘unmarked’ choice in education. Furthermore, there are formulations with protectionist undertones which express the need to ‘secure’ possibilities for education in Swedish (e.g. ‘the position of special needs education in Swedish will be secured; the possibilities for Swedish-speaking students to study in their own language will be secured at the current level’). If something needs to be secured it is under threat; Swedish, then, is constructed as less powerful than Finnish and as needing protection. The emphasis on the two national languages means that multilingualism is mainly dealt with in the Development Plan from the viewpoint of Finland’s official bilingualism; ‘to strengthen Finland’s bilingualism and general competence in both national languages’ is indeed explicitly stated as an aim. This national focus means that the international and global forces and developments leading to increasing multilingualism are not really taken into serious consideration in the Development Plan. Instead, the gaze is directed inwards to Finland’s official bilingualism in ways that assume close correspondence between the two languages and their groups of speakers and disregards the presence of more varied multilingualism and multilingual practices, more difficult to deal with than one language/ one group constellations. In the words of Moyer and Martin Rojo (2007, p. 156), the willingness to be preoccupied by the existing form of bilingualism can also be interpreted as ‘the domination of hegemonic, hiding any trace of difference’. As regards the KIEPO recommendations, their major concern is how to broaden foreign language education in Finland, which is why the overall ethos is more oriented to promoting wider language repertoires than in the Development Plan. However, as with the Development Plan, when immigrant students and their language education are discussed, the importance of the national languages is made clear, Finnish as a second language in particular. The role of immigrants’ own mother tongues is also acknowledged, however. That is, while the document recognizes that integration will be easier with knowledge of Finnish or Swedish, the immigrants’ own languages are not ignored. However, the special role of the Swedish language in Finland is also visible in the KIEPO recommendations, albeit in a different way when compared to the Development Plan. There are no declarations about the need to uphold the Swedish language, but it is noteworthy how the use of the term toinen kotimainen (‘the other domestic language’) is almost invariably used with reference to Swedish, either explicitly as in ‘The learning outcomes of the second domestic language (Swedish) are weak’ or more implicitly for example when reference is made to ‘immersion

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education in a second language’, which in the Finnish context almost invariably refers to immersion in Swedish. In other words, although protectionist discourses directed at Swedish do not emerge in the same way as in the Development Plan, there are more subtle references which suggest that the position of Swedish in Finland is a politically sensitive topic (see also Salo, this volume; Nikula et al., 2010). It was pointed out above that the diversity resulting from multilingualism is constructed as less of a threat in the KIEPO recommendations than in the Development Plan. That this diversity is, nevertheless, first and foremost constructed as a national concern is suggested by the frequent use of the metaphorical concept ‘language skill reserves’ (Finnish varanto meaning ‘reserve’, as in ‘gold reserve’), much like natural resources, throughout the document. Usually this concept co-occurs in constructions such as ‘Finland’s language skill reserves’ or ‘the language skills reserves of the country’, which are presented as having increased over time but as now facing the threat of decline. While probably an intertextual echo from other policy texts, the concept is interesting in the way it depicts multilingualism as a valuable resource for the nation in the era of globalization and internationalization. There is thus an obvious link to competitiveness, even though the KIEPO recommendations explicitly mention competitiveness only once, when the following question is posed: ‘What will happen to Finland’s international competitiveness if the country does not have enough people who know Spanish, Chinese, Japanese or Arabic?’ The suggestion thus seems to be that these more rarely studied and from the Finnish perspective exotic languages would give Finland an even more competitive edge than the more usual foreign languages such as English. Also in the Finnish documents, then, the tension-ridden attitude towards super-diversity becomes evident. Interestingly, when multilingualism is discussed in celebratory terms, the viewpoint is usually that of a multilingual individual, whereas increasing multilingualism in society is less of an issue. Furthermore, due to the nation-state perspective of the documents, the national languages have a prominent role: the position of Finnish and Swedish as necessary components of multilingualism in Finland is made clear. In sum, the documents point towards layered discourses around multilingualism. Firstly, Finnish citizens are expected to have a command of both national languages. Secondly, multilingualism in the form of additional foreign languages is a valuable asset in competitive international markets, especially for Finnish citizens. Thirdly, the existence of migrant groups is recognized, but their multilingualism tends to be depicted as a problem rather than as a resource. These parallel and at times conflicting discourses on multilingualism indicate that the increasing diversity of language resources in Finland is far from a resolved issue.

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Conclusions – bringing order to disorder The policy documents we have analysed are, essentially, ideological conceptualizations of the many languages and the societies in which these languages are counted, grouped and ordered (e.g. Blommaert, 1999; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Heller, 2007). Especially the European documents explicitly celebrate late-modern, hybrid forms of multilingualism, but a high-modern view of ‘monolingual multilingualism’ emerges implicitly, painting a different kind of picture in the supranational and especially in the national level documents. By ‘monolingual multilingualism’ we refer to the representation of languages as hierarchical entities of our, national, foreign and so on, which implies that languages are learned and used separately, each in their own sphere (see also Heller, 1999). In fact, there seems to be little evidence in the European and even less in the Finnish policy documents studied of a recognition of the multilingual everyday realities of individuals (see e.g. Blommaert et al., 2005; Rampton, 2006; Martin-Jones, 2007). It seems that while societies are becoming linguistically more hybrid (Vertovec, 2006), policy documents still see multilingualism as a modern concern, and, in the Finnish case, as still mainly a national concern. That a hierarchical ordering of languages is used to govern the incoherent multilingual realities shows in our analysis in the 30-something ways of characterizing different languages in the European documents. It is at the same time both an indication of an explicit attempt to acknowledge the everyday multilingual reality and an implicit hierarchization of the said languages and their speakers. We agree with the observation by Heller and Duchêne (2007, p. 6) that multilingualism is largely about the ‘management of diversity within the framework of the opportunities and dangers presented by the globalized new economy’. Even the references to ‘celebratory multilingualism’, that is, multilingualism as a positive resource for society and the individual, are presented in a monolingual manner, as national languages and mother tongues take precedence over non-Community languages, immigrant languages or foreign languages. This hierarchization downplays ‘diversity’ as hybrid, and suggests a linear, essentialist view of languages, which, in turn, is strongly reflected on the national level in views on languages and, consequently, on language education. The ordering of the disarray of languages serves to promote an ordered, ‘monolingual’, high-modern kind of understanding of multilingualism over the hybrid multilingualism of the postmodern. All this − construing order in disorder, representing languages and multilingualism hierarchically, producing different identity categories and thus bringing about social order − has societal impacts. As Rose (1996, p. 42) points out, discussing its effects, governmental rationality works towards establishing ‘divisions between the proper spheres of action of different types of authority’. The particular kind of governmentality apparent in the documents produces policies in which a certain kind of multilingualism is more valuable

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than others, both for society and the individual. Multilingualism as the knowledge of European national languages may produce more cultural, social and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and it may fuel prestigious social trajectories. Multilingualism as the knowledge of other languages or immigrant languages, on the other hand − when they are not made totally invisible − seems to create a need for remedial language education of the national languages, as we witness in Finnish language education policy. While the implicit need to govern diversity and disorder appears in both the supranational and national level documents, there are also differences between these documents. At the European level, ‘diversity’ seems to be subordinate to aspects of cohesion and competitiveness; in other words, diversity is needed to enhance (global economic) competence and intercultural dialogue (which is needed to promote the said competitiveness). Diversity is presented from the viewpoint of expected benefits to both the individual and society. As far as language education is concerned, it is interesting that the High Level Report seems to blame schools for the failure of successful multilingualism, implying that multilingualism is about ‘learning languages’. In the Finnish documents, on the other hand, two kinds of understandings of multilingualism emerge. The ‘socially accepted’ form of ‘official bilingualism’ is evident in discussions on language education for immigrants and their socialization into Finnish society, whereas the multilingualism brought about by immigrants is invisible and, implicitly, undervalued. Especially the Development Plan takes a very cautious stand on multilingualism. However, tensions are also revealed: it seems that multilingualism deriving from immigration is something that needs to be managed to achieve social cohesion, and there are also attempts to downplay the diversity inherent in multilingualism (cf. lumping together numerous languages and cultural backgrounds under the label of ‘students with immigrant backgrounds’). Our analysis thus resonates with Milani’s (2007, p. 187) analysis of the Swedish language policy document Mål i Mun: Two language ideologies tied to the nation-state seem to be at work here: (1) the ideology of multilingualism, according to which language diversity is a positive societal phenomenon, which needs to be supported; and (2) the ideology of social cohesion, according to which social cohesion is the foundation of civil society and is achieved by means of one common language (Swedish), which therefore needs to be preserved. Finally, it is worth considering what kind of challenges the various discourses on multilingualism evident in the European and Finnish policy documents might pose for foreign language education (cf. Nikula, 2009), a concern that is largely left untouched in the documents analysed. While the need to adopt anti-essentialized views of languages and multilingualism

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that recognize hybridity and the fluidity of boundaries has recently gained ground in research (e.g. Woolard, 1999; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Heller and Duchêne, 2007), the question of how such views could be taken into account in language teaching has not been explored to the same extent. Blommaert (2010) argues that language competences in the world of globalization ought best to be perceived in terms of people having ‘truncated repertoires’, composed of specialized but partially and unevenly developed resources, but how the idea of truncated repertoires could be incorporated into discourses on, and practices of, language education remains an unresolved issue. Canagarajah (2007) is among the few who have outlined the possible implications for language teaching if we accepted that languages are not discrete codes with strict rights and wrongs, and that people in multilingual encounters are likely to cross the imagined boundaries of languages and to use whatever resources they find useful to accomplish their intended social actions. He (2007, p. 238) suggests that language teaching should orientate students to sociolinguistic and psychological resources with which to cope in multilingual realities, which, in turn, would mean that ‘we have to move away from an obsession with correctness’ in order to help students ‘shuttle between communities, and not to think of only joining a community’. Kelly (2009, p. 15) is along the same lines when discussing language education in the age of growing diversity, arguing that ‘target language’ pedagogies are no longer sufficient. While language education has not been problematized much in the documents analysed, it is inevitable that super-diversity will also have its impact on language education as the national core curricula are renewed in the near future. The impact should be research-driven and informed by meaningful connections between macro-level policies and local practices.

The data Communication 2008. Multilingualism: an Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. Brussels, 18 September 2008, COM (2008) 566 final. Development Plan 2008. The Development Plan for Education and Research 2007–2012. Adopted by the Government 5 December 2007. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. High Level 2007. High Level Group on Multilingualism. Final report. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. KIEPO 2007. Luukka, M.-R. and S. Pöyhönen: Kielikoulutuspoliittisen projektin keskeiset suositukset [The Central Recommendations of the National Project on Finnish Language Education Policies (KIEPO)]. University of Jyväskylä: Centre for Applied Language Studies.

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Moyer, M. and L. Martin Rojo (2007) Language, migration and citizenship: new challenges in the regulation of bilingualism. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: a Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137–60. Muntigl, P. (2002) Policy, politics and social control: a systemic functional linguistic analysis of EU employment policy. Text, 22(3), pp. 393–441. Nikula, T. (2009) Multilingualism – a challenge for language education. Plenary lecture at Kielikeskuspäivät [Language Centre Days], University of Turku, Finland, 18–19 May 2009. Nikula, T., S. Pöyhönen, A. Huhta and R. Hildén (2010) When MT ⫹ 2 is not enough: tensions within foreign language education in Finland. In U. Ammon, J. Darquennes and S. Wright (eds) Foreign Languages in the Schools of the European Union, Sociolinguistica Yearbook 2010. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 25–42. Pennycook, A. (2007) The myth of English as an international language. In A. Pennycook and S. Makoni (eds) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 90–115. Phillipson, R. (2003) English-only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Pöyhönen, S. (2009) Foreign language teaching in basic and secondary education in Finland: current situation and future challenges. In S. Lucietto (ed.) Plurilinguismo e innovazione di sistema. Sfide e ricerche curricolari in ambito nazionale e internatizionale. Provincia Autonoma di Trento: IPRASE del Trentino, pp. 143–74. [Online.] Available at: , date accessed 8 November 2010. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1996) Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies. In A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason. Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: University College London Press. Rose, N. (1999) Powers for Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saarinen, T. (2008) Persuasive presuppositions in OECD and EU higher education policy documents. Discourse Studies, 10(3), pp. 341–59. Sergeant, P. (2008) Language, ideology and ‘English within a globalized context’. World Englishes, 27(2), pp. 217–32. Tarnanen, M. and A. Huhta (2008) Interaction of language policy and assessment in Finland. Current Issues in Language Planning, 9(3), pp. 262–81. Statistics Finland (2011) Statistics on Population Structure. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 2 September 2011. Thompson, J. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Woolard, K. (1999) Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 8(1), pp. 3–29. Wright, S. (2000) Community and Communication: the Role of Language in Nation State Building and European Integration. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Wright, S. (2004) Language Policy and Language Planning. From Nationalism to Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, S. (2009) The elephant in the room: language issues in the European Union. European Journal of Language Policy, 1(2), pp. 93–119.

4 Dealing with Increasing Linguistic Diversity in Schools – the Finnish Example Minna Suni and Sirkku Latomaa

Introduction Europe has undergone major changes, and so has its linguistic landscape. Increasing population mobility has left no part of Europe untouched, and has forced several countries to adapt to a variety of challenges. Due to increasing immigration and the empowerment of established linguistic minorities, countries that were officially labelled as monolingual are now recognized as multilingual. Immigration has raised questions typical of late modernity, due to the fact that the uniformity of the nation state has gradually broken down. Within this process an obvious tension has emerged between well-established systems meant for a relatively homogeneous society, and the new, more dynamic reality of diverse languages and a more heterogeneous population. Some countries were relatively early in building up a reputation as bilingual or multilingual democracies. With two equal national languages, Finnish and Swedish, Finland has – since the early 1900s – been praised as a model example of a modern bilingual society (see Salo in this volume; McRae, 1999). As in other European countries, during the past few decades linguistic diversity has increased in Finland. It could be anticipated that prior experience of managing multilingualism could be of use when linguistic diversity multiplies, giving Finnish society a head start over other countries facing similar challenges. This chapter aims at examining whether this is indeed the case, via a review of the development of language education policies in Finland, and a report on how they are currently implemented with respect to immigrant students. In this study, these young people will also be referred to as plurilingual students or students with an immigrant background, to emphasize the fact that they all use two or more languages in their daily lives, and that some of them were born in Finland, thus representing the second generation of an immigrant family (cf. Rumbaut, 2004). Our chapter addresses the issues of order and disorder in language practices amid ongoing linguistic diversification. It provides evidence of a clear 67

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discrepancy between, on the one hand, the language education policies that are aimed at securing language instruction for immigrants, and, on the other, the actual implementation of these policies. In principle, educational policies in Finland have succeeded in creating stable and fair guidelines by which first and second language instruction is available for everyone, including immigrants; however, the actual experiences of immigrant students and their teachers speak of a very different kind of reality. In other words, the ‘order’ aimed at by policy is not always reflected in actual practices within the classroom – which tend to be much more varied and heterogeneous. To illustrate this, this chapter gives voice to the teachers of immigrant students. On the basis of a survey administered to the teachers, it reports on their views about how well they believe policy is translated into actual practice in the classroom. The chapter by Voipio-Huovinen and Martin in this volume will further elaborate on this theme, taking as data interviews with the teachers of immigrant children. In the current national curriculum, functional bilingualism is set as a goal of immigrant education. Moreover, one of the main missions of basic education (i.e. grades 1–9) is declared to be to ‘support each pupil’s linguistic and cultural identity and the development of his or her mother tongue’ (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 12). This highly ethical objective may be considered somewhat ambitious, taking into account the fact that increasing numbers of students in Finnish schools are plurilingual. Similar ideals are presented in the most recent development plan for education and research, published by the Finnish Ministry of Education: All pupils must be able to maintain and develop their mother tongue in addition to learning Finnish or Swedish. […] Measures will be taken to support the equal provision of instruction preparing for basic education, the teaching in the mother tongue and the teaching of Finnish or Swedish as a second language. (Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 47) As illustrated by these quotations, Finland might seem like an educational paradise, a place where all students are ensured equal opportunities. Equality is, in fact, taken as a core value in Finnish society and education – its centrality was very evident, for example, in the discussion of the muchpraised results achieved by Finnish schools in the PISA evaluations (The Programme for International Student Assessment, OECD; cf. Välijärvi et al., 2007; Kupiainen et al., 2009). However, the actual grassroots reality of immigrant students may be quite different, and one may well ask whether they really do enjoy a satisfactory level of equality. In tandem with the increasing linguistic diversity in Finnish schools, research on the implementation of educational policies has also increased. So far, however, most studies, using statistical information and other data provided by the municipalities and headmasters, have concentrated on the

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arrangements that have been set up, and on the educational success – or failure – of immigrant students. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the reasons behind the challenges encountered. In the same vein, the teachers of immigrant students have rarely been used as a source of information in research (but see Voipio-Huovinen and Martin, this volume). To remedy this lack of grassroots information and in order to map current practices and to determine the extent to which equality is actually realized in immigrant education, we conducted a web survey1 among teachers of immigrant students, as part of our study entitled ‘How is multilingualism perceived and practised in Finnish schools?’ More specifically, the questions which our study sought to answer were the following: How do the schools currently address the needs of plurilingual students? Are all first languages treated as equal and truly supported? What is the status of second language instruction? How is students’ plurilingualism taken into account in assessment practices? A key finding of the study was that, while the national language education policy on immigrant students aims at plurilingualism, its implementation does not match the ideals stated. In fact, the practices followed are still largely monolingually oriented, often putting students with immigrant background in a problematic position, because their language backgrounds and educational needs are not consistently taken into consideration. Before the detailed account of the results of our survey, the following sections will, however, first give some background, by offering a snapshot of the history of immigration in Finland and its impact on the attitudinal climate, as well as an overview of the Finnish language education policy on immigrants. After this, the opportunities given to immigrant students to develop their plurilingualism will be highlighted in more detail. Finally, the developments that have taken place will be discussed, with attention to international comparisons and to the local background. In addition, some future challenges will be pointed out and discussed in the light of the observations made in the study.

Attitudes towards immigration and linguistic diversity – past and present Schools are an integral part of society. Hence, when outlining the development of language education policy and teachers’ views on immigration and multiculturalism, one must also take into consideration the attitudes that laypersons have, manifested, for example, in ongoing public debate on immigration. This debate has focused on, among other things, experiences and memories of mass emigration to America (from the late 1800s to the early 1900s) and Sweden (1960s and 1970s), the post-war settlement of the Karelians, who were refugees within their own country, a general fear of change, and a wish for a better, unified world. Neighbouring countries have always played an important part in Finnish discussions on this topic.

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For a long time, Sweden, the multicultural western neighbour, was taken as a point of comparison, and similar – good and bad – developments were expected to take place in Finland. Large-scale immigration to Sweden started shortly after the Second World War. In this period, and for several decades afterwards, Finland had an almost non-existent immigrant population. In 1970, for example, the country had only 5483 foreign citizens, which comprised 0.1 per cent of the population (Leitzinger, 2008). As Hämäläinen (1982) has pointed out, at that point Finland did not provide newcomers with any tailor-made language education, as they were so few in number. She also argued that ‘Finland does not have problems in language teaching such as those encountered by countries that receive high numbers of immigrants and immigrant workers’ (1982, p. 148). She compared Finland’s situation with Sweden, where education planners were obliged to design new curricula that took into consideration a range of learners, from illiterate people to those with an academic education. By contrast, she asserted that in Finland ‘the educational background of language learners is more homogeneous, since the teaching of Finnish [for foreigners] has been concentrated in the universities’ (ibid.). This stage of (illusory) order did not last long, however. During the 1980s, as the number of immigrants exceeded that of emigrants for the first time, Finland turned into an immigrant country. In the 1990s, the number of foreign-born residents increased rapidly; and since then the number of immigrants has continued to grow, but at a more even pace. At present, the number of the immigrant population is approximately 300,000,2 or about 6 per cent of the total population, and the number of languages in use is over 150 (Statistics Finland, 2011). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, rapidly increasing immigration across the eastern border gradually became a special feature of Finnish multiculturalism. Here it should be noted that the history, going back to the Second World War and before, that Finland has shared with Russia has inevitably been a factor in the relationship with Russians. Hence, the attitudinal climate has often been particularly challenging for immigrants from Russia (cf. Lähteenmäki and Vanhala-Aniszewski, this volume). In addition, there has been a good deal of discussion of perceived threats connected with increasing immigration: there have been fears that newcomers from various corners of the world might exploit the Finnish social security system, fears of undesirable competition in the labour market and even the marriage market, and fears in some quarters regarding the potential negative impact of immigration on the PISA school achievement results. These fears can be viewed as reflections of the emergence of a more chaotic reality, typical of societies in late modernity. The current worldwide economic depression has brought with it challenges for policies on immigration and language education. As Jaakkola (2009) has indicated in her longitudinal study, attitudes towards immigration and

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language policy tend to change in parallel with general economic conditions. This was true of the recession in the early 1990s which clearly contributed to the hardening attitudes that Finns had towards immigrants.3 On the whole, over the past two decades, Finns’ attitudes have, however, become more positive. For example, the majority now find it acceptable that immigrants maintain their first language and also transfer it to their children. In general, people living in big cities have more positive attitudes towards immigration than those in smaller cities or the countryside. Furthermore, a high level of education and readiness to accept immigration-related phenomena are also connected with positive attitudes (Jaakkola, 2009, pp. 68–72). On the other hand, tuition in the immigrants’ L1 gives rise to much more divided opinion. During the past few years, the readiness to offer such tuition has decreased, and the view that immigrants should become more like the majority community has gained in popularity (ibid.). In anonymous exchanges on web discussion forums, for example, immigration and language-related topics are often debated in very critical terms. The most common arguments there follow the general logic of ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’, suggesting that all immigrants should become assimilated without any special support or arrangements. Since Finnish is the native language of the vast majority (88.9 per cent) of the population of Finland, knowledge of Finnish is generally taken for granted in public debate. In addition, the country is commonly seen as intended for Finnish speakers only. In such discussions, more positive views on immigration may occasionally also be voiced, but they tend to be overwhelmed fairly quickly by the more vociferous, critical majority. Similar tensions are also present in schools and in local policy-making procedures within municipalities. In the following sections we will shed light on these tensions, and present an account of what Finland has attempted to do in order to manage the increasing multilingualism in schools during the past few decades. On the basis of our study we will also indicate some of the dangers embedded in the educational arrangements.

Three cornerstones for managing multilingualism When the number of immigrants began to increase in Finland, it led to changes in the Finnish language education policy, the purpose of which was to cater for the immigrants’ new educational needs which were gradually becoming more clearly recognized. In the following overview of these policy changes we will only focus on preparatory, native language4 and second language instruction. This is because these educational levels involve the central arrangements made for students with an immigrant background. A survival kit for newcomers – preparatory instruction For a long time, immigrant students were integrated into mainstream classrooms immediately, and they were only offered some remedial instruction

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in Finnish. However, when in the early 1980s Finland began accepting refugees on an annual quota basis, more permanent arrangements had to be developed. From this time on, students with a refugee background were entitled to a period of preparatory instruction for 12 months before they moved to a mainstream class. During the preparatory phase, they received instruction in their second and first languages, as well as in other school subjects. However, these tailor-made arrangements were not available to other (non-refugee) immigrants. Thus, Finland followed a policy that created a hierarchy between various groups of newcomers.5 In 1997, the right to attend preparatory classes was finally extended to all immigrant students, irrespective of their reason for coming to Finland. During the recession of the early 1990s, the period of preparatory instruction (for refugees) was, however, cut down to six months. After the recession was over, the legislation was not amended, and the length of the preparatory phase then remained the same for more than ten years. Nevertheless, several municipalities ended up extending the period to 12 or even to 18 months, because the period of 6 months was found to be too short for students to make the progress needed. In 2009, the legislation concerning preparatory classes was also finally amended, in accordance with the suggestions made, for example, in the most recent development plan for education and research (Ministry of Education, 2008). Currently, the minimum length of the preparatory phase is once again 12 months. Thus, on the one hand, certain municipalities could be said to have paved the way for the change by arranging more instruction than that suggested in the legislation, and by showing what was actually needed in the education of newcomers. On the other hand, other municipalities have taken advantage of the obvious loophole in the legislation: they have not arranged any preparatory instruction at all – since they have not been under any obligation to do so. At the mercy of economic fluctuations – native language instruction Native language instruction was first offered to refugee students in the 1970s. The subject was initially called home language instruction. In 1987, the name of the subject was changed to mother tongue instruction. Since then, all immigrant students have been entitled to two hours of mother tongue instruction per week throughout their schooling.6 In 1993–94, due to the recession, the instruction was reduced to one hour per week. The impact of the recession was acutely felt; for example, the concerns it gave rise to were summed up in the headline of an article in the main national newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat: ‘Mother tongue instruction for foreign children neglected’ (1993). In the following year, the number of teaching hours was restored to two, and the guidelines for this instruction were included in the national core curriculum for basic education. There were several reforms of educational legislation in the 1990s, aiming to ensure equality of education in various parts of the country

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and to strengthen the status and rights of minorities. In 1995, educational legislation was amended to allow the teaching of minority languages as school subjects as well as their use as a medium of instruction. The comprehensive reform of the educational legislation, which came into force in 1999, continued in the same vein. As a result, in accordance with the students’ language of instruction, it became possible that students could be taught Finnish, Swedish or Sámi as their native language. Section 12 of the Basic Education Act (1998) states the following: 1 As the mother tongue, the pupil shall be taught Finnish, Swedish or Sámi in keeping with the language of instruction. 2 As the mother tongue, the pupil may also be taught the Roma language, sign language or some other language which is the pupil’s native language. Thus, the Act makes it clear that languages by default have a different status in Finnish schools: Finnish, Swedish and Sámi shall be taught, whereas Roma, sign language and other languages may be taught as mother tongues. Nevertheless, according to the legislation, all students can receive instruction in their native language. In Finnish immigration and language education policies, emphasis is placed on the maintenance of the first language of immigrants. However, the status of native language instruction was radically changed in connection with the curriculum reform of 2004, when instruction in the native language became an extracurricular activity. Currently, L1 instruction comes under a mere ‘recommendation for the core curriculum’, given as an appendix to the national curriculum. The opening sentence of the recommendation defines L1 instruction for immigrants as complementary in nature, offered in addition to basic education. It is stated that this instruction does not constitute the kind of education mentioned in section 12 of the Basic Education Act, and that it is instead supported by a special government subsidy (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 303). However, two points are important here. Firstly, instruction in immigrant languages was financed in a similar manner even before the reform when it was still part of the national curriculum – which it no longer is. Secondly, instruction in Roma, and also in Sámi outside the Sámi homeland, is organized with the same state funding, but the curricula for these languages have nevertheless retained their place in the national core curriculum. Consequently, it is clear that the Basic Education Act has been applied differently in the case of immigrant languages, illustrating a hierarchy of importance among the non-majority languages used in Finland. Municipalities decide whether and how L1 instruction is to be arranged. They can receive state funding for groups of at least four students, and groups can be formed of students from several schools, and even from various municipalities. The number of students required can be considered

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relatively small, as compared to the requirements for arranging teaching in foreign languages, where as many as 16 students may be required to form a teaching group. Despite this regulation regarding four students, in practice municipalities sometimes require a much higher number than those four students for whom they receive state funding. Altogether, the number of languages used by students from immigrant backgrounds amounts to more than 100. For about 40 languages, languagespecific curricula have been designed. According to statistics collected by the National Board of Education, in 2008 instruction was given in approximately 50 languages by 80 education providers (Opetushallitus, 2011). The main languages used in these curricula were Russian, Somali, Albanian, Arabic, Kurdish, Estonian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Persian and Spanish. It appears that opportunities depend greatly on the locality the student is living in, and also on the particular native language, as instruction is offered in less than half of the languages spoken by the students. Inevitably, this will lead to a hierarchy of provision in the languages, and will make equality within the immigrant population less likely. The smaller the municipality and language community and the number of school-age speakers of the language, the fewer the opportunities for obtaining tailored L1 instruction. In addition, the awareness and attitudes of local officials have a role to play: if there is no interest in organizing such instruction, information on the possibilities for arranging it is unlikely to be actively disseminated to families. (Un)available – second language instruction In addition to native language instruction, Finnish as a second language (FSL)7 was included in the 1994 national core curriculum for basic education. In the current core curriculum, FSL is included under the umbrella term ‘Finnish language and literature,8 FSL syllabus’ (National Board of Education, 2004, pp. 95–8). The curriculum states that students should be taught FSL in the event that their skills in Finnish are judged not to be at the level of native speakers of Finnish in all areas of language competence. The FSL syllabus can be taught ‘entirely or partially’, and the extent of the instruction is decided within curricula at the local level. Once again, the municipalities have a key role in recognizing the need for instruction. There is no obligation to arrange FSL instruction in a separate teaching group or for a minimum number of hours. Instead, municipalities may choose not to organize FSL instruction at all, or they may arrange it to the extent they consider necessary. In principle, municipalities may arrange instruction in FSL as part of normal tuition, using their regular hourly resources. Alternatively, they may finance it with special resources, either from their own budget or through resources offered by the state. For this purpose, municipalities can apply for special state funding for each immigrant student who has participated in basic education for six years or less. Under these circumstances, few municipalities have elected to arrange an FSL

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syllabus in its entirety, but ‘partial’ arrangements do exist. A recent national survey (Korpela, 2006) showed that 12 per cent of the students in need of FSL instruction received it for all the weekly teaching hours meant for Finnish, whereas 60 per cent were given a combination of FSL and Finnish for native speakers. In about 25 per cent of cases no FSL instruction was given at all. The national average for FSL instruction was one hour per week, which seems quite modest in relation to the fact that students are supposed to be able to use Finnish as a tool for learning all other school subjects (Korpela, 2006). However, there are additional requirements that apply to the teaching of immigrant students. According to the criteria for student evaluation (Opetushallitus, 1999), immigrant students need to be evaluated according to an FSL syllabus if their skills are not at the level of native speakers, irrespective of whether the students receive FSL instruction or not. This kind of obligation, though perhaps well intended, seems contradictory, as evaluation should, in principle, be based on what has been taught. On the other hand, the requirement does oblige teachers to focus on the developing language skills of immigrant students when doing assessment, and thus to avoid comparing the immigrants’ school achievements with those of their Finnish-speaking peers. Since the adoption of the national core curriculum in 2004, the assessment of FSL has been linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), in other words in the same way as the assessment of foreign languages is generally conducted. This practice is expected to equalize the basis of assessment and to lead to a functionally oriented view of language skills. In sum, it is evident that immigrant students are not treated equally: the opportunities for receiving instruction in FSL depend very much on the locality they are living in. The currently weak status of Finnish as a second language gives much responsibility to the municipalities, as is the case also with the regulations on preparatory and native language instruction. Taken as a whole, the current system contains loopholes, enabling local decisionmakers to implement the national policy in whatever ways they please, reducing opportunities for equality and, in worst case, paving the way for marginalization. In the section which follows we shall go beyond the official policy and present some key findings from the web survey. Here we shall focus on the ways in which plurilingual students are currently encountered in Finnish schools, from the viewpoint of their teachers. The main threats appear to relate to the invisibility of multilingualism, the lack of tailored instruction, and problems related to assessment.

How are plurilingual students encountered in schools? In our study How is multilingualism perceived and practised in schools, teachers were chosen as a target group for several reasons. In their daily work, they

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encounter the practices of the entire school community, and can therefore provide valuable information beyond the bare statistics. From their position at the interface between the educational organization and the students, they can make observations on the attitudes and beliefs present in their workplace and on the progress made by their immigrant students. They can further relate these aspects to the practices within the school. In addition, they often experience tensions and pressures in their role: for example, their work can involve representing pupils in interactions with educational officials, and standing behind official policies in interactions with pupils and their families. Despite their important double role, their experiences and expertise have not, however, gained much attention in previous studies on the language education of immigrants in Finland. In our study, a total of 217 teachers responded to the questionnaire sent to a number of email lists. All of them had immigrant students in their classes, and approximately 90 per cent worked in basic education (ages 7–16), the vast majority of them in primary schools. The majority of those who responded to our survey were teachers of Finnish as a second language (the most common occupation), but other types of teachers also gave their viewpoints: these included class teachers, special educationists, and teachers of Finnish as a mother tongue. Most of the respondents were working in circumstances that were fairly new to them: on average, they had taught immigrants for 8 years, but for 33 per cent this period was merely 1–5 years long, and for 15 per cent less than 1 year. For the majority, the numbers taught covered a wide range, from a few to several dozen. A minority had taught 100 or more students with an immigrant background. The geographical distribution of the respondents was similar to that of the immigrant population: most of them resided in the capital region and other urban areas, but the data also included answers from small municipalities and from various provinces around Finland. All in all, the data reflect a wide range of stages of experience, among individual teachers, schools and municipalities. The questionnaire consisted of 75 statements9 designed to reflect a wide variety of concerns and conflicts commonly reported by teachers in various in-service training courses. The respondents were asked to consider the familiarity of the phenomena described, and to report on how common they were in their school environment.10 In addition to reacting to these statements, the respondents could comment freely on any of the topics and give additional information according to their own viewpoints – this they did, in fact, fairly frequently. Plurilingual students – a source of enrichment and a burden Students with an immigrant background are still a relatively new phenomenon in Finnish educational contexts. This is reflected in the respondents’ answers: they show how immigrant students are generally regarded as a burden in Finnish schools. As many as 67 per cent of the respondents reported

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this to be at least sometimes the case in their schools, and 21 per cent mentioned this as occurring, but only seldom. Figure 4.1 presents the percentage distribution of the responses.11 There are, however, a few exceptions, involving some international schools, and those mainstream schools that have a more experienced staff and a longer history with plurilingual students than other schools. Teachers working in such circumstances quite frequently noted that plurilingual students enrich the daily school activities both linguistically and culturally, thus echoing the official goals set in the national curriculum (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 12): The instruction must also take into account the diversification of Finnish culture through the arrival of people from other cultures. The instruction helps to support the formation of the pupil’s own cultural identity, and his or her part in Finnish society and a globalizing world. The instruction also helps to promote tolerance and intercultural understanding. Nevertheless, the practices observed by the majority of the teachers differ notably from the goals set out in the official guidelines. The frequently reported ‘burden effect’ was explained, for example, by the teachers’ lack of knowledge of adequate assessment methods tailored for ‘foreign students’, and by the need for special arrangements, such as various L1 or religion classes, and for interpreters in meetings with parents. According to the respondents, negative attitudes towards both students and their parents are sometimes quite overtly expressed and supported in staff meetings – for 45

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Figure 4.1 Statement: ‘Students with immigrant background are regarded as a burden’

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example the wish that all the immigrants would be ‘sent back to their home countries’. Some teachers had heard from their colleagues complaints such as ‘your noisy students are doing such and such a thing’. Furthermore, they reported on having heard questions on whether high school was at all suitable as an educational setting for anyone with an immigrant background. In addition, the need for modified materials for immigrant students may be acknowledged by the school staff, but this does not necessarily lead to any concrete efforts in preparing them. Such duties are easily directed to FSL teachers, who are considered to be the main specialists in matters concerning plurilingual students, and especially their language-related problems. The respondents had very often discovered that other teachers were not willing to share responsibility. Thus, the division of students into ‘our students’ and ‘them’ (i.e. immigrant students) seems to take place quite frequently in Finnish schools. Such findings are in accordance with Talib’s (1999) observations on teachers’ beliefs concerning immigrant students in Finnish schools: with time, the teachers’ initially constructive view of immigrants as constituting an enriching element tends to turn into a view that they are a burden. According to Talib, the lack of sufficient education and experience – together with inadequate teaching materials and time – contribute to the harsh attitudes and narrow-mindedness among teachers. This, in turn, can be seen as a factor having an effect on the immigrant students’ disturbing behaviour and low school achievement, which for its part confirms the negative connotations attached to these students. So far, the most intensive debate on multicultural schools has been the one initiated by a critical newspaper article, ‘Teachers cannot deal with multicultural students’ by Talib and Lipponen (2008). The writers expressed their concern about the increasing inequality among students and status differences between schools; they noted that schools with a high number of immigrant students tended to have the lowest status in the capital region. Many teachers and parents immediately responded with the view that Finnish schools should stand for Finnish culture and not promote other cultures, and that equality should primarily be understood as the application of similar criteria and learning conditions for all. The frequently repeated comment ‘it is time to put an end to all the fuss about immigrant students’ could be regarded as the main message received from the general public during the stormy debate. The tension was obvious when the ideologies of the allegedly well-ordered society of the past were set against the linguistically and culturally more diverse reality of an emerging, more ill-defined society (cf. Usher and Edwards, 1994). Plurilingual students’ first languages – invisible and unrecognized It seems justified to assume that one effect of increasing immigration could also be that the visibility and recognition of various languages in Finnish

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schools increase in parallel. According to our data, this is not the case. As many as 68 per cent of the respondents reported that it sometimes, often, or always happens that schools do not possess enough information on the language background of their students (see Figure 4.2). In addition, more than half of the respondents reported that the schools had provided teachers with too little information on the students’ language background. In fact, the schools may have this information somewhere, but for some reason it never reaches the teachers who are in need of it. It also appears to be common that the information in the possession of the schools is false. One explanation given for this situation is the computer program that is used to register the students’ background information: it does not have an option for all the immigrant languages (nor, as one respondent remarked, on Roma). One might well ask whether this state of affairs is acceptable in a modern society: whether a computer program can really decide whether the schools are to promote plurilingualism? This practice is also at odds with the goals set in the national curriculum according to which the development of each student’s native language should be supported. Nevertheless, there are other problematic practices as well. In the city of Tampere, for example, information on the student’s language background and on the time of arrival is received from the Population Register Centre, and this information is supplemented later with information given by the family. In practice, the local register contains information on the language indicated in the population register and on other languages used at home. However, this system, like any other, relies very much on self-reporting. The parents have the right 35 31

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Figure 4.2 Statement: ‘The school has too little information on the language background of its students’

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to declare any language in the official register and also to the municipality. Some respondents knew families in which the parents actually concealed the language used at home, giving, instead, Finnish as their children’s first language – for fear that the children’s true L1 could have a negative effect on their school achievement. For the municipalities, this concealment of the students’ languages has undesirable consequences, since they receive a special government subsidy for all the students with a language other than Finnish or Swedish as their L1. Clearly, it would be in the municipalities’ interest to inform parents on the significance of reporting the true language situation of the family. As many as 59 per cent of the respondents declared it to be quite common that the school showed no interest in immigrant students’ prior linguistic or cultural skills. This is not surprising: if the information on the students’ language background is insufficient, it is difficult to make use of any special knowledge possessed by the students. The high percentage of cases with missing information also has other consequences for the students’ education. Most significantly, it is difficult to arrange relevant L1 instruction if accurate information on the students’ language background is unavailable. Negotiating space for first languages In the spring of 2006, a German school in Berlin launched a policy according to which only German was to be used as the language of communication during school recesses. The decision met with both praise and criticism: those in favour saw it as a model for other schools, whereas those against it called it ‘forced Germanization’ (Ahtiainen, 2006). A year later, it was reported that one particular school in Helsinki had prevented immigrant students from using their own language in the classroom. After this, the school received counter-instructions from the Education Department of the City of Helsinki (Vähäsarja, 2007). In the public debate that followed, it was emphasized that this incident was rare.12 It could be asked, however, how rare this denial was and is in practice. Are immigrant students allowed to use all their languages within the school premises, and for all the functions for which they might wish to use that language? Over half of the respondents (55 per cent) claimed that it never happened that students were forbidden to use their native language during recesses, and 18 per cent had no experience of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, approximately every fourth respondent had encountered the phenomenon in their school (Figure 4.3). On this point, the respondents were fairly unanimous. Thus, the grassroots language policy of Finnish schools seems to include the following ‘rule’: it is not permitted to openly restrict the use of other languages. However, it appears to be acceptable to guide students to ‘practise their Finnish’ during school recesses. In the classroom, the use of native languages can be forbidden more openly: as many as 41 per cent of the respondents declared that at

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60 55 50

%

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20

18

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8 3 0

0 Not familiar

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Figure 4.3 Statement: ‘The students are forbidden to use their native language with speakers of the same language during school recesses’

least sometimes students were prevented from using their L1 in group work or when giving advice to other students. Some respondents pointed out that the restrictions on the use of the L1 were well motivated, for example, as in the case when it was suspected that students had been bullying each other or using their language as a tool of power in other ways. Furthermore, in cases where the immigrant students did not speak their own language at school, the respondents explained that this is because the students did not want to, not because they did not dare to. In the respondents’ opinion, students almost always dared to speak their own language freely, and it happened only rarely that they were teased for their use of the L1 or their participation in L1 instruction.13 On the whole, the linguistic climate of Finnish schools is portrayed as an extremely tolerant one. Equality is one of the core values of Finnish society. In the respondents’ view, hardly any signs of language hierarchies exist at their schools. Less than a third (27 per cent) of the teachers were of the opinion that immigrant languages with a large number of speakers were more highly valued than other languages; the rest disagreed or indicated that this did occur, but very rarely. Interestingly, the respondents also disagreed strongly with some other statements about L1 instruction. More than half of them were of the opinion that students were never advised to reject L1 instruction with such arguments as the following: ‘it is more useful to study other subjects than the L1’, ‘participation in L1 instruction is too much of a burden’, ‘Finnish is the students’ new native language’ or ‘teaching the L1 is the parents’ responsibility’. The teachers also reported that L1 instruction was seen in the schools as having value per se, and not merely because of

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the extra support it provided for L2 learning. Here one should note that during the 1980s in particular, it was common for immigrant languages to be regarded as auxiliary languages, enabling a transition period on the way to Finnishization: it was assumed that instruction in them would not be needed after the pupil had learned enough Finnish. Thirty years later, about a third of the teachers (34 per cent) had also encountered this view. On the basis of the teachers’ answers, the Finnish school would appear to have excellent arguments for arranging L1 instruction. Since the linguistic climate is very tolerant and since, according to the survey, no unequal hierarchies of languages exist, it could be argued that it would be easy to offer L1 instruction in any of the languages entitled to a state subsidy within each municipality. However, this does not seem to match the reality. It was reported by two-thirds of the respondents (65 per cent) that in their schools it happens at least sometimes that students do not take part in L1 instruction, even though it is organized. According to the teachers, the students refuse to participate in L1 instruction, because their parents want them to study Finnish instead. More than half of the respondents (52 per cent) agreed with this statement. In other words, while the school makes an effort to promote its students’ plurilingualism, the parents’ aspirations seem to work against this idea. Schools also face a range of other challenges when they strive to support and acknowledge the languages of students with an immigrant background. Firstly, it may be difficult for them to identify the language/s requiring support, as in the case when the languages used by the immigrant families are not identical with the codified, standardized language with which they may, nevertheless, share a name. This is the case with ‘Arabic’, for example, which consists of numerous varieties several of which are strongly divergent from each other. Secondly, the providers of education are sometimes challenged by the fact that, as an outcome of ethnic or political allegiances, two languages which are linguistically similar may actually be considered different languages (e.g. Dari, Farsi). Another example of this kind of challenge could be parental attitudes to teaching Vietnamese: a Nordic study based on interviews of immigrant parents (Latomaa, 1993) showed how the parents’ mistrust in instruction in the Vietnamese language derived from the former political division of Vietnam. The parents complained that children could not understand what the teacher was telling them and that the teacher was teaching the students ‘in the wrong way’, using ‘the wrong books’. Political disputes were also implied by such comments as ‘I don’t want my child to mix dialects’. Thirdly, the school’s attempts at giving support may be made difficult by the fact that parents may occasionally demand that their children should receive instruction in the official school language of the parents’ former home country, even though the first language of children has nothing else in common with it except its geographical origin

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(e.g. Bengali, Sylheti; Urdu, Mirpuri). Finally, it may be very difficult for the school to offer language support, when the first language learnt by the students has no written form. On the other hand, the students’ unwillingness to participate in L1 instruction and their parents’ doubts about its value can be explained by the low status of L1. In practice, starting from the early days of immigration to Finland, immigrant students have always studied their native language on a voluntary basis and the instruction has commonly been given late in the afternoon. In this way, the practices have kept such instruction apart from the instruction in compulsory languages (Finnish, English and Swedish). However, the status of L1 instruction is now even lower than before, since the students’ skills in the L1 are no longer evaluated in annual report cards. It is possible that this change in status functions as a signal for some parents: since the language of the home is not part of regular school hours and since skills in it are not given any credit in the Finnish school system, it does not seem to be worth much. They may wonder why they should bother sending their child to a faraway school for a late afternoon language ‘club’ if there is no reward for it. As far as the implementation of L1 instruction is concerned, there are some shared problems throughout the country. The teachers admitted that it is difficult for the L1 teacher to become a member of the school community (Figure 4.4). The overwhelming majority reported that the phenomenon was familiar, whereas only 12 per cent stated that L1 teachers could become equal members of the school community. According to the teachers, the reason for this problem has to do with the teaching arrangements: the L1 teachers

40 37 35 30

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Figure 4.4 Statement: ‘It is hard for the L1 teacher to become a member of the school community’

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work in several schools and they usually come to their workplace after school hours, ‘together with the cleaning personnel’. Consequently, they cannot take part in regular school activities and do not get acquainted with their colleagues. Another flaw in the otherwise perfect picture is the language barrier between the school and the parents. According to the majority of the respondents (71 per cent), Finnish schools most often send their information leaflets to homes only in Finnish. In addition, meetings with immigrant parents are sometimes organized without an interpreter, despite the obvious demand for interpretation. Overall, more information on the use of interpreters at school is clearly needed. In other words, the school exercises linguistic power in many ways, and in doing so, it prevents the parents from actively taking part in their children’s education. The majority language at the top of the hierarchy Typically, everyone living in Finland is expected to speak and understand Finnish. Such a view is also prevalent in administrative reports. Adequate skills in Finnish are mentioned as a prerequisite for secondary education and employment, but the need to clarify what ‘adequate’ actually means in each field has only recently been acknowledged – for example, in the official report focusing on immigrant employment and incentive traps, published by the Ministry of the Interior (cf. Sisäasiainministeriö, 2009; Nikula et al., this volume). The fact that knowledge of Finnish is necessary does not automatically mean that FSL is offered in the schools for all the students who are in need of it. More than one respondent in four (29 per cent) reported that at least sometimes in their schools a student who obviously needed FSL instruction had not received it. As a finding this is quite worrying, even if 42 per cent of the respondents could report a quite different situation in their schools, as Figure 4.5 shows. Especially in smaller towns and municipalities, large numbers of immigrant students receive neither preparatory nor FSL instruction, and are, instead, forced to manage in the mainstream without any tailored aid. As one of the respondents concluded, ‘in our municipality, no FSL instruction has been arranged this year, although some ten students have migrated here during the past few years. People trust that their kids will learn Finnish in their daily encounters, during the lessons and breaks.’ Such practices echo typical views of earlier times when it was commonplace to think that immigrant children would acquire the new language easily, without any special support. These results also confirm the findings of Korpela (2006) and Kuusela et al. (2008), who estimated in their survey report that one-quarter of immigrant students receive no FSL instruction at all. The explanations suggested for this situation are twofold: in the bigger cities a large number of plurilingual students

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Figure 4.5 receive it’

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Statement: ‘A student obviously needs FSL instruction, but does not

are assessed as fluent enough to manage without such instruction, while elsewhere the main reason is simply a lack of resources. On the one hand, it has been a common trend to take the student’s spoken fluency as a sign of a fully fledged skill in that language. On the other hand, the current legislative status of FSL enables – and perhaps even encourages – the providers of education to think that students can be assumed to quickly develop or already possess sufficient skills in Finnish. Hence, very little or no FSL teaching has to be offered. In general, teachers are of the opinion that assessment is often made without due consideration. In our survey, as many as 61 per cent of the teachers reported that their colleagues tended to overestimate their students’ language skills. This, in turn, can easily lead to a failure to adjust one’s teaching in relation to lessons, tasks and assessment practices. Excessively optimistic views of the students’ language skills thus work against the interests of individual students. They can mean that the students are denied the educational arrangements that are most appropriate for them. That said, it should also be noted that it is a real challenge for any FSL professional to assess the language skill profiles of plurilingual students. In late-modern societies the students’ individual trajectories can vary a great deal. In addition, there are also a variety of subcultures and membership opportunities available to them, which will also be reflected in their use and mastery of linguistic varieties. As a result, there is a serious risk that only those language skills that are relevant in school are recognized and valued, in the same way as, more generally, there is a risk that certain current linguistic practices are regarded as anomalies. Another issue to be taken into account is that FSL is not valued highly by all the parents and teachers. As was suggested above, our respondents

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frequently reported that many immigrant parents would prefer their children to study Finnish together with native speakers of Finnish, within regular Finnish classes, and not within separate FSL classes. A differentiated curriculum is thus regarded as a stigmatizing setting that can lead to lower school achievement and worsen the opportunities for further studies. Such a fear might reflect some prior experiences, for example in the parents’ country of origin, but it might equally well be rooted in the Finnish reality. If immigrant students generally feel that they are a neglected group or an extra burden for teachers, they may consider the tailor-made arrangements offered to them in good faith as something that is meant for poor learners only. The simplest explanation for the avoidance of second language classes might be the immigrant students’ generally strong desire to be like the majority. The roots of this desire lie, in turn, mostly in the attitudes of the surrounding community, but also the students’ young age may be a factor contributing to their unwillingness to participate in second language instruction (cf. Iskanius, 2006). According to most of the respondents, the status of FSL instruction is still somewhat unclear even within schools. Such tuition may be regarded as a support to other subjects only: 55 per cent had witnessed this view. In addition, 41 per cent had the feeling that their colleagues tended to rate FSL instruction lower than the Finnish instruction given to native speakers. This is shown, for example, in the following two comments: ‘the class teacher takes the student away from the Finnish L2 lesson every now and then, because s/he has more important activities to offer’, and ‘colleagues may say that the student has to be present in the “real Finnish L1 classes” to avoid lagging behind’. Thus, if FSL instruction is regarded within the school community as a lower-level alternative offered only to less capable students, it is no wonder that the learners themselves, and their parents, have corresponding views. In contrast to many L1 teachers (see Figure 4.4 above), FSL teachers are in principle well-accepted members of their working community; 47 per cent have not faced any problems in this – even though some feel that they are treated more like outsiders. However, FSL teachers commonly experience that they are considered to be the only staff members who can plan the arrangements and solve the conflicts and communication problems related to immigrant students in schools. Yet many respondents acknowledged that they themselves were partially responsible for the present unfair situation involving numerous extra duties. Sharing the responsibility would be the solution; however, based on the responses, it appears to be difficult for teachers to trust their colleagues in issues concerning immigrant students, since they show a clear tendency to avoid any adaptations and rearrangements. This is illustrated by the following comment: ‘I really take the responsibility for sorting out all the school-related problems for all the immigrant students.’ However,

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the situation was far from uniform: some respondents noted that the main responsibility was placed on the shoulders of the class teacher, the preparatory class teacher or the special educationist. In contrast, in schools with a long history of immigrant education the responsibilities were well shared between all staff members. Many parents expect Finland to be an educational paradise which ‘offers equal opportunities for everyone’, as defined in educational policy. This kind of view is echoed in comments such as the following: ‘Most parents are not aware of the actual potential of their own child. They are all supposed to become medical doctors and lawyers, since that’s reportedly possible in Finland.’ This respondent thus suggests how the parents tend to dream of a better life for their children and have a great deal of faith in the good reputation of the Finnish school system, without necessarily acknowledging such barriers as a lack of prior schooling or skills in Finnish. These viewpoints were all too familiar to the respondents (Figure 4.6). The parents may set the upper secondary school and university-level studies as the child’s goal even at the time of arrival, despite the fact that it usually takes more than 3–4 years to reach the skill level at which classroom interaction can be followed with a reasonable degree of ease and textbooks read independently (Suni, 1996). This kind of obvious discrepancy between the actual skill level and the expectations set by the parents causes extra stress and pressure for the students, and it also puts the teachers in a position where their professionalism in efficient language education can be overtly questioned. Such observations as these point to some more general questions concerning the assessment practices applied to plurilingual students.

45

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Figure 4.6 Statement: ‘Parents have unrealistic expectations regarding the progress and future education of the student (e.g. a desire to get to upper secondary school)’

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Assessment as the main challenge Any type of assessment is a site for the use of power. This is the case with the evaluation of immigrant students: inadequate assessment practices undoubtedly endanger their equality and legal protection. Thus, it is alarming that assessment is the most common challenge reported on in the present survey: 76 per cent of the respondents agreed that more information about the assessment of plurilingual students was often or always needed in their school communities, and 17 per cent stated this to be the case sometimes. The distribution of responses is presented in Figure 4.7. Correspondingly, 56 per cent shared the view that assessment was often or always experienced as problematic, and 24 per cent acknowledged that this problem had been faced sometimes. Overall, such a clear majority can be seen as expressing a strong opinion: it does seem to be the case that adequate guidelines are lacking, and that equitable assessment criteria and practices should be both created and effectively disseminated.14 Taken as a whole, the problems of assessment cover an entire spectrum, relating to language skills, success in school subjects, and the diagnosis of learning difficulties or language impairments. Poor assessment practices may also complicate the understanding of the phenomena that are normally present in bilingual development and second language acquisition. For example, it is often the case that immigrant students are overdiagnosed as suffering from language impairments: 34 per cent of the respondents had observed this either sometimes or relatively frequently. Immigrant students are also easily moved into special education classes. Although officially a lack of language skills is an unacceptable reason for 45 42 40 35

34

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Figure 4.7 Statement: ‘More information on the assessment of plurilingual students is needed in the school community’

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making such a decision, 37 per cent of the respondents had witnessed this (cf. Laaksonen, 2008). Furthermore, the students who truly need special education may not get it in time, because their learning difficulties have not been diagnosed properly and because they are confused with their deficient language skills. Another facet of this problem – as 70 per cent of the respondents had noted – is that teachers are unwilling to adapt their assessment methods to meet the needs of immigrant students. The following comments illustrate some of these problems: Teachers cannot adjust their teaching and assessment of students, if they have not obtained information (e.g. in training) on how to teach students with an immigrant background. The whole issue is new for them, and it causes embarrassment. Language skills are mixed up with the mastery of the school subject. When it is difficult to recognize whether the problems of the child are due to his/her weak Finnish language skills or special learning difficulties, the child tends to get moved into special education because of linguistic problems. On the other hand, it is hard for immigrant students to get special education, since it is so demanding to diagnose them, due to their language problems. According to the national core curriculum (National Board of Education, 2004), it is recommended that immigrant parents should be familiarized with assessment practices. Nevertheless, more than two-thirds (71 per cent) of the respondents reported that it was still common that parents did not understand the assessment principles and practices of Finnish schools. Here it should be noted that the national curriculum sets out the following principles for school assessment: The assessment of immigrant pupils in different school subjects takes account of the pupil’s background and his/her gradually improving skills in Finnish or Swedish. In the assessment of the pupil the teacher needs to use diversified, flexible assessment methods which are adapted to the pupil’s situation, so that s/he is able to demonstrate his or her performance regardless of possible deficiencies in Finnish or Swedish language skills. The assessment of immigrant pupils may be verbal throughout basic education, with the exception of the final assessment. (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 263) Compared with these general guidelines, the final assessment at the end of basic education is in sharp contrast with the practices previously applied, since at this point of schooling everyone is placed on the same footing. The

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only exception involves students following an individual study plan. This leads to a situation in which the immigrant students are abruptly forced to face a harsh reality: the only norm followed is that for native speakers. Consequently, native speakers have a clear advantage over students with an immigrant background in terms of further education opportunities. Together with any remaining language problems, poor grades at the end of basic education may ruin an immigrant student’s motivation to continue his or her studies. According to Kuusela et al. (2008), 15.4 per cent of students with an immigrant background are, in fact, excluded from secondary education, which amounts to 10 per cent more than the figure among majority students. Effective measures for preventing marginalization are thus clearly needed. Unprofessional assessment can take various forms, all of which contribute to the risk of marginalization. On the one hand, if assessment is neglected merely by turning a blind eye to the students’ performance, or if it is implemented in an extremely sensitive way throughout the school years, the grades given at the end of basic education may come as a shock. On the other hand, if the evaluation in various school subjects is not adapted to the student’s situation at all, his/her performance may constantly remain far below the actual skill level achieved. These outcomes could, however, be avoided by appropriate methods of assessment. The obvious discrepancy between the principles set in the curriculum and the practices regularly followed in schools cannot be overlooked, in terms of the dangers it poses. It seems that equality is still frequently interpreted according to a modernist ideology, as involving equal, identical arrangements, but not equal opportunities for showing what one knows and can do. Furthermore, whenever such ‘equal’ criteria are set, they are set out according to native speaker norms. In the current situation of late modernity, however, it could be argued that nativeness can no longer be an adequate and appropriate point of comparison in the assessment of a diverse student population.

Concluding remarks The idea of functional bilingualism has been set as the official goal of immigrant education arranged in Finnish schools for 18 years. During these 18 years, this progressive language policy has directed at least some attention to the diversified linguistic repertoires now present in Finnish society. In international terms, Finland has adhered to a relatively stable language education policy, due to the fact that the planning, administration and direction of the policy has for the most part been controlled by civil servants who are not elected on political grounds. Consequently, developments in education have not directly reflected political changes (cf. the sudden changes that have taken place in immigrant education in

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e.g. Denmark and the Netherlands), but they reflect, instead, the views of leading educational administrators. This has meant that language education policies have been relatively well protected from rapid changes in general attitudes and power relations. A positive outcome of such a system is that it has allowed a degree of continuity. In addition, Finland’s history as an officially bilingual country may have contributed to, for example, attempts to offer both first and second language instruction for immigrants, and to the willingness, at least in principle, to recognize the significance of immigrant languages at the policy level. On the other hand, one may wonder whether the stability of the policy may, at least in part, be connected with the small percentage of immigrants in Finland, and the short history of immigration to Finland, as compared to several other European countries (cf. OECD, 2008). During the 1990s, the number of immigrants grew rapidly, and the pressure for more systematic planning and goal-setting gradually led to changes in immigrant education. Now, at the start of the 2010s, new challenges are looming, since schools are bound to receive even more immigrants and, especially, the descendants of immigrants. Again, as educational planning has so far been targeted mostly at first-generation immigrants, Finnish schools are not necessarily prepared for this change. With a growing number of immigrants, and with increasingly diversifying immigration and multilingualism, the problems will become even more difficult to manage than at present. The challenges for the future include learning to deal with the linguistic hybridity typical of a second generation, and recognizing immigrant languages as a valuable resource for society as a whole (cf. Nikula et al., this volume). Until now, immigrant languages have been acknowledged as significant primarily for the individuals concerned and their ethnic groups. Much less attention has been paid to their value as a versatile form of human capital in global markets (cf. McPake et al., 2007), let alone as an important component of the collective linguistic repertoire of Finnish society. As shown by our analysis of various documents, Finland seems to manage the current form of multilingualism fairly well at the policy level (cf. Nikula et al., this volume). However, as our survey revealed, there is considerable variation in the implementation of the policies. The balance, equality and order codified by language educational policy cannot control or organize the actual reality that exists within classrooms – a reality that is continually diversifying as more and more immigrant students with complex linguistic backgrounds enter the Finnish school system. The survey results clearly showed that plurilingual students in Finnish schools are treated far from equally. In their answers, the respondents indicated the kinds of opportunities that are (not) provided for studying languages, the other forms of support that are (not) given, and the kinds of practical arrangements that make it (im)possible to actively use the languages in question, also indicating why all of this may be happening.

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It is only natural that in areas with a large number of plurilingual students, there will be more resources and opportunities to develop good practices. It is also to be expected that schools in the Helsinki metropolitan region with a relatively long history of dealing with immigrant education will have well-developed practices in their work with plurilingual students, as compared to schools in rural areas and smaller communities that have only recently received their first immigrants. However, exceptions to this pattern exist: tailored educational support can be completely absent in areas with large numbers of immigrant students (cf. Korpela, 2006). The reason for this is the fact that it is the municipalities and even individual schools that are entrusted to execute official language education policy, and the bodies in question can take different practical measures. A substantial government subsidy for immigrant education is available if applied for, but since it is currently not obligatory to make any special arrangements, not all local authorities show any interest in offering anything but mainstream education for all. This means that in defining the educational settings in which plurilingual students go to school, it is the local authorities’ awareness of, and attitudes towards, immigration-related issues that play a central role. And it is here where the actual danger lies. The experiences reported by our respondents indicate that many teachers in Finnish schools are still more or less unprepared to encounter and deal with plurilingual students in their classes. In part, this is an obvious consequence of the current legislation, since it does not force the providers of education to take the special needs of immigrant students into account. At the same time, following the logic of modernity, a kind of passive resistance to the need to change can be observed behind the practices. One should bear in mind that most of the teachers and officials of today have been educated to implement the ideal of equality according to bygone practices. They have not been equipped with the kinds of tools that are needed in the multicultural and multilingual schools of late modernity. The confusion thus caused leads to a certain degree of passivity – and this may be considered an understandable or even inevitable reaction to the drastic changes that have occurred in the daily working environment. When successful integration is discussed, it is easy to forget what it is like to be a young individual with needs and plans, surrounded by partially conflicting expectations that have been set by the family, the school and the Finnish-speaking community. This chapter has highlighted some discrepancies between principles and practices in immigrant education, discrepancies noted by the teachers themselves. The perspective does have limitations, given that we have so far only addressed the views of the teachers. The voices of students themselves are not present, nor are those of their parents, nor those of their L1 teachers. However, even a partial look of this kind can shed some light on issues and problems which, in part, explain why numerous Finnish schools currently fail to promote plurilingualism among their immigrant students.

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Notes 1. We would like to thank Mari Honko (University of Tampere) and Sanna VoipioHuovinen (University of Jyväskylä) for their valuable comments on the first draft of the web questionnaire. The statistical processing of the survey data was supported by the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies, University of Tampere, and the research project Dialogues of Appropriation: Dialogical Approaches to Language Learning and Teaching (Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä), funded by the Academy of Finland. 2. This is an estimate, including the foreign-born population and those born in Finland with at least one foreign-born parent, i.e. combining statistics from two generations (Saari, 2009). 3. Likewise, a survey carried out by the Finnish Business and Policy Forum in 2009 showed that anti-immigration attitudes have become more prominent since the beginning of the most recent depression (Haavisto and Kiljunen, 2009). 4. We acknowledge the difficulty in choosing the right term for the language in which schoolchildren from an immigrant background have been raised. In this chapter, ‘native language’ and ‘first language’ have been preferred to ‘mother tongue’ and ‘home language’. However, these terms also occur in this chapter, as they have been used in the documents quoted. 5. Latvia, a country of recent immigration, seems to be following the same hierarchical pattern in its current policy (see Eurydice, 2004). 6. Thus, whereas preparatory instruction was given only to refugee students until 1997, L1 instruction was given to all immigrant students during 1987–97. 7. In Swedish or bilingual municipalities, the second language for students from an immigrant background can also be Swedish, but we will not repeat this option in the description of the policy. 8. The name of the subject translates literally as ‘mother tongue and literature’, which can be seen as an ethnocentric concept, echoing ideas of the nation state. 9. The statements were organized within six thematic sections: status of the languages and plurilingualism, evaluation criteria used for plurilingual students, teaching arrangements, L1 instruction, the students and their languages, and parental viewpoints on teaching arrangements. 10. The scale used was 1 = never, 2 = seldom, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often and 5 = always. In addition, one category was labelled 0; the respondents could select this when they were not familiar with the phenomenon in question. 11. For the sake of clarity, the quantitative results of the survey are presented as rounded percentages. 12. Interestingly, when the use of Finnish has been restricted in the neighbouring country Sweden, the tone of the discussion has been quite different. For example, in 2007, a stormy debate took place in Finland when employees in the city of Uppsala were forbidden to use Finnish during their coffee breaks. For Finns, this evoked memories of the 1960s, when schoolchildren speaking Tornedal Finnish in Sweden were not allowed to use their language in the playground. 13. However, see Tanttu (2008) on the bullying which Russian-speaking students commonly experience in their daily lives. 14. Some assessment manuals have recently been published by the National Board of Education.

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References Ahtiainen, I. (2006) Välituntien pakkosaksasta kiivas keskustelu [A heated debate on obligatory German during recess]. Helsingin Sanomat, 27 February 2006, p. B3. Basic Education Act (1998) Basic Education Act 628/1998. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 2 May 2011. Eurydice (2004) Integrating Immigrant Children into Schools in Europe. Brussels: Eurydice. Haavisto, I. and P. Kiljunen (2009) Kapitalismi kansan käräjillä. EVAn kansallinen arvo- ja asennetutkimus 2009 [EVA National Attitude and Value Survey 2009]. Helsinki: Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA. Hämäläinen, E. (1982) Suomen opettaminen vieraana kielenä: kokemuksia ja ongelmia [Teaching Finnish as a foreign language: experiences and problems]. In F. Karlsson (ed.) Suomi vieraana kielenä [Finnish as a Foreign Language]. Porvoo: WSOY, pp. 147–61. Helsingin Sanomat (1993) Ulkomaisten lasten äidinkielen opetus lähes retuperällä [Mother tongue instruction for foreign children neglected]. Helsingin Sanomat, 15 November 1993, p. A8. Iskanius, S. (2006) Venäjänkielisten maahanmuuttajaopiskelijoiden kieli-identiteetti [Language and Identity of Russian-Speaking Students in Finland]. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Jaakkola, M. (2009) Maahanmuuttajat suomalaisten näkökulmasta. Asennemuutokset vuosina 1987–2007 [Immigrants from the Finns’ point of view. Changes in attitudes in 1987–2007]. Tutkimuksia [Studies], 1/2009. Helsinki: City of Helsinki Urban Facts. Korpela, H. (2006) Suomi tai ruotsi toisena kielenä -opetuksen järjestäminen perusopetuksessa [The Arrangement of Finnish or Swedish as a Second Language Instruction in Basic Education]. Briefing 2005. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Kupiainen, S., J. Hautamäki and T. Karjalainen (2009) The Finnish Education System and PISA. Ministry of Education Publications 2009: 46. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Kuusela, J., A. Etelälahti, Å. Hagman, R. Hievanen, K. Karppinen, L. Nissilä, U. Rönnberg and M. Siniharju (2008) Maahanmuuttajaoppilaat ja koulutus – tutkimus oppimistuloksista, koulutusvalinnoista ja työllistymisestä [Immigrant Pupils and Education – a Study on Learning Achievements, Educational Choices and Employment]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Laaksonen, A. (2008) Maahanmuuttajaoppilaat erityiskouluissa [Immigrant Pupils in Special Schools]. Turku: University of Turku. Latomaa, S. (1993) On parental attitudes towards child bilingualism in the Nordic countries. In G. Extra and L. Verhoeven (eds) Immigrant Languages in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 181–93. Leitzinger, A. (2008) Ulkomaalaiset Suomessa 1812–1972 [Foreigners in Finland in 1812–1972]. Helsinki: East-West Books. McPake, J., T. Tinsley, P. Broeder, L. Mijares, S. Latomaa and W. Martyniuk (2007) Valuing All Languages in Europe. Graz: ECML. McRae, K.D. (1999) Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Finland. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Ministry of Education (2008) Education and Research 2007–2012. Development Plan. Helsinki: Ministry of Education.

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National Board of Education (2004) National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2004. Helsinki: National Board for Education. OECD (2010) International Migration Outlook: SOPEMI 2008. Paris: OECD Publishing. Opetushallitus (1999) Perusopetuksen oppilaan arvioinnin perusteet 1999 [The Fundamentals of Student Evaluation in Basic Education 1999]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Opetushallitus (2011) Maahanmuuttajien koulutus Suomessa − tilannekatsaus [The Education of Immigrants in Finland – the State of the Art]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 1 September 2011. Rumbaut, R.G. (2004) Ages, life stages, and generational cohorts. Decomposing the immigrant first and second generations in the United States. International Migration Review, 38(3), pp. 1160–205. Saari, M. (2009) Personal email message from the civil servant working in the population section of Statistics Finland. Received 27 May 2009. Sisäasiainministeriö (2009) Maahanmuuttajien työllistyminen ja kannustinloukut [The Employment of Immigrants and Incentive Traps]. Helsinki: Ministry of the Interior. Statistics Finland (2011) Population Structure. [Online] Available at http://www.stat. fi/til/vaerak/index_en.html, accessed 3 April 2011. Suni, M. (1996) Maahanmuuttajaoppilaiden suomen kielen taito peruskoulun päättövaiheessa [Finnish Language Skills of Immigrant Pupils at the End of Comprehensive School]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Talib, M. (1999) Toiseuden kohtaaminen koulussa. Opettajien uskomuksia maahanmuuttajaoppilaista [Encountering Otherness in School. Teacher Beliefs on Immigrant Pupils]. University of Helsinki: Department of Teacher Education. Talib, M. and P. Lipponen (2008) Opettajat eivät osaa kohdata monikulttuurisia oppilaita [Teachers can not encounter multicultural students]. Helsingin Sanomat, 21 November 2008, p. A2. Tanttu, J. (2008) Venäjänkielisenä Suomessa 2008. Selvitys vähemmistövaltuutetulle [Living in Finland as a Speaker of Russian in 2008. A Briefing for the Minority Ombudsman]. Helsinki: Edita. Usher, R. and R. Edwards (1994) Postmodernism and Education. London: Routledge. Vähäsarja, I. (2007) Koulu kielsi kotikielen puhumisen tunneilla [The school prohibited the use of home language in lessons]. Helsingin Sanomat, 21 December 2007, p. A13. Välijärvi, J., P. Kupari, P. Linnakylä, P. Reinikainen, S. Sulkunen, J. Törnroos and I. Arffman (2007) The Finnish Success in Pisa – and Some Reasons behind it. University of Jyväskylä: Institute for Educational Research.

5 Problematic Plurilingualism – Teachers’ Views Sanna Voipio-Huovinen and Maisa Martin

Introduction Once upon a time there was order in Finnish schools. All the students and teachers spoke the same language at school and at home, and shared many cultural habits and values. The only linguistic question ever discussed was the extent to which it was desirable to allow the use of the students’ home dialects within the educational system. For an officially bilingual country the school system was extremely monolingual: the Finnish and Swedish language schools lived (and still live) totally separate lives, under separate administrative systems. The only contact to anything foreign was the teaching of foreign languages such as English and German, and the mandatory second domestic language (see Salo, this volume). Language classes, however, were not really a place to use a foreign language, only to learn its grammar and words. The linguistic situation in Finnish schools changed visibly in the early 1990s. In the 1980s Finland had changed from a country of emigration into a country of immigration (see http://www.stat.fi/til/muutl/2010/muutl_ 2010_2011-04-29_kuv_001_en.html). All of a sudden it became common to have foreign students in the previously monolingual classrooms. Many teachers were confused and had no tools for dealing with these students. As early as in 1994, however, there was the first attempt to create new order: the new core curricula for primary and secondary schools provided guidelines for teaching Finnish or Swedish as a second language (FSL, L2) for the immigrant schools and also introduced the teaching of the students’ first language (L1) within the school hours. Over the past two decades many surveys of the situation of the immigrant students in schools have been conducted (e.g. Suni, 1996; Korpela, 2006; Kuusela et al., 2008). The 1994 core curricula1 were followed by more specific and binding ones in 2004. The teaching of L2 then became more established, while the L1 of immigrant students was moved out of regular school hours into an extracurricular activity. In addition, the Finnish National Board of Education published numerous guidebooks for teachers 96

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to help them with the new situation. Currently the Ministry of Education and Culture is working on the next core curricula, which are supposed to be published in 2014 (Nissilä, 2009), but the preparation has been postponed due to too many mutually conflicting suggestions for changes. The national policies thus attempt to bring back and impose order, or create new order, in Finnish schools. The difficulties of agreeing on the new curricula, however, can be seen as a symptom of a problematic situation. This is also revealed by the haphazard and varying grassroots practices within classrooms. The main theme of this chapter is to illustrate how well (or badly) the official policies are implemented in classrooms and in interactions with students who are an increasingly diverse group both linguistically and culturally. This chapter thus complements the quantitative survey study of teachers’ views of the ways plurilingual students are encountered in schools (see Suni and Latomaa, this volume) by analysing individual teacher interviews. As data it draws on 14 interviews of 14 teachers in the upper level (grades 7–10) of the Finnish comprehensive school.2 The teachers quoted here teach different school subjects but they are all also supervisors of classes including, besides Finnish-speaking students, some plurilingual3 immigrant students. The key questions of the interviews relate to how the teachers perceive their immigrant students’ plurilingualism and their overall language resources and whether they are aware of and interested in the students’ plurilingualism. With the extracts from the teacher interviews we will show how, despite the existence of policy guidelines, schools and teachers are struggling with coming to terms with the new challenges posed by the changed situation. We will also discuss the reasons for the teachers’ uncertainty and inability to fully convert the policies into practice in their own work. Finally, we will argue that in their actual practices they are still relying on the old, pre-immigration order against which the current situation in many schools with immigrant students appears to them as problematic. Here we concentrate on those interview sections which display plurilingualism as somehow challenging or problematic in terms of how the teachers and schools are actually prepared and willing to accommodate the linguistic needs of immigrant students. We want to emphasize, however, that the interview material as a whole also contains many examples of teachers’ positive views of the growing linguistic diversity in schools. The starting point of our analysis is the following quotation from a teacher in a Helsinki school: ‘Immigrant students cause extra work and I have no time for or interest in the problems they have because of their plurilingualism.’ This opinion summarizes the challenges ordinary teachers currently face with immigrant students and their languages in the middle of all the other changes taking place in language education policies and practices in Finland. This quotation also brings forth several key issues: the teachers’ workload, time constraints and interest. As we will show below, these issues, among others, also surface in many of the interviews analysed

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below. Before this, to frame the discussion of the data, some information on the extent and nature of the changes in Finnish schools, and on the core curriculum for language studies and the organization of immigrant students’ language education is, however, in order.

A transitional period in the Finnish educational system The teachers and immigrant students in Finnish schools are facing a tremendous change, as the number of students with a first or second generation immigrant background has risen significantly in the past decade. For example, while in 1998 there were about 12,000 speakers of foreign languages4 in grades 1–9 (7–15 years) of comprehensive education, in 2010 the corresponding figure was 22,730 (National Board of Education, 2012). This trend is also visible in secondary education where the number of speakers of foreign languages has risen from c.12,500 in 2005 to c.17,300 in 2009 (National Board of Education, 2011a). One effect of these changes is that the number of immigrant students in L1 instruction has also increased considerably. The biggest groups among these students were Russian speakers (c.3300) and Somali speakers (c.2030). In comparison, the number of Finland’s traditional linguistic minorities studying their L1 remains very small with, for example, only 129 learners of the Roma language, and 25 learners of Sámi (National Board of Education, 2011b). The current organization of immigrant students’ L1 instruction is described in a survey conducted by the Finnish National Board of Education in 2007. The survey results were only distributed to civil servants of the central educational administration, but the recommendations based on them were made publicly available (Ikonen, 2007, p. 41, pp. 52–3): 1. L1 studies have to be re-included in the core curriculum for the basic education as a sub-subject of mother tongue and literature studies. In addition, the number of lessons has to be specified. 2. To unify the different arrangements for the obligatory and voluntary study of the second domestic language in different parts of the country, it needs to be specified what the requirement for the study of the second domestic language5 is for immigrant students. The availability of financial resources for this also needs to be clarified. 3. The immigrant students’ needs for content development in their L1 have to be determined. Information should be gathered on both the problem areas and the best pedagogical practices supporting their linguistic development. 4. The educational needs of the teachers of immigrant students’ L1s have to be determined. In particular, their needs for both pre-service and in-service teacher training and teachers’ qualifications need to be specified.

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These suggestions are very much in line with how L1 teachers see the situation. The Finnish National Board of Education thus seems to be well aware of the main problems to be solved in immigrant education, but so far the willingness and political pressure to develop FSL instruction have been far greater than the actual interest shown in immigrant students’ L1 instruction and plurilingualism. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Finnish National Board of Education has only limited authority over local educational arrangements in cities and municipalities regarding the education of immigrant students. The independence of the local city and municipality authorities is, in fact, often emphasized by the National Board of Education, especially when the topic of the invalid implementation of immigrant students’ education surfaces in public discussions.

The role of the core curriculum and the class supervisor in immigrant students’ language education In the current national core curriculum for basic education in Finland (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 95) the objective for immigrant students’ bilingualism is spelt out as follows: ‘together with instruction in his or her own native language, instruction in Finnish as a second language strengthens the pupil’s cultural identity and builds a foundation for functional bilingualism’. (For a description of the core elements of the basic curriculum for the instruction of immigrant students’ FSL and native language,6 see Suni and Latomaa, this volume). This definition of functional bilingualism has not, unfortunately, been clarified thoroughly in any document published by the Finnish National Board of Education. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the teachers are often unable or lack the time to reflect on the different definitions of functional bilingualism suggested in research literature. In addition, compared to the 1990s, there has recently been very little discussion in Finnish schools on how to reach the objective of functional bilingualism in the case of immigrant students. In the same vein, little attention has been paid to the crucial role of class supervisors in the education of immigrant students. It is the task of the class supervisor to follow and support the studies of all his/her students at the upper level of the comprehensive school (grades 7–9 plus the voluntary extra grade 10). Usually there are approximately 15–25 students in each class supervisor’s group. In principle, class supervisors are expected to pay extra attention to guiding the immigrant students in their group. For example, the core curriculum for basic education assigns a great deal of responsibility to class supervisors as regards the instruction of immigrant students; it stipulates that the educational arrangements in school must support the pupil’s growth into active and balanced membership of both the Finnish linguistic and cultural community and the pupil’s own

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linguistic and cultural community. […] In addition to instruction in the pupil’s language [L1, if instruction is organized locally] and Finnish or Swedish, immigrants must be supported in other areas of learning so as to acquire learning abilities equivalent to those of non-immigrant students. […] In home–school cooperation, attention is given to the family’s cultural background and experiences with the school system in the country of departure. The parents or guardians receive an introduction to the Finnish school system, the school’s operating idea, the curriculum, assessment, teaching methods, and the student’s learning plan. The instruction utilizes the knowledge the pupil and his or her parents or guardians possess of the natural environment, ways of life, languages, and cultures of their own cultural and language region. (National Board of Education, 2004, p. 34) These guidelines have often been interpreted as including a recommendation for frequent face-to-face meetings between the class supervisor and the parent(s) or guardian(s) and at least a certain interest by the class supervisor in the students’ language situation. In reality, however, not many class supervisors have actually read these instructions, despite their wish that they get very precise local and school-specific instructions about how to deal with immigrant students. What also often happens is that, although it is the task of the class supervisors to report to parents or guardians on the students’ success in their learning of their first and other languages, they – nearly always native speakers of Finnish – fail to do this. Another crucial task for the classroom supervisor is to give guidance to students and parents about choosing appropriate L1 lessons. Again, the way in which this is done varies a great deal according to the local resources in cities and municipalities. In bigger cities class supervisors are assisted in this task by contact persons for immigrant education who are in charge of L1 instruction and additional support for immigrant students in each school. In many ways, class supervisors are expected to play a key role in guiding and supporting the immigrant students in their language learning. In real life, however, the situation is far from ideal.

Class supervisors’ perceptions of immigrant students’ plurilingual education In this section our focus shifts onto teachers and their experiences in the midst of a constantly changing situation with an increasing number of immigrant students with different language backgrounds entering the Finnish educational system. In particular, attention will be paid to the ways in which the teachers depict their students’ plurilingualism as problematic, sometimes even disruptive, for the order illustrated by the educational policies and practices of a pre-immigration era. The discussion of the data is divided by the problem sources the teachers express or which become evident by their comments.

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The data – ethnographic interviews The data investigated here consist of ethnographic interviews of class supervisors. To illustrate the complexities and diversity of the situations of different students, we will here discuss the teacher interviews of seven students.7 The class supervisors interviewed and the students they discuss are listed in Table 5.1. All class supervisors have Finnish as their L1. One of the students, Ivan, is bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian. The three Somali sisters, Amal, Hani and Salma, are Somali speakers, but they are also functional Arabic users: they had lived in an Arabic neighbourhood during their refugee time in Kenya. The students were 13–17 years of age when the data were collected. All the teachers work in three upper comprehensive schools in Helsinki, the city with the highest number of residents with an immigrant background in Finland. All three schools are situated in the eastern and northern suburbs of Helsinki where the immigrant population is the highest. Largescale immigration has been typical of these areas since the beginning of the 1990s. Hence these schools, as opposed to many others in Finland, have had plenty of time to come to terms with their students’ plurilingualism and organize support for them. In addition, this chapter draws on some comments by teachers who participated in several in-service teacher training courses on students’ bi- and plurilingualism in 2006–11. These teachers had chosen to join these courses as part of their annual in-service teacher training. They acted as class supervisors as well, and reflected their views of the implementation of the support for students’ plurilingualism. Voipio-Huovinen has been (one of) the responsible teacher trainer(s) on these courses. Lack of time The heavy workload and lack of time are constant sources of stress for teachers. This has consequences for the use of different languages as the non-fluent linguistic interaction with FSL students takes more time than fluent monolingual communication with monolingual native speakers of Table 5.1

Class supervisors, students, their L1(s) and grades

Class supervisor:8

Student

L1(s)

Grade

Mari Mari

Viktor Ivan

8th grade 8th grade

Pekka Pekka Annikki Jorma

Salma Hani Amal Pavel

Russian Ukrainian and Russian Somali Somali Somali Russian

Minna

Yasin

Somali

8th grade 8th grade 7th grade 10th grade (voluntary extra grade) 8th grade

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Finnish. The choice of language needs to be negotiated, and L2 production is naturally slower and more fragmentary than L1 production, requiring frequent repetition and clarification. Time constraints affect both attitudes and the actual use and choice of languages (see e.g. Blommaert et al., this volume; for discussion and examples from working life, see Jäppinen, 2011). In the class supervisors’ view, in the middle of the hectic school days it is very difficult to find enough time to give extra support to plurilingual students. Some of the supervisors even hoped that the responsibility for helping the plurilingual students would not fall on them at all, but that someone else, the Finnish as a Second Language (FSL) teacher, in particular, would be totally responsible for dealing with these ‘problematic’ students. One class supervisor explained his unwillingness to deal with plurilingual students by claiming that he already has so many other problems – he has innumerable tasks to perform, he has students with special needs or difficult family situations, new regulations from the principal, collaboration with several teacher teams in the school, for example – to take care of each day that he simply has no time for plurilingual students. The comment reveals that, in the hierarchy of priorities of the teachers, the students’ linguistic situations and needs do not rate very high. The plurilingualism of a student is not seen as a natural part of his or her personal properties, similar to some special characteristic of a monolingual Finnish student. The shortage of time and difficulties of setting priorities pushes teachers to look for ways of lightening the burden. Teachers would happily pass the responsibility for the immigrant students on to the FSL teacher. More generally, this view of the possible division of labour between class supervisors and FSL teachers brings into focus the feelings expressed by many class supervisors. They are not willing to take on the responsibility to intervene and try to solve problems that the students may have in learning Finnish, other languages or content subjects in their second language. Class supervisors seem to be unaware of the fact that, according to the core curriculum, all teachers are expected to help the development of the students’ plurilingualism. Ignorance of immigrant students’ languages and plurilingual resources Many of the interviewed teachers were openly surprised at the interviewer’s detailed questions about their immigrant students’ plurilingualism. Excluding a few who were quite well informed about a particular immigrant student’s situation, the majority of them confessed to be totally ignorant of their students’ plurilingualism. They had clearly not given it much thought before and had apparently never realized that, according to official instructions, they were expected to be aware of and support their immigrant students’ bi- or plurilingualism. If anything, they had concentrated on supporting and assessing their students’ FSL competence. This lack of awareness

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is, in fact, symptomatic of a more general problem in schools: if the class supervisors who in principle should have the closest contact with and the most detailed information about their students are not aware of the immigrant students’ plurilingualism, it is very likely that the other teachers know even less about it. When asked about their perceptions of plurilingualism, many class supervisors mainly reflected on the number of immigrant students’ languages and the teaching arrangements in school. These aspects of plurilingualism are naturally most visible to the teachers in their everyday working life. However, the teachers may be totally ignorant of other aspects of the students’ plurilingualism, such as the role of different languages in their daily life and their level of L1 skills. Nor do they know about the parents’ language skills. For example, Amal’s class supervisor Annikki, a teacher of history, had never met or spoken with Amal’s mother during the first eight months of the seventh grade – even though meeting the parents or guardians of students is required of class supervisors. When told about Amal’s mother’s interview by the researcher, Annikki’s first response was9 ‘Does she [the mother] speak some language?’ (‘Puhuuks se jotain kieltä se äiti?’). The formulation of the comment suggests that only Finnish or some other language that Finnish teachers often have competence in or regard as prestigious counts as a language. Her comment also shows that she was completely ignorant of the languages of the student and her family. Minna, Yasin’s class supervisor and a teacher of Swedish and English, reported what she knows about his linguistic situation: ‘I know what [Yasin] thinks about school but I have never thought about it from the perspective of his languages’ (‘mä tiedän, mikä on [pojan] suhtautuminen koulunkäyntiin mut mä en oo kyllä koskaan sitä ajatellut kielelliseltä kannalta’). Even if Minna is a language teacher herself, she does not seem to see the effect of language skills in school life in general. Some class supervisors could reflect on the student’s language skills on a general level, but seemed unsure of the concepts and definitions of plurilingualism. For example, Mari, Viktor’s class supervisor and a teacher of chemistry and physics, talked about Viktor’s bilingualism as follows: Excerpt 1 Interviewer Mari

In basic education we have this goal of constructing bilingualism (of students), so do you think that Viktor is bilingual? I don’t know, he copes pretty well in Finnish in my opinion. You could almost call him bilingual; but I wouldn’t call him bilingual all the way. It may be that the issue is that obviously this learning of foreign languages is more difficult for him. Perhaps this is the case of other bilingual students, too. He may well turn into a bilingual; in my opinion he may have the basis for it.

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Haastattelija Mari

Kun perusopetuksessa on tavoitteena kaksikielisyyden rakentaminen, niin onko Viktor mielestäsi kaksikielinen? En mä tiedä, mun mielestä hän pärjää aika hyvin suomenkielellä. Vois melkein sanoo kakskieliseksi, että en mä ihan loppuun asti sanois. Se voi olla, että sit kysymys on siitä, että tota hänellä ilmeisesti nää vieraiden kielten oppiminen on hankalampaa, että ehkä se on sitten muillakin kaksikielisillä oppilailla. Kyllä hänestä varmaan kehittyy kaksikielinen, että kyllä musta hänessä olis ainesta sellaseen.

To Mari, it is Viktor’s skills in Finnish and his ability to learn other languages that his bilingualism depends on. The level of his L1 Russian skills does not come into the picture, but is taken for granted. Nor are his skills in Russian considered an asset or resource in any way. Pekka, Hani’s and Salma’s class supervisor and a teacher of mathematics and physics, was quite confident that his students can be considered bilingual but had only a very vague impression of their plurilingual competence: Excerpt 2 Interviewer

When the objective is bilingualism among immigrants, functional bilingualism, how would you assess the girls’ potential for it? Pekka You mean Finnish–Somali? It is probably pretty good, judging by how they speak in their own language as soon as they have an opportunity to do so. At least they are very fluent in their own mother tongue. Interviewer Well how about Finnish, are they able to cope in two languages in every situation? Pekka I think they can, at least Salma. Hani is more quiet. Interviewer Do you think that Hani’s weaker skills show in her silence? Pekka Yeah, and in her shyness. Haastattelija Mites, kun tavoitteena on maahanmuuttajataustaisilla tää kaksikielisyys, toiminnallinen, niin miten sä arvioisit sen mahdollisuutta tyttöjen kohdalla? Pekka Siis suomi-somali? Kyllä se varmaan ihan hyvä on, päätellen just siitä, että he puhuu omalla kielellään heti, jos on tilaisuus. Ainakin oma äidinkieli menee niin että ei mitään. Haastattelija No mites suomen puoli, pystyykö he toimiin kaikissa tilanteissa kahdella kielellä? Pekka Kyllä pystyy mun mielestä, ainakin Salma, Hani taas on hiljaisempi. Haastattelija Sun mielestä se Hanin vähän huonompi taso on sitä hiljaisuutta? Pekka

Joo, ja ujoutta.

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For the teacher, Somali appears here as something the students resort to whenever they can, which he interprets as fluency and competence. His assessment of Hani’s skills in Finnish is clouded by her personality: the teacher equates shyness with a weak language proficiency. Amal’s class supervisor Annikki had taught Amal’s older sisters Hani and Salma, too: Excerpt 3 Annikki the older sisters’ mother tongue skills [ ⫽ Finnish skills] were quite miserable. Last year you couldn’t even communicate with them, not even give instructions during the Arts lesson. I couldn’t have ever believed that this Amal is their sister, because they were totally lost in a way. I couldn’t first believe that this Amal is their sister, because she is so smart and manages so wonderfully well in comparison… Annikki se vanhempien sisarusten äidinkielen taito [ ⫽ suomen kielen taito] oli edellisenä vuonna ihan surkee. Että viime vuonna niiden kanssa ei oikein voinut edes kommunikoida eli edes antaa ohjeita kuvistuntien aikana. Mä en ois ikinä edes uskonut, että tää Amal on niiden sisko, koska ne oli aivan pallo hukassa tavallaan. Mä en alkuun edes uskonut, että tää on niiden sisko, koska tää on niin fiksu ja selviytyy niin todella hyvin verrattuna [...] Not only does Annikki equate Finnish with the mother tongue – a very common misnomer when discussing these issues in Finland where for a long time the school subject called mother tongue really was always either Finnish or Swedish – but her comment also confuses language skills with intelligence. Both Pekka and Annikki show inability to discuss language skills separately from the students’ personality or overall cognitive skills. Issues of multiculturalism are discussed daily in schools but this discussion does not seem to extend to languages. Concepts such as multi- and plurilingualism seemed to be totally new for many teachers. That this is a common problem in Finnish schools was confirmed by several young teachers on an in-service teacher training course in spring 2011: they also complained of a lack of information regarding immigrant students’ first languages. One of them stated that they had no idea and no information about what their students’ first languages are. Nobody had ever discussed them at school, and the students had not told about them either. These young teachers work in an officially bilingual city in the Helsinki metropolitan area. On the basis of their experiences, it also seems that there clearly is a need for clarification of concepts of pluri- and multilingualism among all teachers.

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Ignorance of the language learning process The interviews with the class supervisors showed that many teachers do not even have a basic knowledge of normal second language development (SLD) and its trajectory, or of language competence in general. They also seemed to be unfamiliar with the concepts with which to analyse and discuss language learning. Although the detailed assessment of language proficiency can be considered a part of the professional competence of language teachers only, lacking even the most basic understanding of SLD and its concepts may prevent the class supervisors from following their students’ plurilingual development and reporting about it to teacher colleagues, students and their parents/guardians. For example, Mari, Ivan’s class supervisor and a teacher of chemistry and physics, was asked about Ivan’s school achievement. In her reply, she repeated the good news she had heard from the teacher of Russian. Russian is Ivan’s L1 together with Ukrainian. Excerpt 4 Mari

I believe that, according to the teacher of Russian, he knows Russian awfully well and that (he does well in it) although it is a foreign language for him, he is still very good in it. Mari Mulla on semmonen käsitys, että venäjänopettajan mielestä hän osaa hirveen hyvin venäjää että hän on sitä (tosi hyvä venäjässä) vaikka se on hänelle vieras kieli, niin silti hän on hyvä siinä. This excerpt shows how the teacher seems to equal Ivan’s Ukrainian nationality with his Ukrainian skills, assuming that Russian must be a foreign language to him. This suggests that she observes her student’s languages based on the ethnolinguistic assumption (see Blommaert et al., this volume). She does not realize that Russian is, in fact, one of Ivan’s first languages, and that therefore his good competence in it is only to be expected. Further, she does not realize that evaluating Ivan’s Russian skills as if the language was a foreign language is unfounded. She is thus confused about the distinction between a foreign language and a first language, and she does not seem to understand the idea that a person can have two first languages. As a consequence, despite her good intentions, the teacher was basically incapable of keeping track of and understanding her student’s language development. Mari also commented on Viktor’s mother’s ‘weak Finnish language skills’ which have necessitated the use of an interpreter in their meetings. Excerpt 5 Mari

Yes, in the parent–teacher meeting I have met Viktor’s mother and sister, who acted as an interpreter, and there was also a third person in

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the meeting, must have been a sister, too. The mother has pretty poor language skills. Mari Oon, vanhempainvartissa olen tavannut Viktorin äidin ja sisaren, joka toimi tulkkina ja siellä oli vielä kolmaskin henkilö, joku sisar myös. Äidillä on aika huono kielitaito. The expression ‘poor language skills’ is typically used in the interviews to describe the immigrants’ low proficiency in Finnish. The use of this general term implies that it is only the proficiency in Finnish that is considered important whereas the immigrants’ skills in other languages have no value at all. This may be due to thoughtlessness, but repeated small comments like this may actually influence the students’ and teachers’ understanding of immigrant parents: they are displayed as ignorant and linguistically deficient even if they often are more plurilingual than the teachers themselves. Another teacher, Jorma, also discusses a student of his, Pavel’s, bilingualism, language skills and learning of FSL using the concept of semilingualism: Excerpt 6 Jorma

Jorma

I doubt that his Finnish competence has become much better. It has become a bit better, but it is useless to even speak about bilingualism. Is the Finnish language a foreign language for him? It may be so, but, well, if you put it really rudely, he is semilingual as far as the Finnish language is concerned. […] Well, I shouldn’t put it so categorically, perhaps it is a bit too categorical to say, that he is semilingual, but Finnish is a foreign language for him. It is quite clear. […] The most important thing in learning the language is that there is time for it every day, and an environment and people with whom to use it. When they (the people) are mainly Russian, as it is for all immigrant Russians, their language skills [meaning Finnish competence] are obviously weak. mä epäilen, että hänen suomenkielen taitonsa ei ole kovin paljon parantunut. Jonkin verran se kyllä on (parantunut), ja kaksikielisyydestä on kyllä ihan turha puhuakaan. Että suomen kieli on hänelle vieras kieli, ja se voi olla, no jos oikein rumasti sanoo, niin suomen kielen suhteen hän on kyllä puolikielinen. [...] Ei nyt sanota ihan noin jyrkästi, ehkä se on vähän liian jyrkkä tuo puolikielinen, mutta suomi on hänelle vieras kieli. Se on ihan selvää. [...] Tärkeintä siinä kielen oppimisessa on ennen kaikkea se arkiaika, se lähiympäristö ja se piiri, minkä kanssa joutuu tekemisiin. Kun venäjänkielisillä se valtaosin on venäjänkielinen, niin se on kautta linjan maahanmuuttajavenäläisillä, se kielitaito jää pakostakin heikonlaiseksi.

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Jorma knows the term semilingual and is aware of its unpleasant connotations but uses it nevertheless. Although semilingual (first launched by Hansegård, 1968) originally referred to the lack of skills in both L1 and in L2, Jorma uses the term in a derogatory way to characterize his student’s poor proficiency in L2, Finnish. Bilingualism for him seems to indicate very good skills in at least Finnish, and he attributes Pavel’s shortcomings in achieving this to his social environment which is predominantly Russian speaking. After this he quickly corrects himself, perhaps realizing that his characterization is too condemning. In the end of his turn he nevertheless blames the student and the Russian-speaking community for the student’s – all the Russian students’ – lack of language skills. Like Mari in Excerpt 5, he thus equates ‘language skills’ with Finnish – and implies that without Finnish, the student thus has no capacity to communicate at all. However, even without accurate terminology, the teachers’ linguistic observations can sometimes be fairly detailed. For instance, this is how Mari, who had followed Ivan’s and Viktor’s learning of Finnish, reports on how she notices that the students had difficulties in expressing themselves when writing about such subject matters as physics and chemistry. Excerpt 7 Mari What I’ve noticed of the other immigrant students in particular, is that even when they write pretty good Finnish in FSL-lessons and sometimes even in Finnish mother tongue lessons where they study Finnish [as L1]. However, when they are in a situation in which they don’t pay attention to their Finnish but for example try to answer questions in physics and chemistry, they make grammar errors and spelling mistakes much more often than there would be in other texts. Ivan has this problem, too. I don’t know how he manages in Finnish in other situations. According to my experiences, his writing skills aren’t as good as his spoken skills in normal spoken language. Mari Varsinkin mä oon tehnyt saman havainnon muidenkin maahanmuuttajaoppilaiden kohdalla, että vaikka ne kirjoittaa ihan hyvää suomea suomi kakkosen tunnilla ja tai jos ne on ollut jopa äidinkielessä, opiskelee suomee, niin sitten kun tilanne, että siinä ei niin kiinnitä huomiota suomen kieleen vaan yrittää vaan vastata fysiikan ja kemian kysymyksiin. Niistä tulee sellasia, niissä on kielioppivirheitä ja kirjoitusvirheitä paljon enemmän kuin ehkä muissa teksteissä olis. Ivanilla on myöskin. Sitä mä en tiedä muuten, millainen hänen suomentaitonsa on. Sen mukaan hänen kirjottamisensa ei ole niin hyvää kuin puhuttu, tää normaali puhekieli. Here Mari is able to make valid observations of her students’ linguistic performance, distinguishing between speaking and writing skills, as well

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as between the products where the focus is on language from those where the focus is on the subject matter. This kind of perceptiveness is, however, quite exceptional among the interviewed teachers. Mari’s comments show nevertheless that it is quite possible for teachers of other subjects beside languages to understand and, consequently, support the language learning of their immigrant students. As language is the medium of teaching and learning, all teachers are language teachers. However, currently not much attention has been paid to this issue in teacher training, nor is it taken into account in core curricula. Ignorance of teachers’ responsibilities in guiding immigrant students It is the class supervisors’ responsibility to follow all the studies of each pupil in their group. However, the immigrant students’ L1 studies and the development of their L1 and bi- or plurilingualism are very rarely included in the class supervisors’ top priorities. This may be due to ignorance of their responsibilities or to their lack of interest. One of the teachers, Pekka, for example, describes his lack of interest quite openly: Excerpt 8 Interviewer

Have you received any information regarding their [Hani’s and Salma’s] proficiency in Somali from the teacher? Pekka No, the grade is there [on the report card], I haven’t even looked at it. Haastattelija Ootsä saanut jotain tietoja heidän somalin taidostaan, somalin opettajalta tai? Pekka Ei, se on se numero siellä [todistuksessa], en mä ole edes katsonut sitä.

His lack of interest also shows in his lack of contact with his students’ family. In principle, Pekka has fulfilled his responsibilities as a class supervisor and contacted Hani’s and Salma’s family by asking the Somali language teacher to convey his messages to the girls’ mother. However, due to the lack of shared language, he never contacted any of the Somali students’ families himself: Excerpt 9 Pekka I haven’t contacted their families at all. Usually, if any of my Somali students has difficulties, I contact the Somali teacher, who will then sort things out. […] I have thought that if there is a problem, I tell him [the Somali teacher] in Finnish and he will then speak with the family in their own language. Pekka Mä en oo minkäännäkösessä yhteydessä ollut koteihin. Yleensä, jos mun somalioppilailla on jotain vaikeutta, niin mä otan

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siihen somaliopettajaan yhteyttä, se saa sitten selvittää. [...] Mä olen ajatellut, että jos tulee joku ongelma, niin mä selitän hänelle suomeksi ja hän sitten puhuu omalla kielellä perheen kanssa. This arrangement is by no means in accordance with the advice given in the core curriculum (see above) about home–school cooperation. In this case, Pekka was fortunate enough to have the Somali teacher at the school to whom he could pass on the task of getting in touch with the Somali-speaking students and their families. However, by transferring the responsibility for parent contacts to the Somali language teacher, Pekka missed an opportunity to talk with and to hear the mother. By doing so, he also failed to recruit the mother as a possible ally who could have supported the girls and their learning in a significant way. Mari also resorted to similar tactics when she wanted to deliver a message to her students’ families. Like Pekka, she asked other members of the school staff to contact the family. In her school the duty of contacting immigrant students’ families has been given to an immigrant co-worker: Excerpt 10 Interviewer

Have you met Ivan’s father in a parent–teacher meeting? Or have you been in contact with him in other ways? Mari No, because he [Ivan’s father] doesn’t speak Finnish, so the immigrant co-worker calls the father whenever it is necessary. Usually Ivan takes care of the things before the co-worker has to call the father. For him it is almost a threat that if he doesn’t bring the document [about schools absences], they will call his father to get the document. There has been no need to call the father many times. The co-worker speaks Russian, so that he takes care of contacts of this kind. Haastattelija Oletko tavannut Ivanin isän vanhempainvartissa? Oletko muuten ollut yhteydessä? Mari Ei, kun hän [Ivanin isä] ei puhu suomea, niin maahanmuuttajatyöntekijä soittaa sitten isälle, jos on tarpeen. Yleensä Ivan hoitaa asiat ennen kuin työntekijän tarvitsee soittaa isälle, että se on vähän melkein tämmönen uhkaus, että jos et tuo sitä lappua [poissaolosta], niin työntekijä soittaa isälle ja lappu tulee sillä. Isälle ei ole tarvinnut monta kertaa soittaa. Työntekijä puhuu venäjää, niin hän hoitaa tämmöset yhteydet. This kind of seemingly useful immigrant co-worker arrangements may, in fact, obscure the fact that the class supervisors are expected to contact and

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communicate with the students’ families themselves. For example, Mari reports on an unsuccessful meeting with Ivan’s father and the immigrant co-worker in which she got confused about her role and no longer knew how to continue taking care of the student’s studies: Excerpt 11 Interviewer

What do you think, did Ivan’s father tell you anything about his hopes of Ivan’s schooling or language skills? Mari No, not much really; what happened was that the co-worker and the father talked a lot in Russian with each other. Also Ivan participated in it. They talked with each other and at times I tried to interrupt them to ask what it was that they were talking about ((laughing)). It didn’t become clear to me, they didn’t seem to be talking that much about language skills but rather about studies in general, and about how Ivan should do a lot better and how he could achieve it, and the reasons behind his poor performance and so on. In my opinion this situation was much worse than the one in which there was also the interpreter with us. They just kept talking and the co-worker didn’t interpret everything [to me], so that part of the time I couldn’t follow what was happening. Haastattelija Mitenkä minkälainen kuva sulla on, kertoiko isä jotakin toiveistaan Ivanin koulunkäynnin tai kielitaidon suhteen? Mari Ei oikeestaan paljon, että se meni vähän sillä lailla, että maahanmuuttajatyöntekijä ja isä puhui keskenään hirveesti venäjää ja Ivan oli mukana ja ne keskusteli keskenään ja mä yritin aina välillä kysyä, että mistä on kysymys. ((nauraa)). Mulle ei oikein tullut (selvää), ei siitä puhuttu niinkään kielitaidosta, vaan yleisestä opiskelusta ja siitä, että Ivanilla olis aika paljon parantamisen varaa ja miten sitä voisi tehdä ja mistä se ehkä johtuu ja tällasesta. Se oli mun mielestä pahempi tilanne kuin tää toinen, missä oli tulkki mukana, kun ne puhu ja maahanmuuttajatyöntekijä ei kaikkee kääntänyt ja mä olin vähän ulkona aina välillä siitä tilanteesta. In the same vein, Jorma told in his interview that he had had no meetings with Pavel’s family during his tenth additional school year. Excerpt 12 Interviewer Jorma

Have you contacted Pavel’s family? No I haven’t. I believe that the family is totally Russian. In addition, he has attended school regularly, so there hasn’t been

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any need to make a contact. Of course there is the problem with immigrant students that if and when the parents don’t (know Finnish), the student very often has to act as an interpreter. The parents most likely know no Finnish, this is what I believe. I can’t guarantee it, but with 90 per cent certainty I could claim this. Haastattelija Oletko ollut yhteydessä Pavelin perheeseen? Jorma En ole ollut. Minulla on semmonen käsitys, että perhe on täysin venäjänkielinen ja hän on käynyt hyvin koulua, että ei ole oikeastaan ollut mitään syytä ottaa yhteyttä. Tietysti maahanmuuttajaoppilaiden kohdalla on semmonen ongelma, kun tai sanotaan jos ja kun vanhemmat ei (osaa suomea) niin oppilas toimii sitten tulkkina hyvin usein. Vanhemmathan ei osaa suomen kieltä todennäköisesti, näin minä uskoisin. En mene sitä vannomaan, mutta 90 prosentin varmuudella voisin näin väittää. Jorma evaluates Pavel’s parents’ Finnish skills negatively without actually having met them. This is particularly striking as Pavel’s mother was one of the two parents participating in the study who did not need an interpreter for the interview, because she was familiar with using Finnish language at work. Another problematic issue surfacing in Jorma’s comment is that, contrary to the stipulations in the official guidelines, the students themselves or other family members are often used as interpreters between parents and teachers. As a practice this is problematic, because the use of children as interpreters may result in dramatic and disruptive reversals of the power relationship and responsibilities within the family. As Suni and Latomaa (this volume) point out, if proper interpretation is not provided, the school is exercising linguistic power and thoughtlessly endangering family relations. On the whole, only two of the teachers interviewed had, in fact, any direct contact with their students’ parents and other family members. It seems clear that without such a contact, the teachers have lost a valuable opportunity to strengthen their immigrant students’ commitment to school and to enhance their school achievement and success in general. That such contacts are valuable is also confirmed by Haglund (2003, pp. 21–5): in her study of plurilingual immigrant students in Sweden she has shown how teachers and school leaders have a strong impact on students’ self-esteem, their multilingual development and their multicultural identification.

Discussion The official educational policy in Finland has in principle created order in the instruction of immigrant students: it has suggested clear guidelines

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for supporting their plurilingualism, and their learning of the language of instruction (Finnish or Swedish), their L1, the second domestic language and a number of foreign languages. The duties of the different parties are fairly clearly defined in legislation and guidelines. This situation has been confirmed by several studies (see e.g. Korpela, 2006; Kuusela et al., 2008; Tanttu, 2008). The interviews and observations presented in this chapter tell a different story. All the teachers interviewed for this study act as class supervisors in the metropolitan Helsinki area, and can be assumed to form a good sample of Finnish lower-secondary-level teachers. They also represent a variety of school subjects. About half of the participants expressed views which on the whole were positive, interested or aware of their immigrant students’ plurilingualism. The other half, quoted here, seem more or less indifferent, ignorant, even outright hostile. Despite their negative attitudes or indifference, all the interviewed class supervisors discussed in this chapter express a desire, typical of high-modern societies, to receive clear regulations and instructions about immigrant education and wish that their immigrant students have a clear and understandable language identity, instead of a confusing plurilingual one. Yet they seem ignorant of the attempts of the educational policy-makers to provide a new order, and unwilling to apply themselves in the matter of immigrant students. They may also perceive the new order to be too complex and tiresome to implement. A common way to cope with the situation is to ignore it. Thus it is safe to claim that the knowledge of Finnish teachers of the official guidelines and recommended practices is quite deficient, even when students with an immigrant background have constituted a large part of the school population for a couple of decades. The situation in the rest of the country, outside the Helsinki metropolitan area, is likely to be even worse, due to the teachers’ lack of contact with plurilingual students. This unwillingness of the teachers to familiarize themselves with the new order, let alone to implement it in daily work, has many causes. As was seen above, most of them have to do either with the organization of school work or their personal attitudes and habits. Analogously, the lack of time and knowledge the teachers frequently complained about has both systemic and attitudinal causes, which need to be addressed so that the official objective – securing immigrant students’ functional bi- or multilingualism – can be reached in practice. Teachers’ insufficient time to deal with the challenges of their immigrant students also tells of a pervasive problem in the Finnish school system: the overall workload of teachers is too heavy. It is very common that their classes are very large and heterogeneous and that the teachers are required to have a lot of teaching hours. In these demanding circumstances, many teachers struggle. On the one hand, they are doing their best to support their students, but, on the other, have to deal with too many demands and

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expectations from all the stakeholders in the educational system. In practice this can mean that a class supervisor’s contact time with his/her own group may be as little as 15–45 minutes per week. One indication of this was perhaps the fact that when the material for the present study reported on here was collected, the researcher often gained more information on the student’s linguistic resources in a few hours than the class supervisor had been able to collect during several years. The teachers’ impression of their chronic lack of time can also be a matter of their personal priorities. In the same way as any students with needs deviating from the average, immigrant students can seem to the teachers either as an extra burden or as welcome variety, and this choice of viewpoint naturally affects the teachers’ time allocation decisions. Sometimes the teacher’s perceived lack of time can even have to do with their lack of patience: the energetic and efficient ones, such as many of the teachers interviewed in this study, can sometimes find it difficult to interact with people who require patience and time, due to the frequent need for repetition and breakdowns in fluency. The teachers’ lack of knowledge of crucial issues related to the learning of plurilingual immigrant students includes, firstly, their ignorance of appropriate concepts for understanding and discussing plurilingualism, and the different facets of language proficiency, development and the process of language learning. Secondly, they have little information about the current guidelines and good practices for multilingual education. Again, reasons for their ignorance derive both from the system and the individual. Not having ever read the curricula and other guidelines is clearly negligence on the part of the teachers. Not having good examples of how to cope with the needs of the immigrant students can also tell of the fact that school officials have not provided them with enough opportunities to acquire good practices. Even when relevant information is made available to teachers, it may be sought by only a few. For example, in-service training tends to be attended by only those who consciously recognize their need for new information, and who have the opportunity and motivation to use some of their spare time to attend courses. Indifferent or hostile teachers rarely belong to this group. Yet another factor contributing to teachers’ lack of knowledge is teacher education. Most of the teachers currently employed in Finnish schools studied at a time when schools were still monolingual and monocultural. Even after the situation changed it took the teacher training departments many years to introduce any studies on the issues relating to immigrant students. Even today, teacher trainees can get their credentials with almost no knowledge of multiculturalism, let alone multilingualism. If we bear in mind that thinking, learning and teaching are all heavily dependent on language, this situation is an extremely problematic, even a dangerous

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one. The crucial role that language plays in education in general, and in the education of the increasingly varied student population with a variety of linguistic resources in particular, demands much more attention not only in the curricula for language teachers but for all teachers at all levels of education. Many class supervisors only seem to worry about their students’ lacking FSL competence and its impact on their future studies and opportunities. In contrast, they show little interest in their plurilingualism. This is partly due to the fact that immigrant students are very often seen only as students of the FSL teacher (see also Suni and Latomaa, this volume). Some class supervisors even consider themselves to be less responsible for the immigrant students than for the mainstream students, since, in their opinion, FSL teachers often know the immigrant students better. Yet immigrant students’ educational language rights and plurilingualism can be achieved only if they receive attention from all teachers. One or two interested, well-informed and motivated teachers are not enough if the overall goal is to improve immigrant students’ language education. Officially, the linguistic resources of the immigrant students and their family members are not disqualified by the Finnish school system. However, as our interview data have demonstrated, many teachers voice a different view and do not always acknowledge the students L1(s). To give one more example, in 2007 a lower comprehensive school in Helsinki had implemented a policy according to which their immigrant students should use only Finnish at school during the lessons and the school lunch, thus going against the official policy (see also Suni and Latomaa, this volume). Fortunately, the Education Department of the City of Helsinki quickly responded and stated that schools are not allowed to prevent their immigrant students from using their L1s in the lessons (Vähäsarja, 2007). The number of immigrant students is growing rapidly in the whole of Finland and especially in Helsinki and the surrounding cities. It has been estimated that by the year 2025 almost 20 per cent of the children and adolescents (7–15 years of age) living in the Helsinki metropolitan area will have a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish (Board for the Metropolitan Area of Helsinki, 2007, p. 16). This is a major challenge for Finnish schools. In order to maintain and develop immigrant students’ plurilingualism in the midst of increasing immigration and varied linguistic needs, more attention, resources and interest are clearly needed. The monolingual order and the search for intralanguage purity (the advocation and protection of a particular language variety, clean of foreign influences) are both long-standing ideals of the Finnish school system. Accepting anything different, let alone foreign, seems to be particularly difficult for people who have for centuries lived in close-knit, self-sufficient

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and monocultural communities. To make matters worse, the recent changes in the political climate within the country have accentuated and promoted this kind of purist and conservative view in public. A large fraction of Finns have now converted the old saying ‘nothing human is foreign to me’ into ‘nothing foreign is human to me’ as Akkanen (2011), a journalist in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest and most influential Finnish newspaper, put it. Sadly, this view is not totally foreign even to the educators of the future citizens.

Notes 1. In the Finnish educational system, governmental steering is provided through core curricula that are updated approximately once a decade. Individual schools and municipalities produce their own local curricula based on the regulations, objectives and rules stated in the core curriculum. 2. The present data are a part of a larger data set which consists of interviews of 14 immigrant students, their L1 and FSL teachers and class supervisors, friends and parents. 3. This chapter is based on the ongoing doctoral study of the first author (VoipioHuovinen, in progress) which focuses on Russian- and Somali-speaking immigrant students’ bilingualism and how it is supported by the school. 4. The category ‘speaker of a foreign language’ refers to native speakers of languages other than Finnish or Swedish and native speakers of Finnish who are maintaining their language skills in other languages after having resided permanently abroad. This category is used in Finnish educational statistics. 5. The second official language is Swedish for students in Finnish-speaking schools, and Finnish for students in Swedish-speaking schools. 6. The Finnish core curriculum for basic education emphasizes the migrant pupils’ functional bilingualism, but in many cases migrant pupils are actually multilingual. The European terms ‘plurilingual’ and ‘plurilingualism’ are used here to refer to all forms of individual pupils’ bi- and multilingualism. When the focus is on the core curriculum, the terms ‘bilingual’ and ‘bilingualism’ are used. 7. Voipio-Huovinen started her PhD study before the current core curriculum caused a deterioration of the situation of L1 instruction (see Suni and Latomaa, this volume). In 2003, L1 instruction was still included in the core curriculum as one of the syllabi of the subject Finnish language and literature, and the grades of L1 instruction were included in the report cards that pupils received at the end of each semester or period (2–5 report cards/school year). Altogether 14 students and 12 class supervisors were interviewed in spring semesters 2003 and 2004. 8. All the names of the participants have been changed. 9. In the interview excerpts, the English translations are first given in italics followed by the original Finnish citations.

References Akkanen, J. (2011) Soinin porukasta ei olisi ollut hallitukseen [Soini’s gang wouldn’t have made it in the government]. Helsingin Sanomat, 2 June 2011, p. A2. Board for the Metropolitan Area of Helsinki (2007) Pääkaupunkiseudun väestö ja palvelutarveselvitys 2015 ja 2025 [Survey of Population and Service Demand in the

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Metropolitan Area of Helsinki 2015 and 2025]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 14 June 2011. Haglund, C. (2003) Skolan och de flerspråkiga eleverna [School and the multilingual students]. Invandrare och minoriteter [Immigrants and Minorities], February 2003, 30, pp. 21–5. Hansegård, N.E. (1968) Tvåspråkighet eller halvspråkighet? [Bilingualism or semilingualism?]. Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Ikonen, K. (2007) Oman äidinkielen opetuksen kehityksestä Suomessa [On the development of L1 instruction in Finland]. In S. Latomaa (ed.) Oma kieli kullan kallis. Opas oman äidinkielen opetukseen [Guide for L1 Instruction]. Helsinki: Finnish National Board of Education, pp. 41–56. Jäppinen, T. (2011) Suomen kielen taidon riittävyys yritysten aikapaineisissa puhetilanteissa esimiesten ja työharjoittelijoiden kuvaamana [Sufficient oral skills in Finnish under time constraints: perspectives by company trainees and supervisors]. Puhe ja kieli, 4/2011, pp. 193–214. Korpela, H. (2006) Suomi tai ruotsi toisena kielenä -opetuksen järjestäminen perusopetuksessa [Arrangements for the Instruction of Finnish or Swedish as a Second Language in Basic Education]. Briefing 2005. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Kuusela, J., A. Etelälahti, Å. Hagman, R. Hievanen, K. Karppinen, L. Nissilä, U. Rönnberg and M. Siniharju (2008) Maahanmuuttajaoppilaat ja koulutus – tutkimus oppimistuloksista, koulutusvalinnoista ja työllistymisestä [Immigrant Pupils and Education – a Study on Learning Achievements, Educational Choices and Employment]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. National Board of Education (2004) National Core Curriculum for Basic Education Intended for Students in Compulsory Education. Helsinki: National Board of Education. National Board of Education (2011a) Vieraskieliset opiskelijat lukiossa ja vieraskieliset opiskelijat ammatillisessa koulutuksessa 1998–2009 [High School and Vocational School Students of Foreign Language 1998–2009]. [Online.] Data available for collecting through National Board of Education’s data portal at , source Statistics Finland, date accessed 31 May 2011. National Board of Education (2011b) Omana äidinkielenä opetetut kielet ja opetukseen osallistuneiden määrät vuonna 2008 [Languages Studied as L1s and Students who Participated in the Instruction in 2008]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 18 January 2012. National Board of Education (2012) Vieraskieliset ikäryhmät 1998–2010 [School Students Speaking a Foreign Language by Age Group 1998–2010]. [Online.] Data available for collecting through National Board of Education’s data portal at , source Statistics Finland, date accessed 18 January 2012. Nissilä, L. (2009) Avauspuheenvuoro S2-kehittämispäivillä 5.10.2009 Helsingissä [Opening speech at the conference for the development of Finnish as a second language instruction]. 5 October 2009, Helsinki. Statistics Finland (2010) Immigration, Emigration and Net Immigration in 1971–2010. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 14 June 2011. Suni, M. (1996) Maahanmuuttajaoppilaiden suomen kielen taito peruskoulun päättövaiheessa [Finnish Language Skills of Immigrant Pupils at the End of Comprehensive School]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Tanttu, J. (2008) Venäjänkielisenä Suomessa 2008. Selvitys vähemmistövaltuutetulle [Living as a Russian Speaking Person in Finland in 2008. Report to the Ombudsman for Minorities]. Helsinki: Edita.

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Vähäsarja, I. (2007) Koulu kielsi kotikielen puhumisen tunneilla [The school prohibited the use of home language in lessons]. Helsingin Sanomat, 21 December 2007, p. A13. Voipio-Huovinen, S. (In progress) Maahanmuuttajataustaisten oppilaiden kaksikielisyyden toteutuminen ja tukeminen. Oppilaiden, opettajien ja vanhempien käsityksiä [Bilingualism and support for bilingualism among teenager immigrant students in Finnish schools. Students’, teachers’ and parents’ perceptions]. [PhD thesis.] University of Jyväskylä and University of Helsinki.

Part II Purity – Impurity

6 Hard Currency or a Stigma – Russian–Finnish Bilingualism among Young Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Finland Mika Lähteenmäki and Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski

Introduction During the last 20 years the number of the Russian-speaking population in Finland has increased rapidly and they have become the biggest linguistic minority in Finland after the Swedish-speaking population. While in 1990 there were 3884 Russian-speaking people living in Finland, in 2010 their number had reached 51,683 (31 December 2010). Factually the number is even bigger, because all bilingualism does not show in the official statistics. Despite the growing Russian-speaking population, the Russian language has not been granted the status of a minority language in Finland irrespective of the efforts of the Russian-speaking population and the recommendations of the EU. According to Finnish legislation, the official status of a minority language entitles the speakers of the language to have instruction and administrative services in their native tongue. The Russian-speaking population of Finland has migrated to Finland in four waves. This group is both ethnically and culturally heterogeneous and it is usually divided into the ‘Old Russians’ and ‘New Russians’. The ancestors of the Old Russians moved to Finland in three waves1 (see e.g. Niemi, 2007; Pietari, 2006), the first of which took place in the early eighteenth century comprising serfs and farmers who relocated to the province of Karelia which was part of the Swedish Empire at that time. The second wave of immigration involved civil servants, merchants, military and so on, who migrated in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in the period of autonomy. The third wave of migration comprised people who fled Soviet Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. In 1922, there were 33,500 Russian people living in Finland. The majority of the Old Russians have assimilated into the Finnish-speaking or Swedish-speaking population. Finally, the fourth wave, the ‘New Russians’, refers to more recent immigrants who migrated to Finland from the republics of the former Soviet Union after perestroika. The largest group within the Russian-speaking 121

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population comprises Ingrian Finns, ethnically Finno-Ugric people whose knowledge of the Finnish language was limited or non-existent when they moved to Finland starting from the early 1990s. The majority of ethnic Russians have moved to Finland as a result of Finnish–Russian marriages or work opportunities. Within the Russian-speaking population there are also members of other ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union whose main language was Russian. The aim of the present chapter is to discuss the linguistic situation of the fourth wave of Russian-speaking migrants and shed light on the roles and functions of different languages in the daily life of young Russianspeaking immigrants (for a discussion of the linguistic identity of the Russian-speaking youth, see Iskanius, 2006; Rynkänen, 2004). What is more, our chapter focuses on both the experiences of the Russian-speaking youth about their use of Russian and Finnish in various contexts and their reports of others’ attitudes towards their multilingual activity. In our discussion, we emphasize the dual nature of multilingualism: it can be seen as both a resource and problem for both the individual and the society (see Blommaert et al., this volume). It will be argued that the problematic and negative dimension of multilingualism, as experienced by young Russian-speaking immigrants in Finland today, derives, at least in part, from the discourses which have been used in the construction of the common history of Finland and Russia. In these discourses Russia has been represented as a potential threat to Finland and ‘Finnishness’, as recently demonstrated by the notorious speech by the then Finnish Minister of Defence Jyri Häkämies.2 The discursive representations of Russia as a threat are deeply rooted in the Herderian holy trinity of language, culture and ethnicity which cherishes the unity, self-containedness and purity of Finland, the Finnish language and culture.

Historical context – Russia as a threat The current discourses and attitudes towards ‘Russian and Russians’ in Finland can be seen as part of a broader debate in which ideologies concerning language and culture become articulated (see Blommaert, 1999). In this view, all acts of ideological construction are embedded in a wider sociocultural context and can be seen as a part of more general sociopolitical processes taking place in a particular society (Blommaert, 1999, p. 2). This implies that in order to account for the ideological underpinnings that underlie contemporary discourses and Finns’ attitudes towards the Russian language, it is necessary to focus on the historical development of the ideologies by analysing the sociocultural, historical and political contexts of their emergence. One officially held ideological claim is that ‘knowing Russian is very important’ in Finland and therefore the study of Russian in schools and

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universities should be promoted (Mustajoki, 2007). This claim has been argued for by referring, for instance, to the geographical location of Finland next to Russia and the importance of the Russian market for the development of the Finnish national economy. The official ideological position boils down to the assumption that knowing Russian is an important social, cultural and economic capital, offering advantages to the individual (e.g. better career opportunities) as well as Finnish society as a whole. Within this system of beliefs the only logical conclusion would be to see Russianspeaking migrants as a potential resource for Finnish society. However, as a recent report on the problems of the Russian-speaking population in Finland (Tanttu, 2008) commissioned by the Ombudsman for Minorities shows, there is a clash between the official position and the actual experiences of Russian-speaking migrants. The informants interviewed for the report feel that their linguistic and cultural expertise as well as their education and professional skills form a potential which has been left unrealized in Finnish society. In addition, they have experienced prejudice and even racism in their daily life. Prejudice and suspicious attitudes towards Russia and Russians are not a recent phenomenon in Finland, but derive from the common history of the countries. Finland is a relatively young nation state which belonged to Sweden for almost 500 years and then to Russia for more than 100 years before establishing its independence in 1917 (see e.g. Karonen, 2008). While the first 90 years under Russian rule are generally seen as the era of freedom and autonomy, the situation changed radically at the turn of the century after which Russia was experienced as a threat to Finland and Finnish culture. During the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II nationalism and Russian chauvinism became stronger in the Russian Empire which also threatened the extensive autonomy and privileges Finland had been granted earlier. The aim of Russian chauvinist politics was to obliterate ‘Finnish separatism’ and the growing nationalist movement in Finland. The periods of Russification in Finland are known as the first (1899–1905) and second (1909–17) eras of oppression. Despite the Russification policies Finland established its independence in December 1917 after the October Revolution and the collapse of the Russian Empire ( Jussila, 2004; Zetterberg, 2005). A more recent historical event that has significantly affected the attitudes of Finns towards Russia and Russians is the ‘Winter War’ which started in November 1939, when Soviet troops attacked Finland. The war ended in three months in the peace treaty which gave the Soviet Union large territories in south-eastern Finland. The Winter War was followed by the ‘Continuation War’ when Finland entered the Second World War seeking revenge as a cobelligerent with Germany. After the war, Finland ceded more territories to the Soviet Union and had to pay significant war indemnity which was confirmed in the Paris Peace Treaty. The Treaty of

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Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance was concluded between the countries in 1948 (Zetterberg, 1995, pp. 78–108; Jutikkala and Pirinen, 1984, pp. 248–66). During the post-war period Finnish foreign and domestic politics were dominated by Finlandization which meant that Finland chose not to challenge the interests of the Soviet Union. As a result of the common history with Sweden and Russia, ‘Finnishness’ and the Finnish national identity have often been historically constructed in disjunctive terms as something opposed to both ‘Swedishness’ and ‘Russianness’, as demonstrated by the famous expression ‘we are not Swedes and do not want to become Russians, therefore let us be Finns’, which has frequently been attributed to Adolf Ivar Arwidsson (1791–1858). This expression became a slogan of the nationalist Fennoman movement, the chief aim of which was the promotion of the Finnish language and culture. It is somewhat paradoxical that while a significant number of Fennomans, many of whom started to Finnicize their surnames in the late nineteenth century, spoke Swedish as their mother tongue, their slogan represents an attempt to suppress the social, cultural and linguistic diversity and multivoicedness deriving from history in order to propagate the homogeneity and purity of the Finnish nation (see also Leppänen and Pahta in this volume). The ideal of purity is intimately connected to the idea of natural order (Bauman, 1997, p. 6), from which it follows that ‘Finnishness’, ‘Russianness’ and ‘Swedishness’ are conceived of as natural categories which are mutually exclusive. Thus, cultures, nations and languages are seen in essentialist terms as autonomous and self-contained units, while any influence ‘from the outside’ presents a potential threat to their purity and the natural order of things which supposedly underlies various acts of meaning-making in a particular culture. An important role in the construction of the Finnish national identity in the nineteenth century was played by the creation and standardization of the Finnish language. The existence of a national language different from both Swedish and Russian was considered not only as a necessary prerequisite for promoting national unity among Finns but also as a proof of such unity, thus forming an essential part of the grand narrative of Finnishness which was being created in various political and cultural spheres at that time (see also Leppänen and Pahta, this volume). In addition to unification, another important aim of language standardization is to promote and guard the purity of a particular language by producing prescriptive tools – for example dictionaries and grammar books – as part of linguistic codification. It can be argued that the pervasiveness of the ideal of linguistic purity is based on the assumption that linguistic features of a particular language are not historically contingent but derive from the essences of a particular nation (or other grouping of people, for that matter) (Gal and Irvine, 2000), thus directly reflecting the natural order of things. The complex interplay of various ethnic, national, political, cultural and linguistic factors in the

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creation of Finnish national identity reflects the Herderian idea of the union of ethnicity, language and state underlying the modernist conception of the nation state (for discussion, see Bauman and Briggs, 2003) which has played a significant role in the development of nation states in Central Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The pervasiveness of the Herderian holy trinity in the Finnish context becomes especially evident in case of Ingrian Finns who are the biggest subgroup within the Russian-speaking population. In 1990, President Mauno Koivisto stated that Ingrian Finns living in the territory of the former Soviet Union are considered as repatriates, which led to rapidly increasing migration of Ingrian Finns to Finland in the early 1990s (see Jasinskaja-Lahti and Liebkind, 2000, p. 124; Shenshin, 2008, p. 46). The main criterion for granting expatriate status was ethnicity: those who could document their Finnish origin were given the opportunity to move to Finland irrespective of their linguistic and cultural identity. Despite the fact that in the official discourse Ingrian Finns were considered as ethnic Finns, they were treated as ‘Russians’ and excluded from ‘us’ by Finns after they moved to Finland. Thus, in assigning the identity to the new group of migrants, ethnicity – which was the official criterion for the expatriate status of Ingrian Finns – was disregarded, and they were often labelled as Russians on the basis of the fact that they came from the territory of the former Soviet Union and many of them were linguistically and culturally Russian, while their knowledge of Finnish was sometimes non-existent. The above-mentioned categorization of Ingrian Finns as ‘Russians’ can be seen as an identity claim involving a process of exclusion in which Ingrian Finns are made ‘others’ and separated from ‘us’ by labelling them as ‘Russians’. The categorization demonstrates that in various processes of inclusion and exclusion such categories as language, ethnicity and state are inseparably interlinked. The categorization and identity construction may also involve the misconceived idea of Russia as a state or geographical space which comprises the territory of the former Soviet Union. This is reflected in cases in which, for instance, an Ingrian Finn who has moved to Finland from Estonia and whose mother tongue is Estonian is categorized as ‘Russian’ by Finns. This categorization is clearly based on the Romantic notion of an ethnically, culturally and linguistically homogeneous nation state which is then mistakenly equated with the former Soviet Union as a geographical space. It can be argued that the attitude of Finns towards Russia and Russians has been and still is characterized by Ryssäviha, the hatred of Russians – the specifically Finnish version of Russophobia – which has a prominent place in the collective memory of Finns. According to Vilkuna’s (2006) interpretation, Russia has been seen as a primordial aggressive enemy, and consequently, the fear of Russia and Russian is reflected in Finnish folklore and local history (see also Leppänen and Pahta, this volume). Klinge (1983),

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in turn, sees the hatred of Russians as a more recent phenomenon and argues that it was deliberately propagated during the Civil War in 1917–18 in order to create the fear of communism as part of the ideological confrontation between the ‘Whites’ and ‘Reds’. Thus, despite the official liturgy of foreign politics Russia and the Soviet Union have been seen as a potential threat to Finland which – at least in part – explains the ways in which the ideological position concerning Russia, Russians and the Russian language are articulated in contemporary discourses as well as the attitudes and prejudices towards them.

Between different cultures and languages Against the background of the tenacious fear and mistrust of Russia in Finland, the present study looks at multilingualism among young Russianspeaking immigrants in Finland from the point of view of the roles and functions of different languages in their daily life. More importantly, the study investigates their experiences of the use of Russian and Finnish in various domains and contexts, as well as others’ attitudes to their multilingual activity encountered in daily life in order to reveal prejudices and negative attitudes that underlie contemporary discourses about Russians and the Russian language. To do this, a web questionnaire was designed utilizing Webropol software. An e-mail containing a link to the questionnaire was sent out to 44 subjects3 of whom 22 completed the questionnaire. The subjects were university students whose native tongue is Russian and who had studied the Russian language as their major subject at the universities of Jyväskylä and Joensuu. University students were chosen for the present case study, because the fact that they had selected Russian as their major subject suggests that they were interested in the Russian language and culture as well as in the maintenance of their cultural heritage. It can also be assumed that as language students they are sensitive to how and to what extent the languages which their linguistic repertoire consists of differ in terms of functions, domains of use and so forth. The questionnaire identified five thematic areas relating to various roles of different languages in the daily life of the subjects. The areas included (1) general background information, (2) different languages and their domains of use, (3) attitudes to different languages and their use, (4) evaluation of one’s own language skills and (5) experiences regarding the use of Finnish and Russian in different contexts. The questionnaire consisted of 37 questions utilizing different question types, including multiple choice questions, open-ended questions and scaled multiple choice questions. The instructions and questions in the questionnaire were in Finnish. The question relating to the general background of the subjects revealed that 20 subjects were born in the former Soviet Union, while only one of them was born in Finland. Three subjects had Finnish citizenship, while five

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had Russian citizenship. The majority (11) had dual citizenship, consisting of Finnish citizenship and the citizenship of Russia or a former republic of the Soviet Union. Two subjects were Estonian citizens. The reasons for migration among the subjects were also diverse. The largest group (7) consisted of those who had moved to Finland together with both of their parents. The marriage of one of the parents with a Finn was the reason for migration in four cases. Two subjects had moved to Finland after they themselves had married a Finn. Six subjects stated an unspecified other reason. Only one subject had lived in Finland less than five years, while the majority (20) of the subjects had lived in Finland between 6 and 20 years. The subjects also had different educational histories. Eighteen of them had studied in comprehensive school in Russia or the Soviet Union before moving to Finland. The time studied in comprehensive school varied from less than a year to a full ten years. Five subjects had completed their comprehensive school in Russia, while six had completed the whole syllabus (nine or more years) in a Finnish comprehensive school. Only three subjects had not studied in a Russian comprehensive school at all, while five had no experience of studying in a Finnish comprehensive school. Sixteen subjects had taken the Finnish matriculation exam. Eight subjects had gained a professional qualification or a university degree in Russia or the former Soviet Union. In addition to indicating their citizenship, the subjects were also asked which country they considered as their home country. Six subjects felt that their country of origin – in other words Russia or other republic of the former Soviet Union – was their home country, while ten considered Finland their home country. Three subjects regarded both Finland and Russia as their home countries. Some subjects found it difficult to define their home country, because they felt that they had different identities in different contexts. The formation of identity could also be seen as a process, as exemplified by one answer ‘by now my home country is already Finland’. According to one subject, I mainly consider myself a Finn. In Estonia I feel I’m Estonian, while in Russia I feel I’m Russian. It really depends on the situation. However, in the end my home country is Estonia. This answer demonstrates that the self-identity of an individual does not necessarily represent a monolithic whole, but can be characterized as a heterogeneous and dynamic hybrid which is constructed and emerges in a concrete situation in interaction with others and the environment. As pointed out by Giddens (1991, p. 75), in high modernity the construction of self-identity can be seen as a reflexive project in which the individual is conscious of the potential trajectories of development as well as of the interplay of various factors which condition the process of building and

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rebuilding self-identity. The process of identity construction is embedded in multiple contexts including, for instance, historical, socio-economic, political, ideological and situational contexts, from which it follows that self-identity may contain contradictory elements or different voices (see Bakhtin, 1984; Lähteenmäki, 2010) as a result of which the self-identity of an individual defies an essentialist definition. The subjects were also asked which language was their mother tongue or which languages they had learnt first. Sixteen subjects answered that they considered Russian as their mother tongue, while three felt that they had two mother tongues, Russian and Finnish. One subject reported that s/he is bilingual in Russian and Karelian, while one bilingual person was of the opinion that Estonian, rather than Russian, was his/her mother tongue. While the mother tongue is generally considered a significant part of the identity of an individual, it appeared that it is not necessarily a stable property that could be defined in essentialist terms, as demonstrated by the following reply: I feel that Finnish is my mother tongue, but Russian is the language I learnt first. Thus, the language a person regards as his/her mother tongue is not necessarily the language s/he had first learnt, but it can be the language which s/he knows best and which dominates his/her daily life. However, another subject who stated Russian is his/her mother tongue replied that At the moment I know Finnish better than Russian; in my opinion I know Finnish as well as any native speaker. This response suggests that at some point a bilingual person may feel that his/her mother tongue is not necessarily the language s/he knows best. In contrast, the mother tongue can also be understood as the language the person identifies him/herself with and to which s/he feels to be closest both emotionally and ideologically, while it may not be the language in which proficiency is highest. The subjects also made a distinction between the institutional and experiential dimensions of the concept of the mother tongue, as shown by the following example: My mother spoke Estonian to me and my father spoke Russian. Officially Estonian is my mother tongue and that’s also how I feel. Thus, the mother tongue can be seen as a multi-layered concept which can be viewed from different points of view. While it can be seen as an official institutional category, it can also refer to the language with which the person identifies emotionally. The reply also suggests that these two

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understandings of the mother tongue are ideologically distinct categories which do not necessarily coincide in the case of young Russian-speaking immigrants.

Language diversity in the daily life of young Russian-speaking immigrants In analysing the role of Russian and Finnish in the daily life of the Russianspeaking migrants it is important to pay attention to the different status of the languages. Finnish with its 5 million speakers is a small language by all accounts and its value as a means of communication outside Finnish territory is rather limited. Russian, in turn, is one of the ‘world languages’. It has approximately 164 million native speakers, and it is the second language for approximately 114 million people. In addition to Russia, it has the status of an official language in several former republics of the Soviet Union including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova and it also is one of the official languages of the UN. It can also be argued that the prominent status of the ‘Great Russian Language’ [velikii russkii iazyk] among the languages of the world is a significant part of Russian national identity (see Bragina, 2007; Vanhala-Aniszewski and Siilin, 2008). Moreover, the aim of the official language politics of the former Soviet Union as well as presentday Russia has been to make Russian the lingua franca of the state, which means that good proficiency in Russian is a prerequisite for career opportunities and so forth. However, while in the former Soviet Union and Russia the Russian language was located in the cultural centre and represented important social, cultural and economic capital, it is significantly devalued and becomes a peripheral phenomenon in Finnish society where Russian is just a language spoken by a minority. In order to solicit more detailed information about the role of different languages in the daily life of subjects, they were asked to indicate what other languages they knew in addition to their mother tongue(s). Naturally, all the subjects knew Finnish. Twenty subjects reported that they also knew English, while there were only two people in the group who did not know any English. Those who did not know any English had finished their comprehensive school in Russia or the former Soviet Union which shows that the role of English in the curriculum in Russia is not as prominent as in Finland. There also was a correlation between the low self-assessment of knowledge of English and a short history of studying in the Finnish educational system. The subjects who had studied the whole curriculum in Finnish comprehensive school knew both English and Swedish. Although Swedish – which is the second official language of Finland – is a compulsory subject in comprehensive school, even those subjects who had studied in Finnish comprehensive school reported that they did not know Swedish very well. Other languages which are reportedly known in varying degrees

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included German (4), French (3), Italian (1), Spanish (1), Danish (1), Thai (1) and Czech (1). As regards domains of use, 16 subjects explicitly mentioned that they use Russian at home with their family members. However, if the person is married to a Finn, s/he prefers to use Finnish at home, while Russian is used for communication with one’s parents and relatives. Two subjects reported that they speak English with their spouse. Fourteen subjects replied that they spend most of their time with Finnish-speaking people, while Russian dominates the daily life of three people only. However, most subjects (14) preferred to use Russian when communicating with their friends, while Finnish is used for that purpose by five subjects only. The Russian-speaking students mainly use Russian with each other and Russian is often used as the language of instruction at the university, while Finnish is used in communication with Finnish-speaking students of Russian in the majority of cases. This suggests that for some reason Finnish-speaking students of Russian prefer to use Finnish, despite the fact that by communicating in Russian with native speaker students, they could easily improve their language skills. The subjects were also requested to evaluate their own language skills in both Finnish and Russian. The results of the self-evaluation of their language skills in Finnish are presented in Table 6.1. As Table 6.1 shows, the majority of subjects feel that they can speak Finnish as well as understand spoken Finnish fluently, while they evaluate their writing skills as less fluent. The high self-evaluation of one’s language skills seems to correlate positively with the number of years spent in Finnish comprehensive school. Those who had not studied in Finnish comprehensive school felt that they were less fluent than those who had done so. This is reflected especially in the students’ self-evaluations of their writing skills. The subjects without Finnish schooling felt that their writing skills were ‘relatively fluent’ or ‘average’, while students who had studied in Finnish comprehensive school (from 2 to 9 years) evaluated their writing skills mainly as ‘fluent’ (only one person being ‘relatively fluent’). Similar findings have been reported by Rynkänen (2004, p. 201), according to whom those Russian-speaking migrants who had moved to Finland as adolescents or Table 6.1

Subjects’ self-evaluation of their language skills in Finnish Fluent Relatively Average Satisfactory Only fluent individual words4

Speak Write Read Understand spoken language

16 13 15 16

4 7 6 5

1 1 1 0

0 0 0 0

1 1 0 1

None

0 0 0 0

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later – and may have finished comprehensive school already in Russia – often had insufficient language skills. Table 6.2 presents the results of the subjects’ self-evaluation of their knowledge of Russian. Table 6.2 shows that the number of subjects who evaluated their Russian skills (including speaking, reading and understanding spoken Russian) as ‘fluent’ is higher than the number of those who felt ‘fluent’ in Finnish. This seems natural given the fact that the majority of subjects reported Russian as their native tongue. However, it is surprising that the number of subjects evaluating their writing skills in Russian as ‘fluent’ is exactly the same as the number of subjects evaluating their writing skills in Finnish as ‘fluent’ (13). Moreover, there were four subjects who evaluated their writing skills in Russian as ‘average’, while only one subject evaluated his/her writing skills in Finnish as ‘average’. The high level of writing skills in Russian seems to correlate with the number of years studied in Russian comprehensive school. Those subjects who had finished comprehensive school in Russia or studied less than five years in Finnish comprehensive school evaluated their writing skills as ‘fluent’, while those who had studied more than five years in Finnish comprehensive schools – and consequently had spent a shorter period in Russian comprehensive school – considered their writing skills in Russian less than ‘fluent’. These subjects are more likely to experience problems in contexts which require highly complex task-specific literacy skills such as academic writing. To sum up, those subjects who had some schooling experience in Russia and studied in Finnish comprehensive school for less than five years felt that they were equally fluent in both Finnish and Russian (in all the skill areas). Those who had studied in Finnish comprehensive school for more than five years felt that their Russian skills were not as good as those with a longer history in the Russian school system. However, their self-evaluation of their Finnish skills was quite positive. As regards Russian, the high self-evaluation of speaking, reading and understanding spoken language can be explained by the fact that these skills play an important role in the subjects’ daily life. They speak Russian at home, watch Russian TV programmes via satellite channels and have online contacts (chat, e-mail, Skype, etc.) with the Table 6.2

Students’ self-evaluation of their language skills in Russian Fluent Relatively Average Satisfactory Only fluent individual words

Speak Write Read Understand spoken language

17 13 18 19

3 5 1 2

2 4 2 1

0 0 1 0

0 0 0 0

None

0 0 0 0

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Russian-speaking community, which helps them to maintain the language skills required in these types of activity (see also Tanttu, 2008). However, formal writing is a highly specialized skill which is learnt at school, which explains why subjects with a short history in Russian comprehensive school experience problems with their writing skills. As for the functional role of Russian and Finnish in the linguistic repertoire of young Russian-speaking immigrants, it seems that the choice of a particular language is conditioned by the domain or concrete context of use, as shown by the following examples: – it is easier to talk about feelings in Russian, – the mother tongue [Russian] is always the mother tongue. – I like to read newspapers and literature in the mother tongue or watch Russian TV programmes, but it is easier to talk about studies and hobbies in Finnish. These examples suggest that Russian and Finnish are functionally differentiated, and there also is a preference for using one or another language in a particular domain of interaction. The functional differentiation of Russian and Finnish in the daily life of young Russian-speaking immigrants can be characterized as an instance of Joshua Fishman’s (1967) extended diglossia, because Russian and Finnish are unrelated languages which differ in terms of their prestige status. Subjects reported that Russian is preferred when one wants to express one’s feelings or communicate with relatives and family members, while the use of Finnish feels more natural when discussing various phenomena associated with Finnish society and the Finnish way of life. This is also supported by the findings of Iskanius (2006), according to whom the Russian-speaking youth living in Finland prefer to use Finnish mass media including Finnish TV channels, although they also have access to Russian TV channels. It can be argued that in the repertoires of most subjects the two languages complement each other and form a communicative resource from which the individual can pick suitable linguistic means depending on the domain of use and a particular communicative situation.

Experiences of and attitudes to the use of Finnish and Russian One of our aims was also to analyse the subjects’ own experiences – both positive and negative – of the uses of Russian and Finnish in different contexts. In addition, we were interested in their attitudes to these two languages. Six subjects felt that for them Finnish is the most intimate and ‘beloved’ language, whereas Russian was mentioned only four times.

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Sometimes, however, the choice of which language they considered the most ‘beloved’ was conditioned by the situation or broader context: Russian feels the most beloved language when I visit Russia, it brings me memories from my childhood; Finnish, in turn, I value in a situation in which it is heard all the time. The subjects were also asked if any of the languages they know feels ‘foreign’ to them. English and Swedish were mentioned four times, while six subjects thought that none of the languages they speak feels ‘foreign to them’. Interestingly, one subject responded that Russian feels ‘foreign’ to him/her. However, it appeared that it was not the language as such which felt foreign, but this feeling derived from other people’s reactions to his/her use of Russian in contexts in which there were a lot of Finns around. They used to shoot hostile glances at me every time I opened my mouth. The subjects were also asked what kind of experiences they have regarding their use of Finnish and Russian in their daily life. Four subjects responded that they have never had any problems using either of the languages, while others had experienced problems with their use of either Finnish or Russian. As regards the positive experiences and potential benefits, ten subjects responded that knowing Russian is useful in working life and that it had already helped or will help them to find a job. Other positive experiences were associated with studying at the university, travelling, being able to read books in Russian and being able to communicate with Russian-speaking relatives. Similar findings have been reported in Pietari (2006, pp. 50–3) who studied Russian-speaking young people in the south-western Lahti and Turku areas. On the whole, it seems that for the majority of the subjects their knowledge of Russian represents an important resource and social capital which makes certain types of activities affordable which a monolingual person could not access. When asked about potential disadvantages or negative effects of knowing several languages, four subjects responded that there were none. In general, subjects did not regard multilingualism as a disadvantage. Nevertheless, they mentioned several negative effects that multilingualism had had in their daily life: these included the mixing of languages, prejudice towards Russians held especially by the older generation of Finns, and the loss of one’s own identity. The respondents had fewer negative experiences and problems associated with their use of Finnish than with their use of Russian. Nine subjects responded that they had never had any problems with using Finnish, and only one subject had experienced problems associated with the Finnish

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language on a daily basis. Those who had experienced problems mentioned the following sources of linguistic problems: insufficient vocabulary, orthographic mistakes, inability to understand conversational language or foreign words, and difficulties in reading professional literature. In addition, the use of Finnish was experienced as troublesome when one is – tired, – reading professional literature, – trying to explicate a complex thought to defend one’s opinion, – unable to express one’s thoughts in a situation where other people use spoken vernacular or slang. When asked about the attitudes towards their use of Finnish, none of the respondents reported any negative experiences. Sixteen respondents felt that in a situation in which they used Finnish, other people’s attitudes had been positive, while four respondents felt that the attitudes had been neutral. This, however, seems to contradict the answers given to the questions regarding the subjects’ own experiences of using Finnish in which it was mentioned that speaking Finnish with Russian accent could be stigmatizing when applying for a job, for instance (see also Tanttu, 2008). This negative effect is probably due to the fact that a Russian accent may be interpreted by the potential employer as an indication of insufficient knowledge of Finnish and thus it may hinder the employment opportunities of the migrant. In other words, the Russian accent functions as an indexical sign which categorizes the person as a ‘Russian’ on the basis of the linguistic features of his/her speech, irrespective of his/her ethnic or cultural identity. A foreign accent is interpreted as a two-sided sign, which both functions to exclude the speaker from ‘us’ and to include him/her in ‘them’. In addition, in order to appear as ‘foreign’, it needs to be perceived as somehow fundamentally different from pure Finnish represented by the varieties produced by ethnic Finns. It seems that in many cases the problems encountered by the subjects were associated with specific communicative tasks rather than with the language per se. For instance, an individual may feel that s/he is perfectly fluent in everyday conversation in a particular language, but may experience problems with more elaborated communicative tasks requiring highly specialized skills such as academic writing. This demonstrates that in many cases the linguistic resources the individual possesses are not evenly distributed across the different languages s/he knows, but one language can dominate over another depending on the domain and the context of use. Those cases in which the repertoire of the individual consists of task-specific pieces of different languages have been coined as truncated multilingualism

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(Blommaert, 2005), to emphasize the fact that the languages do not possess equal semiotic potential but are used to do different things. However, the other side of the coin is that in a relatively monolingual environment truncated multilingualism may appear as highly problematic from the immigrant’s point of view. For instance, an individual may be perfectly fluent in one genre or style (e.g. colloquial speech), while s/he may experience problems in other genres involving writing skills (e.g. academic writing). However, the environment often assumes that if an individual is indistinguishable from a native speaker in one genre, s/he automatically masters all other genres equally well. From this it follows that when the individual has linguistic problems with a particular genre, the problems are not interpreted as linguistic problems by others, but rather as problems associated with intellectual capacity, for instance. It can be argued that the problems associated with truncated multilingualism derive from our common-sense notions of language which have been heavily influenced by the modernist conception of language which assumes that a language is an object-like like entity which is known in its totality by the speakers of the language. This idea was also cherished by Noam Chomsky (1965, p. 3, emphasis added) who defined the competence of the ideal speaker-listener ‘who knows its (the speech community’s) language perfectly’ as the object of linguistic theory. The modernist conception of language which sees a language as a monolithic whole has been challenged, for instance, by Bakhtin (1981) who argues that a language is to be seen in terms of heteroglossia, that is, a diversity of language forms representing different social and ideological points of view. In this view, a perfect monolithic competence of a language shared by all speakers is a myth, because competence consists of a repertoire of registers, varieties, dialects, styles, task- and modality-specific usages (see also Rothman, 2008). While the subjects’ experiences regarding the use of Finnish in various communicative situations and different domains can be characterized as mainly positive, the situation with Russian is radically different. Despite the fact that the subjects considered their knowledge of Russian an advantage, they also brought out negative experiences or problems associated with their use of Russian in various situations. The negative experiences found in our data can be divided into two groups: linguistic problems and negative attitudes of others. The linguistic problems they had typically derived from their perceived insufficient language skills some of which were highly taskspecific. These included: – problems with writing, – forgetting words and terms when speaking Russian, – using Russian in an academic university setting,

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– discussing the Russian foreign politics in Russia with inadequate vocabulary. Thus, the subjects felt that there were several domains and settings in which their knowledge of Russian was not sufficient, although they were treated by others as native speakers of the language. While linguistic problems are common among the subjects, the problems associated with the negative and even hostile attitudes towards Russianspeaking people in Finland were experienced as much more severe (see also Rynkänen, 2004, pp. 211–12). The negative experiences encountered by the subjects included the following: – in small places people often start staring and whispering, – when we moved to Finland, people stared at us with hostility, – on the lower and upper levels of the comprehensive school I was bullied when I spoke Russian. As these examples show, the subjects had encountered suspicion and open hostility on the part of Finns in different situations. Speaking Russian at school had also led to psychological and physical violence towards the Russian-speaking person. Thus, speaking Russian in Finland can be stigmatizing, and Russian-speaking people may encounter ‘racism’ in their daily life (on racism in the daily life of migrants, see Liebkind and Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2000, pp. 80–92), as explicitly mentioned by one subject. Consequently, Russian-speaking people may feel uncomfortable using their native tongue in the public sphere and thus decide to use Finnish instead to avoid potential conflicts. This was reported by several respondents: – I do not want to speak Russian in public on all occasions, because Russians have a certain reputation and I do not want be identified with them, – many parents do not speak Russian to their children, but want to forget the language, – I speak Russian to my children and sometimes in public situations I feel uncomfortable doing that. People look at me differently when I speak Russian. As a consequence of the hostile attitudes towards Russians, the pressure from outside may be so strong that a person feels forced to deny his/her linguistic, cultural and national identity and try to assimilate with the majority as quickly as possible. Despite the fact that in the era of high modernity

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the self-identity of an individual can be characterized as a dynamic and reflexive project in which narratives are reconstructed and potential future trajectories are anticipated (Giddens, 1991, pp. 75–6), the examples above show that the construction of self-identity among Russian-speaking immigrants lacks one essential property. This is control over the process, because it is conditioned by the negative attitudes of others to such a great extent. As a consequence of external pressure, they are deprived of the authorship of the narratives utilized in the process of constructing self-identity and also lose responsibility over the outcome of the process. The negative attitudes encountered by a Russian-speaking person may also lead to the development of private and public identities. A person may prefer to use Russian with family members and with Russian-speaking friends only, while in the public sphere s/he may avoid being identified as Russian and therefore chooses to use Finnish there. While a Russian-speaking parent may choose not to speak Russian to his/her children in public settings due to their previous negative experiences, a recent study by Protassova (2008) also suggests that parents want their children to learn Russian at school. Approximately 36 per cent of the parents would choose a bilingual Finnish–Russian school, while 56 per cent would prefer a school in which Russian is taught as a native language; 8 per cent of the parents – mainly respondents with a lower socio-economic background – considered teaching Russian not important and assumed that linguistic and cultural assimilation is best for the future of their children. It was also pointed out that the attitudes towards speaking Russian in public can vary in different parts of Finland: – in western and central parts of Finland people look at me as if I were a stranger, – when I moved to a small place, not everyone was unprejudiced; after realizing this, I have felt that I must be careful. It should be emphasized that although many respondents reported on their negative experiences associated with using Russian in public, the use of Russian had been encouraged by their parents or spouse who had a positive attitude to the promotion of Russian language and culture. Only one subject reported that her husband was against her speaking Russian to their daughter. While most respondents reported that they have felt uncomfortable using Russian or have even avoided speaking Russian in public, seven subjects responded that they had never felt that they should not use Russian. Given the large number of negative experiences, it is rather surprising that when we asked the respondents about other people’s attitudes to their use of Russian, as many as 15 subjects responded that they have been generally positive.

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Discussion The Russian–Finnish bilingualism among young Russian-speaking immigrants can be characterized as a two-sided coin, because it can have both positive and negative impacts on their daily life. On the one hand, knowing Russian can be seen as important social and cultural capital which can promote opportunities for education and a professional career provided that the job requires expertise in Russian. In addition, knowing two languages can enrich the subjects’ daily life in the sense that they are able to read fiction, listen to music, watch TV programmes in both languages and so forth. On the other hand, in certain domains and social settings the negative dimension of Russian–Finnish bilingualism may overpower its positive dimensions. For the bilingual individual, Russian–Finnish bilingualism is not always empowering, but may be experienced as a potential danger or threat, as demonstrated by subjects’ accounts of their negative experiences, some of which had been rather dramatic. As a result of the hostile attitudes towards Russians and the Russian language encountered by the subjects in various contexts and in order to avoid conflict, they sometimes preferred to give up the right to their own language and identity. A Russian-speaking immigrant may also feel that his/her linguistic and cultural capital is rendered worthless in Finnish society, from which it follows that s/he chooses not to maintain his/her language and culture and to pass it on to their children. Instead, s/he tries to assimilate into Finnish culture and society. Thus, there is a dissonance between the official discourses declaring the importance of Russian and emphasizing its positive value as an important cultural, social and economic resource and negative grassroots-level experiences encountered by young Russian-speaking immigrants. The hostile attitudes to Russian and speakers of Russian encountered by the subjects seem to derive from historical discourses in which Russia has been represented as a threat and primordial enemy in two distinct senses. On the one hand, the rapid increase in the number of Russian-speaking migrants may have been interpreted as a potential threat to the purity of ‘Finnishness’, because the essence of ‘Finnishness’ has been discursively constructed in disjunctive terms as something distinct from ‘Russianness’ and ‘Swedishness’. Seeing Russian-speaking immigrants as ‘them’ and a potential threat to the unity of ‘us’ suggests that in the context of globalization the Finnish identity is still deeply rooted in the Herderian idea of purity and the union of language, nation and state typical of the era of high modernity. On the other hand, it is important that linguistic, cultural and ethnic unity is not treated as the fundamental feature of the majority population only, but that it is also ascribed to the Russian-speaking minority and treated as the most significant attribute of their identity. By this we mean that irrespective of their linguistic, ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, the Russian-speaking population of Finland is treated as a homogeneous

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group on the basis of the fact that they share a common language (see also Voipio-Huovinen and Martin in this volume). This shows that language can play a decisive role in identity claims and categorizations, the aim of which is to impose unity – such as a particular ethnic identity – on a particular group of people by overriding ethnic, cultural and so forth factors which may play an important role in the construction of the self-identity of that group. However, recognition of the unity of a minority group is seldom motivated by a willingness to emphasize its equal status, but, as pointed out by Gal and Irvine (2000), the internal diversity and variation within the minority group are erased to essentialize ‘the Other’ and to emphasize the fundamental difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which is seen as deriving from the natural order of things.

Notes 1. Many Russian researchers use a different classification of the waves of immigration, according to which the first wave took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution after Finland had already gained its independence (see e.g. Zemskaia, 2001; Shenshin, 2008). This definition emphasizes that before 1917 Finland did not exist as an independent state but was part of the Russian Empire and, therefore, it makes little or no sense to speak about ‘immigration’ or ‘emigration’ when people were actually moving within one country. The Finnish classification, in turn, is loaded with a very different political and ideological agenda which assumes that Finland existed as a distinct geographical, political and administrative space before the actual declaration of independence in 1917. 2. In a speech in 2007, Häkämies, the Finnish Minister of Economic Affairs at the time, stated that the three biggest challenges for Finland have been and still are ‘Russia, Russia and Russia’. 3. The majority of the subjects were women (19), and there were only three men in the group which reflects the general gender distribution among language students. Some of the students had received their MA during 2008. The subjects who were 20–24 and 25–29 years old formed the biggest age groups with nine subjects in both groups. There was only one person in all other age groups (under 20 years, 30–34 years, 35–39 years and 40 years or older). 4. This answer must be a mistake, because the subjects have studied in Finnish comprehensive school for nine years.

References Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 259–422. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, R. and C. Briggs (2003) Voices of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Z. (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity.

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Blommaert, J. (1999) The debate is open. In J. Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–38. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bragina, N.G. (2007) Pamiat’ o iazyke i kul’ture. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Fishman, J.A. (1967) Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues, 23(2), pp. 29–38. Gal, S. and J.T. Irvine (2000) Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 35–84. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Iskanius, S. (2006) Venäjänkielisten maahanmuuttajaopiskelijoiden kieli-identiteetti [The Language Identity of Russian Speaking Immigrant Students]. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. and K. Liebkind (2000) Venäjänkielisten maahanmuuttajanuorten perhearvot ja identiteetti [The family values and identity of Russian speaking immigrant youth]. In K. Liebkind (ed.) Monikulttuurinen Suomi. Etniset suhteet tutkimuksen valossa [Multicultural Finland. Studies on Ethnic Relations]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, pp. 124–37. Jussila, O. (2004) Suomen suuriruhtinaskunta 1809–1917 [The Grand Duchy of Finland from 1809 to 1917]. Helsinki: WSOY. Jutikkala, E. and K. Pirinen (1984) A History of Finland. Espoo: Weilin⫹Göös. Karonen, P. (2008) Pohjoinen suurvalta. Ruotsi ja Suomi 1521–1809 [A Northern Empire. Sweden and Finland from 1521 to 1809]. Helsinki: WSOY. Klinge, M. (1983) Vihan veljistä valtiososialismiin: yhteiskunnallisia ja kansallisia näkemyksiä 1910 ja 1929-luvuilta [From Brothers in Hatred to State Socialism: Social and National Views of the Years 1910 and 1929]. Helsinki: WSOY. Lähteenmäki, M. (2010) Heteroglossia and voice: conceptualising multilingualism from a Bakhtinian perspective. In M. Lähteenmäki and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski (eds) Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Finland and Russia. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 17–34. Liebkind, K. and I. Jasinskaja-Lahti (2000) Syrjintäkokemusten vaikutus maahanmuuttajiin [The impact of discrimination on immigrants]. In K. Liebkind (ed.) Monikulttuurinen Suomi: Etniset suhteet tutkimuksen valossa [Multicultural Finland. Studies on Ethnic Relations]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, pp. 80–92. Mustajoki, A. (2007) Yliopistojen Venäjä-yhteistyön ja Venäjä-osaamisen kehittäminen [Development of collaboration by universities with Russia and of the Russia know-how]. Opetusministeriön työryhmämuistioita ja selvityksiä No. 11 [Memoranda and Studies by the Ministry of Education]. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Niemi, H. (2007) Russian immigrants in Finnish society. Soctag. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 8 April 2009. Pietari, H. (2006) Venäläisten Suomeen muutto: Lahdessa ja Turussa asuvien venäjää puhuvien nuorten muuttotilanne ja sopeutuminen [Immigration to Finland by Russians: the immigration and intergration of Russian speaking youth in Lahti and Turku]. Web Reports No. 21. Turku: Institute of Migration. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 25 May 2009. Protassova, E. (2008) Teaching Russian as a heritage language in Finland. Heritage Language Journal, 8(1), pp. 127–51.

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Rothman, J. (2008) Linguistic epistemology and the notion of monolingualism. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2(3), pp. 441–58. Rynkänen, T. (2004) Sujuuko suomi, vertyykö venäjä? Venäjänkielisten maahanmuuttajavanhempien näkemyksiä lastensa koulunkäynnistä Suomessa [Will Finnish be learnt, will Russian improve? Views by Russian speaking immigrant parents on their children’s schooling in Finland]. In S. Laihiala-Kankainen, O. Milovidova and T. Rynkänen (eds) Dialogeja. Kieli, yksilö ja yhteisö [Diglossia. Language, Individual and Society]. Jyväskylä: Centre for Applied Language Studies, pp. 189–215. Shenshin, V. (2008) Venäläiset ja venäläinen kulttuuri Suomessa. Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 30 March 2009. Tanttu, J. (2008) Venäjänkielisenä Suomessa 2008. Selvitys vähemmistövaltuutetulle [Living as a Russian Speaker in Finland in 2008. A Report to the Minority Ombudsman]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 30 March 2009. Vanhala-Aniszewski, M. and L. Siilin (2008) ‘Na velikoe delo, velikoe slovo’. Funktsionirovanie slova velikii v sovremennom russkon jazyke. In A. Mustajoki, M.V. Kopotev, L.J. Birjulin and E.J. Protasova (eds) Instrumentarii rusistiki: korpusnye podkhody. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, pp. 25–42. Vilkuna, K.H.J. (2006) Paholaisen sota [The Devil’s War]. Helsinki: Teos. Zemskaia, E.A. (ed.) (2001) Iazyk russkogo zarubezh’ia: obshchie protsessy i rechevye portrety. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury. Zetterberg, S. (1995) Itsenäisen Suomen historia [The History of Independent Finland]. Helsinki: Otava. Zetterberg, S. (2005) Main outlines of Finnish history. thisisFINLAND. [Online]. Available at , date accessed 29 August 2011.

7 Finnish Culture and Language Endangered – Language Ideological Debates on English in the Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007 Sirpa Leppänen and Päivi Pahta

Introduction In Finland, foreign languages have frequently been the focus of impassioned public debates – this is evinced in many of the chapters in this volume. In this attitudinal climate English is no exception. In the press, for example, this anxiety manifests itself in frequent avalanches of worry, suspicion and irritation. In these, English is typically depicted as a clear and present danger that can seriously disrupt the purity of the Finnish language and culture. What often seems to lie behind these concerns is a deep-rooted language ideology of the national language/s as a key defining the nation state and determining national and cultural identity and integrity. In this chapter we hope to anatomize these discourses of danger about the English language, in order to show the role English has in the hierarchical valorization of languages in Finland. The public discourse we focus on here is newspapers – an institutional discourse arena whose representations of language ideologies can be consequential in the wider society. It is a particularly visible and influential societal forum where the voices, arguments and attitudes of civil society are expressed, and where ‘the polity gets involved in shaping policies’ (Blommaert, 1999, p. 8). Language ideological issues and debates on the allegedly dangerous impact of English on Finnish culture and language are at the core of our chapter. More specifically, we look at recurrent themes and topics in the language ideological debates on the dangerousness of English, uncovering some of the recurrent patterns and instalments in these debates. In our discussion of the findings we hope to show how the concerns voiced about English in public intertwine with a worry about the end of the nation, the nation state and national culture in an inevitable but reluctant transition towards late modernity. As we will show in detail, these issues and debates also bring into focus questions of purity – the foreign language is repeatedly pictured as a force threatening to tarnish the purity of not only the Finnish 142

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language and culture, but also that of the nation state, national identity and even Finns’ minds. In our analysis we draw on a database consisting of newspaper genres which typically provide a point of entry to language ideological views and debates by a range of social actors: editorials representing the authoritative voice of the newspaper, and letters to the editor in the voice of the reading public. The data were collected within the time span of 12 years extending from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s from Helsingin Sanomat, the leading national newspaper. As a time period in the unwinding of language ideological debates in Finland, this was a particularly interesting one. During this period Finland underwent a series of major political, economic, cultural and linguistic changes which had an impact on the language situation in different societal domains. One of these changes was joining the EU in 1995. For society as well as for many Finns, this represented a major turning point in the ways in which Finland defined its identity and political role in Europe, marked by a new openness to and allegiance with Western Europe. As an event, it generated a great deal of discussion of the implications of the political Europeanization for Finnish society, culture and language/s. At the same time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, processes of economic, political and cultural globalization contributed to the increase of the popularity, visibility, uses and significance of English in such key societal domains as education, media, work and everyday life (see Leppänen and Nikula, 2007, 2008; Taavitsainen and Pahta, 2003, 2008; Leppänen et al., 2011).

Language ideologies and language ideological debates Language ideologies refer to cultural or subcultural systems of morally and politically loaded ideas and beliefs about what a language is, how it works and how it should work, which are widely accepted in particular communities and which can have consequences for the way in which languages are used and judged, as well as for social and linguistic relationships (Woolard, 1998; Irvine, 1989). They are indexical of social groups, in other words, the ways in which language ideological notions are formulated can index ways in which a particular social community sees itself and its language, as well as its relationships to, and view of, other communities and their language/s (Irvine and Gal, 2000; Blackledge, 2002, p. 199). Language ideologies are seldom unified, unchangeable or straightforward – on the contrary, they are multiple, mutable, conflicting and contestable (Blackledge, 2005, p. 32; Milani, 2010). As shown in recent research, language ideologies are always linked to relations, particular historical moments and the power and political arrangements in societies (Blackledge, 2005; Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2002; Blommaert, 1999; Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998; Gal, 1998; Gal and Woolard, 1995; Kroskrity, 1998; Woolard, 1998). They contribute to the production and reproduction of

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social difference, whereby some languages and varieties are taken to have greater worth than other languages and varieties (Blackledge, 2005, p. 33). According to Blackledge and Pavlenko (2002), language ideologies continue to act as gatekeeping practices to create, maintain and reinforce boundaries between people in a broad range of contexts, including community, nation, nation state, state and global levels. Language ideologies are formulated, expressed and debated in a range of discourses: they occur in institutional discourses of, for example, the media, education, politics, advertising, the economy, academic texts and the law (Blackledge, 2005, p. 44). They are also part of many non-institutional, everyday contexts of language use on occasions where it becomes expedient and necessary to establish a shared normative framework for communication and interaction, and to regulate and discipline language use (Leppänen and Piirainen-Marsh, 2009). As suggested by previous research on language ideological debates (see e.g. Gal, 2006; Blackledge, 2010), particularly persistent touchstones in them are that monolingualism is taken to be the natural state of human life, and that languages are seen as homogeneous to the extent that they are taken to be expressions of the distinct spirit of a particular group (Gal, 2006, p. 15). Very often, multilingual societies which apparently tolerate or promote heterogeneity in fact undervalue or appear to ignore the linguistic diversity of their populace. A liberal orientation to equality of opportunity for all may mask an ideological drive towards homogeneity, a drive which potentially marginalizes or excludes those who either refuse, or are unwilling, to conform (Blackledge, 2005, pp. 34–5). As suggested by Blackledge (2010, p. 305), one implication of this kind of view is that ‘ideally the nation should be monolingual, with adherence to another language often (mis)read as a lack of loyalty to the national identity’. A similar point is also made by Verschueren and Blommaert (1998, p. 207) in their analysis of the European newspaper press which, according to their analysis, operates on the basis of a theory which ‘revolves around the impossibility of heterogeneous communities and the naturalness of homogeneous communities’. In this ideology of homogeneity, ‘language is the essence of identity’ (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998, p. 128): language is taken to express and encapsulate the cultural identity of the nation.

English in the changing sociolinguistic terrain of Finland From the late 1990s onwards, Finns were explicitly facing a situation where older notions of the nation and the nation state which were in principle (Finnish–Swedish) bilingual, but in practice largely (Finnish) monolingual, were challenged by the spread of English in many discourse domains within society itself. In just 20 years English has become the foreign language par excellence that practically every young Finn studies at some point during

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their schooling, that is visible in its linguistic landscape and mediascapes, and that is increasingly used in various domains of globalized Finnish society, media and everyday life at work, at home and in leisure time. With the increase in the use and importance of English in global communication all over the world during the past 60 years, the overall presence of English has also dramatically increased in Finnish society at large. Research accumulating over the past 25 years indicates that the role of English in Finland has undergone a complex and rapidly accelerating change, involving several key domains of society (e.g. Sajavaara, 1983; Haarmann, 1989; Haarman and Holman, 2001; Battarbee, 2002; Louhiala-Salminen, 2002; Hiidenmaa, 2003; Taavitsainen and Pahta, 2003, 2008; Pahta and Taavitsainen, 2004, 2011; Kankaanranta, 2005; Latomaa and Nuolijärvi, 2005; Moore and Varantola, 2005; Leppänen, 2007; Nikula, 2007; Leppänen and Nikula, 2007; Leppänen et al., 2008, 2011). This sociolinguistic change is interlinked with extensive societal and cultural changes taking place since the Second World War, including a whole-scale modernization of society, rapid urbanization, technologization and internationalization. An important factor contributing to the status of English was the educational reform in the early 1970s, introducing the comprehensive school, where studying a foreign language became compulsory for everyone: as a consequence, every age group of Finns began to learn a foreign language at the age of nine. From the very beginning, for most pupils the first foreign language has been English, although other languages have also been made available, particularly in urban schools. For example, according to recent statistics most students start studying English from grade three (in 2008, 91 per cent of grade three students study English as their first foreign language, with corresponding figures of 1.2 per cent for German, 0.8 per cent for French and 0.2 per cent for Russian) (SUKOL, 2010). During the past 15 years in particular, English has also gained position not only as an object of education but as a medium of education on all levels of education from day nurseries to polytechnics and universities. Largely as a result of learning English in formal contexts, according to the latest statistics, c.60 per cent of all Finns speak English fluently in everyday communicative situations; the percentage is considerably higher among the younger generations (Eurobarometer, 2006; Leppänen et al., 2011). With increasing internationalization, English has become an essential part of the professional life of a steadily growing number of Finns in various fields requiring communication with speakers of other languages – in politics and government, science and education, business, communication and media, transportation, tourism, sports, culture or entertainment. The mobility of many Finns has increased: politicians, businessmen and students, for example, have been catapulted into international contexts in which they had to cope with linguistically and pragmatically demanding communicative situations and settings, often ridden with acute feelings of

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communicative anxiety and inadequacy. Parallel to these developments, immigration to Finland has also increased, leading to more visible linguistic diversity, particularly in the big cities. Transnational economic and political interdependencies increasing demographic mobility and flexible crossborder migration and the politics of Europeanization, an important aspect of internationalization in the frame of political, economic and cultural integration within the EU, have also contributed to the use of English in several public spheres. Like the rest of the globalized world, Finland is also affected by transcultural flows and lifestyle trends where English has a key role; various kinds of youth and subcultures as well as sports are cases in point. Those Finns who are not actively involved in international affairs or in English-intensive lifestyles, are also heavily exposed to English through the mass media, thus being passive consumers (and learners) of English. The fact that English is accessible enough to be intelligible to the majority of the population also makes it possible to use it in intranational functions in communicative contexts traditionally reserved for the domestic languages. The use of English in commercial advertising and naming practices is one of the trends visible in the linguistic landscape; the prominence of English in posters, billboards, electric displays and shop signs is now one of the most noticeable manifestations of the position that English has gained in Finnish society. As witnessed by the data in our study, the presence and impact of English has caught the attention of laymen. Interestingly enough, the results of a recent nationwide survey of Finns’ attitudes to English show, however, that the great majority of Finns have no real concerns about this, but regard English as a useful and pleasant language which every Finn in principle should be able to use (Leppänen et al., 2011). Broadly speaking, the survey respondents’ views on the current situation are thus at odds with the public language ideological debates under investigation in this chapter. In the same way, the general opinion Finns have about English also seems to be at odds with what has been suggested, for example, in the recent language policy programme put forward by the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (Hakulinen et al., 2009). According to this programme, in a number of societal domains, including science, academic publishing and higher education, the Finnish language is now in competition with English. Thus it is argued that active protective measures are needed to enforce the right of Finnish citizens (stipulated by the Finnish language law) to use and be served in their own language (ibid., pp. 11–12). Here one can see a dichotomy: while the general public expresses permissive attitudes to English, language policy-makers – perhaps partly due to their awareness of such attitudes – see a genuine, and harmful, process of change under way. Finns, they believe, need to actively prefer their own language over English within the Finnish society, while, to manage international communication, they also need a parallel competence in English. Something of this concern that Finns are not

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sufficiently aware of the danger lurking in the spread and popularity of English may, in fact, also ignite the opinions and attitudes voiced in the public forum of the press.

Language ideologies in editorials and letters to the editor Editorials and letters to the editor provide a window into the ways in which public newspaper discourse constitutes, and is constitutive of, language ideologies (Blackledge, 2005, p. 89). An examination of items representing these two genres published in 1995–2007 in the leading Finnish daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, shows that language issues are a recurrent theme, inciting expressions of opinion from people representing various walks of life, including both language professionals and ordinary people. The focus of the writings varies, so that opinions are expressed on topics ranging from the importance of education and competence in foreign languages, typically for various practical reasons affecting the economic or intellectual future of subjects from individuals to the entire nation, to concerns about and annoyance with the poor language skills, in Finnish or any other languages, of particular social groups using language in public contexts. Several writers express their concern about the narrowing of Finns’ foreign language skills repertoire, as the numbers of students studying European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian in Finnish schools are very low. A great number of writings have been sparked by the underlying ongoing changes in the sociolinguistic situation of the country. The nature, quality and status of Finnish, the majority mother tongue, receives a lot of attention, with writers expressing their worries or anger over its decline, brought about by uneducated, uncultured, negligent or careless language users misusing, abusing or underusing it. On the other hand, its importance, beauty, richness, expressive capacity and versatility, and its closeness to every Finn’s heart are frequently emphasized. The dual role of Swedish as a part of the cultural heritage on the one hand and as a compulsory school subject – almost a cultural burden – on the other is a common topic (see also Salo, this volume). As expected, however, the majority of opinions are concerned with the role of English, so much so that often English in one way or another also figures in writings primarily dealing with other languages, often providing a point of comparison or contrast. The attitudes towards English expressed in the writings vary from positive, advocating the importance of English skills in the globalized economy, through pragmatic, accepting English as a self-evident means of participation in today’s world, to negative, portraying English as a threat or danger to other languages and cultures, in this case notably Finnish. Our focus in the rest of this chapter is on textual occurrences and formulations of English as a danger: on points in which – following the dictionary definition (OED) – English makes Finnish society or some of its parts liable

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or exposed to harm, injury, evil, risk or peril. More specifically, we will show what specific types of danger English is perceived to present to the Finnish language situation, society and culture, to what or whom these dangers are particularly imminent, what kinds of arguments are used to establish the dangerousness of English, and why – in response to what kind of historical situations – the issue of the dangerousness of English is raised in the opinion writings. Hence, our analysis is necessarily slanted in that it only pays attention to ‘alarmist’ views of English and excludes the ‘celebrationist’ views by not paying attention to textual occurrences and formulations in which English is depicted as something positive, advantageous and helpful. In our opinion, this kind of bias is, however, justified: when English is perceived as a danger, it brings into focus the sociolinguistic crisis Finland has been undergoing from the 1990s onwards during which the modernist notion of a nation and a nation state defined by its national language/s has had to give way to a more heterogeneous, late-modern sociolinguistic reality brought about by Europeanization, internationalization and globalization of society. The data we draw on consist of editorials and letters to the editor discussing language issues, published in Helsingin Sanomat, the leading national daily in Finland.1 The data come from two focus periods within a 12-year time span: from 1995–99 and 2005–7. The material contains 106 separate texts and amounts to just over 30,000 words of running text (see Table 7.1). In order to identify the loci where the English language was mentioned in the editorials and letters to the editor, we analysed the electronically stored data with a corpus tool called AntConc,2 using a truncated form of the Finnish lexeme for ‘English’ (englanti) as a search term. The passages identified by the systematic computerized search were then subjected to a discourse analytic examination, where passages portraying English as a danger were selected for a closer scrutiny. In analysing these passages, we aimed at investigating the linguistic and rhetorical ways in which the writers – ranging from experts to voices of the general public – construct their particular scenarios about the dangerousness of English: in what way, in which context and historical situation and to whom the danger is perceived to manifest, and what effects it is argued to have.

Table 7.1 Editorials and letters to the editor discussing language issues in Helsingin Sanomat in 1995–99 and 2005–7 Period

Texts

Words

1995–99 2005–7 Total

66 40 106

19,645 11,222 30,867

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Dangerous English In order to diagnose the danger that English is seen to pose in the scenarios painted in editorials and letters to the editor in Helsingin Sanomat, we discuss the discourses of endangerment using the following questions: • As what kind of danger is English seen and how it is verbalized? • To whom is it argued to be a danger and how are these parties characterized? What kind of danger is English? English as an intruder In our data, English is often portrayed as an intruder which does not belong in Finland. As an intruder, English overshadows, undermines or displaces the indigenous native language. Often, the intrusion of English into Finnish territory is portrayed as non-patriotic, and its users as disloyal, in betrayal of true Finnishness. This view is illustrated in Example 1, an extract of a letter to the editor criticizing the use of English by the Finnish coastguard – a state authority. The writer expresses his surprise at the English name ‘frontier guard’ that is painted on the patrol boats instead of the Finnish and Swedish names of the institution. He expresses his concern over the lack of ‘healthy patriotism’ in the ‘officials in charge of state security’ and worries that the use of English gives an impression to Finns that Finland is not a sovereign country, but needs to resort to the help of others, specifically ‘NATO or the British’, to guard its frontiers.3 Example 1 Are our coast guards English? We drove past the coast guard station in Haapasaari on August 4th, and to my big surprise I noticed that all the patrol boats had ‘frontier guard’ written on them. No Finnish or Swedish text was in sight. In an ordinary Finn this sort of internationalization raises a whole lot of questions. Even though our businesses have adopted a lot of English terminology, one would expect officials in charge of state security to show healthy patriotism emphasizing Finnishness with elegance. The appreciation of our official languages is an important part of our Finnish identity. English is not yet officially our third language. Now ‘frontier guard’ on a Finnish coast guard patrol boat gives to us Finns an impression that Finland is not an entirely independent, a sovereign state, but that Nato or the British have come to guard our borders. (Letter to the editor, 9 August 1996) As an intruder, English is also seen as an agent creating linguistic homelessness, especially when it is used as a medium of education in content

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and language integrated learning (CLIL) environments. Such views as these were inspired by the passing of a law in 1991 which made CLIL instruction possible in Finnish schools – for many, this innovation represented a step towards a deliberate succumbing to English as a language of education, and towards displacing teaching in L1. Against this background, ‘linguistic homelessness’ most likely means that English was seen to possess the power to sever the connection between identity and the L1, leading to lack of belonging and of shared heritage. Example 2 represents a case in point; this is the voice of an expert – a professor of Finnish. For him/her the impact of the introduction of English as the language of instruction in some subjects is so serious that s/he categorically asserts that there simply is ‘no need for it’: Example 2 NN, professor of Finnish language argues in Helsingin Sanomat on August 18th that there is no need for English-language teaching in Finnish schools. According to her, it creates linguistic homelessness. (Letter to the editor, 1 September 1996) English as a destructive natural force The power that English is believed to have over other languages and cultures is often emphasized by comparing it to an uncontrollable natural force, springing from the technological and economic supremacy of the Anglo-American world. For example, the impact of English is seen as overwhelming as a flood or as inevitable as global warming sweeping over the native language. In the middle of this ‘natural’ disaster Finnish is, in contrast, seen as an undeveloped, defenceless victim at the mercy of the overpowering, external force. Two editorials from the late 1990s illustrate this view as follows: Example 3 Loan words have flooded into the language for the past 6000 years, as long as we know, and they will keep flooding in […] Words enter and they are adapted into our language and that’s it. […] But the real danger to the Finnish language comes precisely from the prevailing technically advanced culture, and at the moment that is the Anglo-American culture. (Editorial, 18 January 1998) Example 4 The appreciation of Anglo-American culture is leading to the diminishing of the use of Finnish as opposed to English in various functions. The business world, especially commercial advertising, has opened the flood gates. […] The process is slow but it advances as inevitably as the greenhouse effect. (Editorial, 30 June 1996)

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Interestingly, this kind of metaphorical view of English as a cause or factor in an ‘ecological’ catastrophe is not unknown in more scholarly discussions either. For example, linguistic diversity has been seen as a particular type of biocultural diversity which is susceptible to sweeping external forces which can radically reduce the vitality of small, indigeneous, traditional and local languages (see e.g. Terralingua, , date accessed 7 September 2011). English as a violent actor In the same way as some scholars have seen English as a killer language (see e.g. Phillipson, 2004; McArthur, 1998), in our data English is also likened to a violent actor which has the capacity to burden and suffocate – and even kill the Finnish language. It is seen as a supreme and malicious force of cultural dominance, spreading the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American culture, oppressing ‘our language’. The damage caused by English is, however, at least partly aided by Finns themselves who are claimed to willingly subject themselves to its harmful effects. Examples 5–8 all illustrate such a conceptualization of English: Example 5 Almost as big a burden to the Finnish language [as compulsory Swedish] is the second language of the bilingual world, English. (Letter to the editor, 30 December 1998) Example 6 To prevent the threat one might consider giving English the position that Latin used to have along with the Finnish language. Then it would not cause pressure to oppress our language […]. (Letter to the editor, 7 June 2005) Example 7 […] the real danger to the Finnish language comes precisely from the prevailing technically advanced culture, and at the moment that is the Anglo-American culture. We suffocate our language ourselves. (Editorial, 18 January 1998) Example 8 English is the globally shared language of ICT professionals, regardless of their nationality. This is all well and good, but because of the growing significance of ICT, the increased use of English will be the death of Finnish. (Letter to the editor, 16 October 1996) English as morally wrong English is also a morally wrong choice; this has already become clear in the examples discussed above. Its use is seen as non-patriotic, it undermines

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Finnish national identity and leads Finns to abandon their own language and culture. Its advocacy and use can even be compared to heresy: Example 9 The article describes the problem as a value-free choice between English and the mother tongue and indirectly labels as heretics those who use English in their teaching. (Letter to the editor, 4 May 2005) However, it is not only the Finns whose moral values are called into question, but also the English language itself is believed to be in some way morally dubious. Because of its omnipresence, it is argued, it can seduce and trick people into thinking that they can actually speak it, when, in reality, they cannot, for it is a complex language whose nuances are difficult to master: Example 10 There is a trap lurking in English. There are many who fall into it, thinking that they know how to speak the language, because it is heard everywhere. On the level of nuances, however, English is an extremely difficult language. (Letter to the editor, 21 October 2005) English by Finns – bad, contaminated When Finns do use English, they sound awful – this seems to be a very typical evaluation voiced by many commentators. Typical lamentations include that Finns’ English is vulgar, uneducated, ridiculous and ugly, i.e. it is not pure but contaminated. As was already suggested above, its use is a non-patriotic act jeopardizing the consistency and authenticity of genuine national identity. An interesting variation on this theme is also that it is suggested that the badness of English spoken by Finns is actually caused by Swedish: this is because ‘the obligatory status of Swedish as a school subject […] takes up the limited resources which should be used in learning more important things [including English] required by the changed world’ (letter to the editor, 15 February 1998). Another letter to the editor on 20 January 1996 spells out the badness of Finns’ English by establishing it as multiply problematic: Example 11 My British friend told me that the litanies of swearwords learnt from Yankee movies by some loud-mouths first startled him and then made him laugh, because when they are sloppily mixed with Finnish in a thick accent, they sound so ridiculous. (Letter to the editor, 1 January 1996) This evaluation is mediated to readers via the point of view of an English native speaker, with whom the Finnish writer, however, seems to agree wholeheartedly. What is put forward here is that Finns do bad things to

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English, because they are the bad kind of Finns (‘loud mouths’) who have picked up their English from a bad source (from ‘Yankee movies’), learnt a bad register (‘litanies of swearwords’), and pronounce these English items in a bad way (in a ‘thick accent’), by sloppily mixing it with Finnish. It could even be argued that such comments as in Example 11 imply that the way in which the English used by Finns is evaluated as bad is an example of distinction at work (Bourdieu, 1984): their ‘bad’ English distinguishes the speakers as a particular social group or class. The social class so categorized is clearly a lower one of people who have not learnt their English at school, but through popular culture, and, instead of for higher aspirations, use it for vulgar and mundane purposes. The danger implicitly suggested in this kind of scenario seems to be that the lower classes, with their subversive lowerclass English, trespass on social and cultural territory which, in principle, they are seen not to have any right to – the territory of native-speaker(-like) educated English. Code-switching and loanwords also trigger alarm and resentment. As phenomena they are often taken to be concrete examples of the ways in which the English language is destroying the Finnish language. Such language practices are considered as a facile and superficial fashion, striving for internationalization and totally lacking creativity and originality. Furthermore, as they are taken to contribute to the emergence of an ugly and unacceptable mongrel language, they actually are argued to violate not one, but two languages, Finnish and English. Example 12 represents a typical comment: Example 12 Finland goes English I have observed with great admiration how English and Finnish are fluently combined when major cultural events have been named. What exceptional creativity and originality these skilfully used words demonstrate! Down by the4 Laituri [‘Pier’], how exquisite. [In the] Art goes Kapakassa [‘to the bar’], today Classic Sunday (HS August 31st), how international they sound. What I would like to suggest is that the same policy be applied on an even higher societal level. Down by the Hallituksen Iltakoulu [‘the Government evening session’]. [President] Ahtisaari goes Maakunnat [‘the provinces’]. Let no one, never, be allowed to say that we Finns wouldn’t be part of the internationalizing and unifying world. Let us throw our national language, culture and currency into the trash at the threshold of this new and illustrious era. N.N. goes hulluksi [‘crazy’]. (Letter to the editor, 8 September 1997) In this letter to the editor the writer imitates, repeats and exaggerates code-switching practices that he has come across in the media. With the help of these strategies he constructs an ironic and parodic account of these practices and thus conveys an explicit condemnation of them as

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fundamentally dangerous. Thus, he is really suggesting that code-switching will lead to ruin – to the opposite of ‘exceptional creativity and originality’, skill and exquisiteness. What is also often at the core of language ideological assertions of this particular type is that, again, Finns are taken to be partly responsible for the crime of destroying their own national language. Accordingly, the writer here lays the blame on ‘us Finns’ who are destroying ‘our national language, culture and currency’. It is thus the actions of those Finns ignorant, careless or superficial enough to make such a decision to use mixed language which are being targeted. Again one can read a great deal of indirect, metonymic social criticism here: modern Finns who do code-switch are being negatively evaluated because of their ideologically corrupt language practices. In addition, this example also illustrates how language practices are assigned a great deal of symbolic power: language ideological assumptions are not only speaking of people’s views of language per se, but also of their attitudes to more general social changes and practices. In this particular example, the way in which the writer lumps together Finnish ‘language, culture and currency’ as equally lost causes shows how the language practices s/he resents are actually a part of the equally problematic social and economic changes, following from Finland’s joining of the EU. Finns’ English as excessive and, therefore, wrong Besides assertions of Finns’ English as fundamentally bad and wrong, it is also seen as excessive and superfluous in a variety of ways – and therefore dangerous. Firstly, there are complaints that there simply is too much of English in the Finnish linguistic and media landscapes and that English is thus force-fed to Finns. Secondly, it is deplored that English is too popular, too easy, too fashionable and too modern. In short, thanks to its attractiveness, it actually seduces Finns into learning and using it too much. In this task, it is claimed, it is aided by Finns’ poor self-esteem which causes them to underestimate their own language and culture. In addition, it is also complained that too good a competence in English makes it difficult for Finns to spot misunderstandings in communication – it is thus implied that a good proficiency in English in reality hampers successful communication (letter to the editor, 23 August 2007). In Example 13 the writer compares the language situation in Finland to that in Germany, and complains that the situation in Finland is worse, because English (or what appears to be English) is used too much and without any real purpose. S/he complains that English is, in fact, too popular and that it is used because for Finns, contrary to Finnish, it appears as a fashionable and modern language. Example 13 The situation in Finland is worse. English is used in all situations: in spoken youth language the most common swearword is fuck5 and in

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advertisements everything is cool or new. Companies pick an English name for themselves, tradenoms [Bachelors of Business Administration] graduate from vocational schools and rural communities develop international survival strategies for themselves. What is wrong with Finnish or Finnish words? Not everything that is new or youthful needs to be in English; being fashionable can also be expressed in Finnish. (Letter to the editor, 14 July 1999) As was seen in connection with the previous example, in complaints of this kind, writers often cite and repeat the uses of English that they claim are allegedly overused by Finns. It seems that often the mere repetition of the offending practices is enough to convey to readers a sense of their ridiculousness; no detailed evaluation is therefore deemed necessary. Also Example 14 is an illustration of this strategy: here the writer begins his/her letter to the editor by a categorical statement that Finns have actually rejected their own language, and then proceeds to build up his/her exposition on this by weaving English loanwords within his/her own text without actually commenting on them in detail: Example 14 [Finns’] low self-esteem explains the [low] status of Finnish XX made a very good point in the letters-to-the-editor section (May 9th) about the rejection of the Finnish language. I have also observed with sadness the same development for years in my main work as a secretary and in my second job as a Finnish translator. An abstract (via email, for example) needs to be sent to a conference by a speaker. In the conference the presentation of posters is naturally in order, and the sessions are chaired by moderators, and sometimes even by the speakers. In the course of the event participants agree upon missions and visions, and work in workshops. The primary goal is of course a consensus. The ‘right’ concepts need to be mastered, even when the event is arranged in Finland. This was just one example out of many. […] The reason for the underestimation of the Finnish language may be Finns’ low self-esteem (probably because of this, such words are called ‘civilised’ terms), laziness, or a laissez-faire attitude, or, at its worst, all three of these. ‘When everyone else talks about posters and abstracts, how do I dare to speak about them by using the corresponding Finnish terms?’ Finnish is a beautiful, nuanced, and infinitely rich language, but if it is not appreciated, it is difficult to protect it. (Letter to the editor, 13 May 2007) Example 14 also illustrates that from the 1990s to the early 2000s nothing much has changed in language attitudes: in the 2000s, English continues to

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be the source of a great deal of irritation to many Finns. In this example, the particular domain the writer is concerned with is conference register. In his/her view, it is full of terminology uncritically borrowed from English. Interestingly, s/he does not directly brand them as inappropriate or incorrect, but, like many other writers, uses more indirect strategies to do so. On the one hand, s/he implies that this happens because of social pressure by including a fabricated citation of someone who actually uses such terminology, also suggesting that it would be socially unacceptable to use Finnish terminology instead of the English word. On the other hand, by describing Finnish as a ‘beautiful, nuanced and infinitely rich’ language, s/he is also, indirectly, suggesting that the English terminology (over)used by Finns is the opposite – ugly, poor in nuances and expressive potential. In this way, like the writer of Example 13 who claimed that Finns falsely believe English to be a fashionable and modern language, s/he also presents a succinct evaluation of the two languages. To whom or what is English seen as posing a danger? According to our data, English is seen by Finns as posing a danger to practically everything and everyone in Finland. Danger to the native language Firstly, English is a serious threat to the Finnish language, its purity, integrity and beauty (see Example 15 below). A particular worry here is that English is gradually taking over communicative functions previously served by Finnish, thus reducing its functional range and causing it to regress (see Example 16 below), to become underdeveloped or to prove inadequate, especially with regard to its conceptual apparatus (see Example 17 below). The vulnerability of the Finnish language in the face of this threat is often underlined by characterizing it as a small language of a small nation which needs to be actively protected, because it is seen as vital for the small nation and its freedom and independence. A recurrent additional theme in this danger scenario is that English is seen to jeopardize the teaching of the native language. Example 15 The English language is a clear threat to the Finnish language. It has a sort of ruling position in the world, and this gives it considerable power in Finland, too. (Letter to the editor, 7 June 2005) Example 16 In those fields where [English] totally dominates, the functional range of the mother tongue naturally becomes more narrow. [Finnish] regresses and in the long run it will only be suitable to less important functions. (Editorial, 1 January 1998)

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Example 17 The most important preconditions for the life of a small nation are freedom and a language of its own. […] The language of a small nation needs to be looked after particularly well and be consciously developed in education. This is because, with increasing internationalization, the language selected for use in for example research is ever more frequently some other language than Finnish. If Finnish is not used in theoretical and scientific discussion, its concepts remain undeveloped and the production of texts becomes muddled. (Letter to the editor, 3 March 1999) In professional registers, English jargon is seen as a more specific threat to the Finnish language. For example, triggered by the rapid development of ICTs in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s, a great deal of anxiety surfaced in public as the evolving field turned to English as a quick solution to the lack of exact terminology with which to describe the technologies. In several writings, including those by both language professionals and laymen, computing is highlighted as an area of expertise where the language of the professionals has, for this reason, become incomprehensible to the layman: Example 18 […] in some fields of computing Finnish terminology is in danger of becoming displaced by English terminology […]. (Letter to the editor, 9 April 1998) Example 19 XX has commented on the language by ICT people (HS October 16th) […] he argues that there is a communicative gap between the ICT people and the laymen. In his opinion, this gap would disappear if topics related to ICT were talked about using the everyday language. (Letter to the editor, 28 October 1996) However, Finnish is not the only language English threatens. It is also seen as a danger to the Swedish language in Finland, and Swedish-speaking Finns are argued also to be concerned about its supremacy. Although Swedish is in public debates often placed in the role of the language of the elite and regarded with suspicion and resentment (see Salo, this volume), in relation to English it is seen to occupy a similarly endangered position. Example 20 illustrates this; with the help of expert opinions by linguists, it argues that the two national languages are both falling victim to English: Example 20 XX and YY noted (HS May 22nd) that internationalization should not mean the killing of small languages. [...] The Finnish language is not the only one under threat. In the world, ca 6900 different languages are spoken.

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About 90 per cent of people speak the hundred ‘biggest’ languages. The rest of the 6800 languages in the world are under the threat of extinction during the next hundred years – such an argument is voiced by Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle, both researchers in Oxford. […] English language skills are needed, but the Finnish and Swedish languages should not be sacrificed for the English language. (Letter to the editor, 29 May 2005) Analogously, English is also seen to endanger skandinaviska – the Scandinavian variety used in many Nordic meetings and seminars (see Martin, this volume) – thus placing pan-Nordic culture and cooperation in a vulnerable position and robbing Nordic citizens of the expression of Nordic solidarity and identity. Example 21 Our neighbourly relations to other Nordic countries will be affected as well. They will lose their unique character if we shift to English. (Letter to the editor, 31 August 2005) It is an interesting point, however, that not many commentators express much worry about the possibility that English may pose a threat to European multilingualism, thus perhaps replicating a traditional Finnish notion that Europe is a different and faraway reality with which Finns have had difficulty identifying themselves. A notable exception to this is the following: Example 22 Mr XX, 60, who directs the main office of the translation section of the EU commission in Brussels, worries about the vitality of multilingualism within the Union. More and more officials speak English, but not as their mother tongue. (Letter to the editor, 25 October 2005) Danger to national identity Besides the languages of Finland, English is also argued to endanger other aspects of Finnishness which are seen as crucial to the identity of the nation state and its citizens. Here, English is often portrayed as a mischievous agent working on behalf of the Anglo-American hegemonic culture, aiming at disruption and destruction of the integrity of the Finnish national language and culture. In such comments, the uniqueness and richness of Finnish culture and the need to cherish and protect it are often strongly emphasized. A typical opinion is illustrated by Example 23 – it argues that English endangers not only the Finnish language and culture, but also our know-how: Example 23 The admiration of English can be dangerous not only to our language and culture but also to Finnish know-how. (Letter to the editor, 9 April 1998)

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Danger to social equality English also endangers the democratic structure of society: it is believed that the fact that some people manage to acquire good proficiency in English enforces social inequality and difference. Those who are proficient in English are seen to form a new, privileged elite and those who are not, a new marginalized underclass (cf. Bourdieu, 1984). Example 24, an editorial, depicts a scene in which the adoption of English as the lingua franca in some domains and services is seen to espouse social inequality and unequal opportunities to access knowledge: Example 24 Language does not change and develop via the official channels only. One question concerning people all over Europe is what the role of the native language is in science and economy. Will the citizens’ equality and equal access to information be possible if in some fields we only operate in English? Along with international success, will one outcome of this be the shrivelling of the native-language culture and general knowledge? (Editorial, 27 July 2006) Interestingly, this anxiety also surfaced in the national survey on Finns’ attitudes about English (Leppänen et al., 2011). According to its findings it appeared that while ignorance of the English language and inability to use it are not directly linked to social exclusion or relegation to the fringes of society, they do indicate a certain detachment from the urban, international and multicultural society in which work is becoming increasingly globalized and in which the capacity to use English is a valued skill. In addition to threatening Finnish society at large, some groups are singled out in the writings. One of these groups is children. The popularity of English, witnessed in the alleged widespread enthusiasm for English language immersion education, creates a danger, as children want to have English as their mother tongue. It is also interesting that the primary importance of learning the mother tongue through formal education is emphasized, whereas English, the foreign language, is seen as something that can be acquired in informal learning contexts through channels like TV, commercials and the Internet. It is thus implied that learning English is easy and requires no formal instruction, whereas learning the first language is difficult because it needs to be learnt well. English is thus not important – it can be picked up without any real effort – but Finnish is, because it is taken by many writers as the foundation necessary for thinking, for culture and for identity. Example 25 formulates these views as follows: Example 25 Also the National Board of Education is finally beginning to understand what the results of the over-enthusiasm about immersion and other

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languages, especially English, can be. It is a really serious issue, if children prefer to have English as their mother tongue. It is understandable that parents wish that their children have a good [educational] foundation in their lives. However, in language learning it is important to see to it that Finnish is learnt properly first. English is acquired almost without an effort via TV, commercials, the internet, etc. (Letter to the editor, 5 September 1998) English as a danger to the development of competences The use of English as a medium of instruction in immersion and content and language integrated learning environments, addressed in the previous example, seems to be one of the topics causing the most worry in writings in the 1990s, in particular. What seems particularly disconcerting for many is that the development of learners’ proficiency in Finnish may be at risk because all responsibility for the teaching of the mother tongue is left to parents. According to the writer of our next example, for instance, learning in English will lead to the loss of concepts in the native language. Learning in one language – even when it takes place in certain specific lessons only – can thus lead to the loss of the students’ native language: Example 26 The impact of English-medium instruction on the mother tongue triggers a variety of opinions. People are not worried about language mixing, but very extensive instruction in the foreign language can be harmful: some students complain that they have to search for mother tongue expressions even when they have revived English-medium instruction for only for a year. (Editorial, 1 January 1998) According to some writers, English also poses a threat to deep and nuanced thinking. The lack of terminology and concepts in Finnish leads to situations where the Finns’ cognitive skills are endangered: Example 27 As a professional lexicographer I know, too, that fluent Finnish terminology does not emerge on its own and that in some fields it is in danger by being displaced by English terminology. Despite this, I myself and many others wish to speak and write about things, including topics related to ICT, primarily in our own language. The admiration for English fanned up by XX can be dangerous, not only for our language and culture, but also for the Finnish know-how. Hopefully not all university teachers will succumb [to the dominance of English] with him, but are smart enough to turn to terminology experts. […] Good language skills and language awareness are of course needed, but professional competencies are not improved by the removal of the

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tools for thinking which are based on the mother tongue. (Letter to the editor, 9 April 1998) An even more harmful impact of English-medium instruction is that it is taken to risk the development of Finnish children’s cognitive skills. In Example 28 the writer utilizes a familiar Finnish idiom of ‘losing the child with the bathwater’ and coins a new metaphor, ‘the net of semi-lingualism’, to drive home the point that the outcome of English-medium instruction is hazardous. You may end up losing the child, that is, failing to educate him/her properly, and causing the child to lose something essential: his/ her right to a full competence in his/her mother tongue. In addition, the writer resorts to the by now familiar strategy of critique and questioning what s/he considers an excessive use of English by mimicking English(-like) terminology as part of his/her otherwise Finnish message (e.g. ‘alarmisti’; ‘defenssiaktiiviteettejä’; ‘intensifioitava’; ‘happy ending’) to emphasize the silliness and absurdity of such uses of English by Finns. Besides arguing that English-medium instruction can be harmful to the development of the child’s native language proficiency, the writer also suggests that such pedagogic practice also produces imperfect English. In sum, the whole of the enterprise of English-medium instruction is futile and harmful, endangering the child’s development, his/her native language, and his/her proficiency in English. Example 28 The situation in Finland is of course quite different from that in India, but we also need to be careful that the child does not slip into the sewer with the language bathwater or get caught in the net of semi-lingualism. I wish by no means to be an alarmist, but the defence activities of the mother tongue competence need to be intensified, or the story of our internationalization remains without its happy ending. (Letter to the editor, 31 March 1999)

Conclusion In our analysis we have shown how English was multiply conceptualized as a danger, how various social groups, entities and phenomena were seen as endangered by it, and how its dangerousness was seen to arise from a range of factors. Table 7.2 summarizes our main findings. As Table 7.2 indicates, the dangerousness of English in our data is constructed with the help of a range of metaphors which liken its impact on Finland, Finnish and Finns to a range of destructive, disruptive, harmful and violent phenomena and entities. Similarly, the impact of English is argued to be pervasive, seductive, corruptive and harmful, affecting individuals and social groups and their minds and language practices. It can even do

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Table 7.2

Ideological constructions of English as a danger in Finland

English is a danger because it is: An intruder

English as something that does not belong to Finland

A destructive

English as a flood

natural force

English as global warming English as a cause of erosion

A violent actor

English English English English English

A supreme force

English is an oppressor of ‘our language’ English is an expression of the dominance of Anglo-Saxon language and culture English is a threat to independence and sovereignty

A moral wrong

Use of English undermines Finnishness Use of English as heresy Use of English as non-patriotic treason English as a cause of the abandonment of Finnish culture English as a cause for linguistic homelessness

Bad, contaminated

English is unimportant, ugly, valueless, superficial and falsely fashionable English spoken by Finns is consistently bad English spoken by Finns is bad, because of compulsory Swedish English spoken by Finns is ridiculous, vulgar, low class Code mixing as bad English is violated by Finns: lacks creativity and originality Use of English is superficial internationalization

Excessive, therefore wrong

English English English English English English

suffocates Finnish is a cause of regression erodes Finns’ cognitive abilities is a source of anxiety and worry as a killer language

is is is is is is

too popular too easy excessive unnecessary fashionable in the wrong way youthful and modern in the wrong way

English is a danger to … everyone and everything: To language

English endangers the Finnish language, its integrity and beauty, and communicative functions English endangers the teaching of mother tongue English endangers Finland Swedish

To national culture and identity

English endangers Finnish culture English endangers Finnish know-how English endangers national freedom, sovereignty and patriotism

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To society

English endangers equality English endangers the social structure, by creating and enforcing social difference: Finns’ English is bad because it is too widely used in a vulgar way

To social groups

English is attractive to too many Finns English puts children at risk

To the development of competences

English hampers the development of proficiency in Finnish English endangers Finns’ cognitive skills Finns’ use of English produces imperfect English

To other countries

English robs Nordic citizens of the expression of Nordic solidarity English endangers Nordic culture and cooperation English threatens European multilingualism

damage to the fabric, purity and integrity of Finnish society and culture. In all of these conceptualizations there is, as Gal (2006, p. 15) has suggested as typical of language ideologies on the whole, a ‘characteristic persistence that monolingualism is taken to be the natural state of human life, that languages are seen as homogeneous to the extent that they are taken to be expressions of the distinct spirit of a particular group’. However, as our analysis has shown, as a social index English is quite complex and ambiguous, for it can be seen to communicate both an elite, expert status as well as vulgarity and low social class of its speakers. It is depicted as very difficult, and too easy; complex and nuanced, as well as ugly, poor in nuances and superficial. In a way, it could be argued that the debates actually constitute several Englishes. Firstly, there are at least two ‘good’ and ‘correct’ Englishes: one which is the exclusive property of native speakers, and another which is the exclusive property of non-native speakers who index their non-nativeness through a non-native accent. Analogously, there are at least two ‘bad’ Englishes. One of these is the English that is like a natural force which has the capacity to crush Finnish language, society, culture, nation and the nation state. Another bad English is the one mutilated in a vulgar and profane way by low-class non-native speakers who have in principle no right to usurp and to possess the language in the first place. Language ideological debates can be triggered by, and resonate with, a range of events, actions, experiences or discourses which have in common that they in some way are objectionable to writers, be they journalists or lay people. Firstly, there are major societal changes or political decisions, as reported in the media, which explicitly offer textual and political material for writers to comment on or criticize. During the time period covered in our data such events included Finland joining the EU in 1995 – which gave rise to anxiety over whether the national language and Finns’ linguistic rights would be marginalized because of the fact that the EU was seen to operate

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in Euro English. For example, in 1998 a piece of news in Helsingin Sanomat (1998) reported that the Ministry of Environmental Affairs was planning to send a formal query to the EU Commission as to why the so-called Natura forms (forms used for registering nature reserves) were not available in Finnish or Swedish. On this issue a government official was reported to be arguing that ‘this issue is, in principle, important. Finland is a member state in the EU and we have a right to work in our own mother tongue.’ On the other hand, the English used in the EU was also ridiculed as corrupted and low quality, compared to native-speaker English/es: for example in a letter to the editor of Helsingin Sanomat (23 March 1995), a language professional argued that ‘The English spoken in Brussels makes Oxford and Cambridge smile, with pity.’ So, although the English imposed on the Finnish state and citizens was seen as menacing the national languages, it was also taken to be inferior and ludicrous, because it does not belong to Europeans, and, therefore, they are in principle incapable of managing in English without making both themselves and the language ridiculous. Another major political issue stimulating language ideological debates during the time period under investigation was clearly the government decision to strengthen the role of content and language integrated education in Finnish primary and secondary schools. As was already shown above, in the 1990s this was, in fact, one of the topics that ignited most debate and also gave rise to extensive danger scenarios ranging from threats of corruption of Finns’ minds, to the deterioration of the educational system, and eventually the languages of Finland. Also experiences that individuals have had with English in public places, with the media, or in their private lives sometimes gave rise to language ideological debates. In such texts, it was often apparent how language – especially the first language – was felt to be a private and personal issue about which people have very strong feelings. In this kind of framework English tends to be seen as a hostile agent threatening the very core of one’s identity. Secondly, it is not surprising that in many of the conceptualizations of English as a danger one can detect the impact of national history and of discursive frameworks for telling the grand narrative of Finnish history. In particular, the colonial past of the country, the fact that it has been a part of two empires – Sweden (from the eleventh century to 1808–9) and Russia (1808–1917) – still seems to give some of the language ideological debates direction and shape. The resentment against the Swedish language apparent in our data in arguments against Swedish as an obligatory school subject and as a factor which jeopardizes Finns’ capacity to learn other languages, can partly derive from the cultural suspicion that some members of the Finnish majority have had against Swedish influence in Finland, and what they see as the Swedish-speaking elite in Finland (see Salo in this volume). Even more importantly, the relationship Finland has had with Russia and the USSR seems to have a great deal to do with some of the

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ways in which the dangerousness of English is established (cf. Lähteenmäki and Vanhala-Aniszewski in this volume). For instance, an editorial, while discussing Irish society and culture, also manages to suggest through a comparison between Finland and Ireland that, despite difficult times and a sensitive geopolitical position, Finland has nevertheless managed to retain its culture and language: Example 29 Finland and Ireland have a lot in common One of the curiosities in this world is that Finns should feel at home in Ireland, at the other edge of Europe, a long way away on this nearly treeless island with the roaring Atlantic Ocean, endless rain and green grass. This is so, despite the fact that in principle Finns and Irish knew nothing of each other a few years ago when both were struggling against their own isolation while also deriving much of their power from it. There are lot of similarities. A big neighbour keen on getting supremacy, a religious borderland, poverty, the protection of one’s own culture based on storytelling even during difficult times, a strange small language, similar drinking habits – the list is endless. (Editorial, 4 October 1998) On an even more general level, the dangerousness of English often seems to be constructed with the help of a very specific historical–ideological narrative depicting the Finnish nation state, culture and language as under attack and which dates back to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political battles for national independence, and to the establishment and solidification of the nation state in the twentieth century (see Blommaert et al. in this volume). To illustrate this narrative, consider The Attack (‘Hyökkäys’) (1905), a painting by Eetu Isto which is a very well-known, iconic representation of the image of Finland in danger (see Figure 7.1). In the painting, the Russian double-headed eagle is attacking the maiden symbolizing Finland, tearing her law book. In the battle for independence, the painting became the symbol of protest against Russification. It could be argued that this picture also captures something crucial of the current national imagery, in other words, of the ways in which Finns have long looked at forces, powers and influences external to its borders as menacing the integrity and sovereignty of the nation, culture, the nation state and even the minds of its citizens. As was shown above, in the language ideological debates about English this view was clearly visible. In this debate English was cast in the role of the Other – both the malicious attacker and the corruptive seducer. From this perspective, the language ideological debates about English are thus not simply indexical – pointing to and expressing assumptions about English in relation to and opposed to Finnish, about Finns as speakers of English and Finnish, and about the significance of the ‘national’ language. Importantly,

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Figure 7.1 The Attack (1905) by Eetu Isto (photograph by Rauno Traskelin, published with the permission of Traskelin and Finnish National Museum)

the debates and views they foreground are also iconic – they offer an image of what are taken to be the essential ingredients of nation, nation state, language and culture (see also Gal, 1998, 2002). Finally, on the basis of the language ideological debates analysed in this chapter, it could be argued that the Herderian notion of language as the essence of the nation is still very much alive and well in Finland.6 Why it is still doing well in the early 2000s, has a lot to do with the fact that in the era of globalization and internationalization which Finland has also recently entered, English has become an easily available symbol of the anxieties associated with globalization and internationalization. These anxieties – the sense of menace imposed by the global language, included – are, however, not unique to Finland. They are typical of what for example Ulrich Beck

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(1992) has referred to as the crisis in societies which are moving from an era of ‘first modernity’ to late modernity. This crisis entails an uneasy, jagged transition from thinking about and operating in the world in terms of national societies limited to geographical territory, national container states, nation-state concerns and national identities, towards a world of new flows of economics, challenges of national identities, radical individualization, labour-market challenges of the old life span, citizens without countries, and the rise of political failures of nation-state politics and unaccountability of global patterns (Beck, 1992, 2002). In periods of crisis like those depicted by Beck, language ideologies which fall back on national language as the essence of a nation and nation state have a certain appeal of keeping the inevitable changes, at least for some time and for some people, at bay.

Notes 1. Circulation 470, 657 in 1995 and 419, 791 in 2007. 2. A freeware concordance program created by Laurence Anthony, available for download at , date accessed 7 September 2011. 3. The original Finnish texts have been translated into English by the authors. The extracts in Finnish are listed at the end of this chapter. 4. The italics are added here by us to indicate the actual English expressions used in the otherwise Finnish text. 5. Again, the words indicated by italics mark the original English used in the original Finnish text. 6. In his Philosophical Writings, von Herder argued ‘For every distinct community is a nation having its own national culture as it has its own language’ (von Herder, 2002, p. 284).

References Battarbee, K. (2002) English in Europe: Finnish. In M. Görlach (ed.) English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 261–76. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beck, U. (2002) The silence of words and political dynamics, in the world risk society. Logos, 1(4), pp. 1–18. [Online.] Available at date accessed 6 July 2011. Blackledge, A. (2002) The discursive construction of national identity. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 1(1), pp. 67–88. Blackledge, A. (2005) Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Blackledge, A. (2010) The practice and politics of multilingualism. In O. Urzula and C. Piotr (eds) Current Directions in Political Discourse Analysis: Methodological and Critical Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 301–26. Blackledge, A. and A. Pavlenko (2002) Language ideologies in multilingual contexts. Multilingua, 20(3), pp. 121–40. Blommaert, J. (1999) The debate is open. In J. Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–38.

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Leppänen, S. (2007) Youth language in media contexts: insights into the functions of English in Finland. World Englishes, 26 (2), pp. 149–69. Leppänen, S. and T. Nikula (2007) Diverse uses of English in Finnish society: discourse-pragmatic insights into media, educational and business contexts. Multilingua, 26(4), 333–80. Leppänen, S. and T. Nikula (2008) Johdanto [Introduction]. In S. Leppänen, T. Nikula and L. Kääntä (eds) Kolmas kotimainen. Lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language. Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, pp. 9–40. Leppänen, S., T. Nikula and L. Kääntä (eds) (2008) Kolmas kotimainen. Lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language. Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Leppänen, S. and A. Piirainen-Marsh (2009) Language policy in the making: an analysis of bilingual gaming activities. Language Policy, 8 (3), pp. 261–84. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, T. Nikula, S. Kytölä, T. Törmäkangas, K. Nissinen, L. Kääntä, T. Räisänen, M. Laitinen, P. Pahta, H. Koskela, S. Lähdesmäki and H. Jousmäki (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 8 September 2011. Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2002) Communication and language use in merged corporations: cases Stora Enso and Nordea. Helsinki School of Economics Working Papers W-330. Helsinki: Helsinki School of Economics. McArthur, T. (1998) The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milani, T. (2010) What’s in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14 (1), pp. 116–42. Moore, K. and K. Varantola (2005) Anglo-Finnish contacts: collisions and collusions. In G.M. Anderman and M. Rogers (eds) In and Out of English: for Better, for Worse? Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 133–53. Nikula, T. (2007) The IRF pattern and space for interaction: observations on EFL and CLIL classrooms. In C. Dalton-Puffer and U. Smit (eds) Empirical Perspectives on CLIL Classroom Discourse. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 179–204. Pahta, P. and I. Taavitsainen (2004) Creating images through English on yellow pages: multilingual practices in advertising in the Helsinki region. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 3 (2), pp. 167–85. Pahta, P. and I. Taavitsainen (2011) English in intranational public discourse. In B. Kortmann and J. van der Auwera (eds) The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: a Comprehensive Guide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 605–20. Phillipson, R. (2004) English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Sajavaara, K. (1983) Anglo-American influence on Finnish. In E. Kuparinen and K. Virtanen (eds) The Impact of American Culture. Proceedings of an International Seminar. Turku: University of Turku, pp. 36–49. SUKOL (The Federation of Foreign Language Teachers in Finland) (2010) Tilastotietoa kielivalinnoista [Statistics of Language Choices at School]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 7 December 2010. Taavitsainen, I. and P. Pahta (2003) English in Finland: globalization, language awareness and questions of identity. English Today, 19 (4), pp. 3–15. Taavitsainen, I. and P. Pahta (2008) From global language use to local meanings: English in Finnish public discourse. English Today, 24 (3), pp. 25–38.

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Terralingua: Unity in biocultural diversity. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 25 January 2011. Verschueren, J. and J. Blommaert (1998) The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. In B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard and P.V. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 189–210. Woolard, K. (1998) Introduction: language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard and P.V. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–47.

List of the data examples in Finnish Example 1 Merivartijamme englantilaisia? Ajoimme 4.8. Haapasaaren merivartioaseman ohi ja hämmästykseni oli suuri, kun huomasin, että kaikkiin merivartioaluksiin oli kirjoitettu ‘frontier guard’. Mitään suomen- tai ruotsinkielistä tekstiä ei näkynyt. Tavallisessa suomalaisessa tällainen kansainvälistyminen herättää koko joukon kysymyksiä. Vaikka liike-elämämme onkin omaksunut paljon englanninkielistä terminologiaa, odottaisi valtion turvallisuudesta vastuussa olevilta virkamiehiltä tervettä isänmaallisuutta suomalaisuuden profiilia tyylikkäästi korostaen. Virallisten kieliemme arvostus on tärkeä osa suomalaista identiteettiämme. Englanti ei vielä ole virallinen kolmas kielemme. Nyt ‘frontier guard’ suomalaisessa merivartioaluksessa antaa maastamme meille suomalaisille sellaisen lässähtäneen vaikutelman, että Suomi ei olisikaan täysin itsenäinen, suvereeni valtio, vaan rajojamme ovatkin tulleet valvomaan Naton joukot tai britit. (Mielipide, 9.8.1996) Example 2 Suomen kielen professori NN sanoo Helsingin Sanomissa 18.8. että Suomessa ei tarvita englanninkielistä kouluopetusta. Se luo hänen mielestään kielellistä kodittomuutta. (Mielipide, 2.9.1996) Example 3 Lainasanoja on tulvinut kieleen viimeisen kuuden tuhannen vuoden ajan, sen ajan, josta jotain tiedetään, ja tulvii vastakin. [...] Sanat tulevat ja ne mukautetaan omaan kieleen ja thats it. [...] Varsinainen uhka suomen kielelle sen sijaan tulee juuri tuosta teknisesti etevästä kulttuurista, joka tällä hetkellä on angloamerikkalainen. (Pääkirjoitus, 18.1.1998) Example 4 Angloamerikkalaisen kulttuurin arvostus on johtamassa siihen, että suomi väistyy englannin tieltä erilaisten käyttötilanteiden kielenä. Sulun on avannut talouselämä, erityisesti kaupallinen mainonta. [...] Prosessi on hidas, mutta se etenee yhtä vääjäämättä kuin kasvihuoneilmiö. (Pääkirjoitus, 30.6.1996)

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Example 5 Lähes yhtä suuri rasitus suomen kielelle [kuin pakkoruotsi] on kaksikielisen maailmanosan varsinainen kakkoskieli englanti. (Mielipide, 30.12.1998) Example 6 Uhan välttämiseksi voitaneen ajatella englannin kielelle vanhan latinan asemaa suomen kielen rinnalle. Silloin se ei aiheuttaisi paineita kielemme sortamisen suuntaan, vaan loisi selvän kahdennetun jaon kielten välille. (Mielipide, 7.6.2005) Example 7 Varsinainen uhka suomen kielelle sen sijaan tulee juuri tuosta teknisesti etevästä kulttuurista, joka tällä hetkellä on angloamerikkalainen. Me tukahdutamme kielemme itse. (Pääkirjoitus, 18.1.1998) Example 8 Englannin kieli on yleismaailmallinen atk-ammattilaisten yhteinen kieli kansallisuudesta riippumatta. Hyvä niin, mutta atk:n kasvavan merkityksen vuoksi laajeneva englannin käyttö on suomen kielen surma. (Mielipide, 16.10.1996 – kaupunginvaltuustoehdokas) Example 9 Kirjoitus tyytyy kuvailemaan ongelmaa vapaana arvovalintana englanti vastaan äidinkieli ja epäsuorasti leimaa englantia opetuskielenä käyttävät jotenkin harhaoppineiksi. (Mielipide, 4.5.2005) Example 10 Englannissa vaanii myös ansa. Moni lankeaa siihen, että luulee osaavansa kieltä, koska sitä kuulee kaikkialla. Nyanssien tasolla englanti on kuitenkin erittäin vaikea. (Mielipide, 21.10.2005) Example 11 Brittiläinen ystäväni kertoi joidenkin rääväsuiden jenkkileffoista oppimat kirouslitaniat saavan ensin hätkähtämään ja sitten nauramaan, sillä paksulla aksentilla suomenkielen seassa solkotettuina ne kuullostavat niin naurettavilta. Pidetään kielemme kauniina! (Mielipide, 20.1.1996) Example 12 Suomi goes englanniksi Olen ihastuneena seurannut englannin ja suomen kielen sujuvaa yhdistämistä suurten kulttuuritapahtumien nimeämisessä. Mitä poikkeuksellista luovuutta ja omaperäisyyttä osoittavatkaan nuo taidokkaasti kiteytetyt sanat. Down by the Laituri, kuinka hienoa. Art goes Kapakassa tänään Classic Sunday (HS 31.8.), kuinka kansainväliseltä se kuulostaakaan. Ehdotankin saman

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linjan jatkamista entistä suuremmassa yhteiskunnallisessa mittakaavassa. Down by the Hallituksen Iltakoulu. Ahtisaari goes Maakunnat. Älköön kukaan, never, pääskö sanomaan että me suomalaiset emme olisi osa kansainvälistyvää ja yhdistyvää maailmaa. Heittäkäämme kansallinen kieli, kulttuuri ja valuutta historian romukoppaan tämän uuden ja uljaan ajan kynnyksellä. ‘N.N. goes hulluksi.’ (Mielipide, 8.9.1997) Example 13 Tilanne Suomessa on pahempi. Englantia käytetään joka yhteydessä: nuorison puhekielessä yleisin kirosana on fuck ja mainoksissa kaikki on cool tai new. Yritykset muokkaavat nimensä englanninkieliseen asuun, ammattikoulusta valmistuu tradenomeja ja maaseutukunnat kehittävät itselleen kansainvälisiä selviytymisstrategioita. Mitä vikaa on suomessa tai suomenkielisissä sanoissa? Ei kaiken uuden ja nuorekkaan tarvitse olla englanniksi, muodikkuutta voi ilmentää suomeksikin. (Mielipide, 14.7.1999) Example 14 Huono itsetunto selittää kielen aseman XX kirjoitti Helsingin Sanomien mielipidesivulla (9.5.) täyttä asiaa suomen kielen heitteillejätöstä. Olen itsekin surullisena seurannut samaa kehitystä jo vuosikaudet sekä päätyössäni sihteerinä että sivutyössäni suomentajana. Konferenssia varten puhujan on lähetettävä abstrakti (vaikka emaililla). Itse konferenssissa postereiden presentaatio tietenkin kuuluu asiaan, ja sessioissa puhetta johtavat moderaattorit, joskus on ihan vain speakerit. Tapahtuman kuluessa sovitaan missioista ja visioista ja työskennellään workshopeissa. Primääritavoitteena on tietenkin konsensus. ‘Oikeat’ käsitteet pitää hallita, vaikka kyse olisi Suomessa toteutettavasta suomenkielisestä tapahtumasta. Tämä oli vain yksi esimerkki lukuisista. [...] Syy suomen kielen väheksymiseen lienee suomalaisten huono itsetunto (siksi kai vierasperäisiä käsitteitä sanotaankin sivistyssanoiksi), laiskuus tai välinpitämättömyys – pahimmillaan kaikki kolme yhdessä. ‘Kun kaikki muut puhuvat postereista ja abstrakteista, enhän minäkään kehtaa puhua julisteista enkä luentotiivistelmistä.’ Suomi on kaunis, vivahteikas ja loppumattoman rikas kieli, mutta jos sitä ei arvosta, sitä on vaikea vaalia. (Mielipide, 13.5.2007) Example 15 Englannin kieli on tietty uhka suomen kielelle. Sillä on eräänlainen mahtiasema maailmassa, mikä antaa sille huomattavan painoarvon myös Suomessa. (Mielipide, 7.6.2005) Example 16 Niillä aloilla, joita [englannin] kieli näin totaalisesti hallitsee, äidinkielen käyttöala luonnollisesti kapenee. Se taantuu ja kelpaa ennen pitkää vain toisarvoisiin tehtäviin. (Pääkirjoitus, 18.1.1998)

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Example 17 Pienen kansakunnan tärkeimmät elämän edellytykset ovat vapaus ja oma kieli. [...] Pienen kansan kieltä on vaalittava erityisesti ja sitä on kehitettävä tietoisesti kaikessa koulutuksessa, sillä kansainvälistymisen lisääntyessä mm. tutkimusten kieleksi valikoituu yhä useammin muu kuin suomi. Jos teoreettista ja tieteellistä pohdintaa ei harjoiteta suomeksi, jäävät käsitteet kehittymättä ja selkeän tekstin tuottaminen vaikeutuu. (Mielipide, 3.3.1999) Example 18 [...] suomenkielinen termistö [...] muun muassa tietotekniikan eräillä alueilla uhkaa jäädä englanninkielisen varjoon. (Mielipide, 9.4.1998) Example 19 XX on puuttunut (HS 16.10.) atk-väen kielenkäyttöön. [--] hän tuo esille atkihmisten ja maallikoiden välisen ymmärryskatkon, joka hänen mukaansa poistuisi, jos atk-asioista puhuttaisiin jokapäiväisellä kielellä. (Mielipide, 28.10.1996) Example 20 XX ja YY totesivat (HS 22.5.), ettei kansainvälistyminen saisi olla pieniä kieliä tappavaa. [...] Uhan alla ei ole ainoastaan suomen kieli. Maailmassa puhutaan noin 6900 eri kieltä. Noin 90 prosenttia ihmisistä puhuu sataa ‘suurinta’ kieltä. Loput 6800 maailman kielistä ovat uhan alla kadota seuraavan sadan vuoden aikana, näin väittävät Oxfordissa toimivat tutkijat Suzanne Romaine ja Daniel Nettle. [...] Englannin kielen taitoa tarvitaan, mutta suomen tai ruotsin kieltä ei saa uhrata englannin kielen eteen. (Mielipide, 29.5.2005) Example 21 Samoin käy myös pohjoismaisten naapurisuhteitten. Ne menettävät erikoisluonteensa, jos siirrytään englannin kielen käyttöön. (Mielipide, 31.8.2005) Example 22 EU:n komission käännöstoimen pääosastoa Brysselissä johtava Juhani Lönnroth, 60, kantaa huolta monikielisyyden säilymisestä unionissa. Yhä useampi virkamies puhuu englantia, mutta ei äidinkielenään. (Mielipide, 21.10.2005) Example 23 englannin ihannointi voi olla vaarallista, ei vain kielemme ja kulttuurimme kannalta, vaan myös suomalaisen osaamisen kannalta. (Mielipide, 9.4.1998)

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Example 24 Kieli ei muutu ja kehity pelkästään virallisia teitä Kaikkialla Euroopassa pohditaan, mikä on oman kielen asema tieteessä ja taloudessa. Toteutuuko kansalaisten yhdenvertaisuus ja tiedonsaanti, jos joillakin aloilla toimitaan vain englanniksi? Onko kansainvälisen menestyksen rinnalla odotettavissa omakielisen kulttuurin ja yleissivistyksen kutistuminen? (Pääkirjoitus, 27.7.2006) Example 25 [...] Opetushallituksessakin aletaan tajuta, mitä voi olla seurauksena, kun innostutaan liiaksi kielikylvyistä ja muista kielistä, lähinnä englannista. On jo vakavaa, jos lapset haluavat äidinkielekseen pikemmin englannin. On ymmärrettävää, että vanhemmat haluavat antaa lapsilleen mahdollisimman hyvät lähtökohdat. Kielten opiskelussa on kuitenkin syytä pitää huolta siitä, että suomi opitaan ensin kunnolla. Englanti tulee miltei itsestään tv:n, mainosten, internetin ym. kautta. (Mielipide, 5.9.1998) Example 26 Vieraskielisen opetuksen vaikutuksesta äidinkieleen ollaan monta mieltä. Kielten sekoittumista ei juuri pelätä, mutta hyvin kattavasta vieraskielisestä opetuksesta voi kuitenkin olla haittaa: jotkut oppilaat valittivat, että äidinkielisiä ilmauksia saa joskus hakea jo vuodenkin kestäneen vieraskielisen opetuksen jälkeen. (Mielipide, 27.1.1998) Example 27 [...] Sanastotyön ammattilaisena minäkin tiedän, ettei sujuva suomenkielinen termistö synny itsestään ja että se muun muassa tietotekniikan eräillä alueilla uhkaa jäädä englanninkielisen varjoon. Silti minä ja monet muut suomalaiset haluamme puhua ja kirjoittaa asioista, myös tietoliikenneasioista, ensisijaisesti omalla kielellämme. Halmeen lietsoma englannin ihannointi voi olla vaarallista, ei vain kielemme ja kulttuurimme kannalta, vaan myös suomalaisen osaamisen kannalta. Toivottavasti kaikki korkeakoulujemme opettajat eivät alistu hänen kanssaan, vaan hoksaavat tarvittaessa kääntyä esimerkiksi terminologian asiantuntijoiden puoleen. [...] Hyvää kielitaitoa ja tajua tarvitaan ilman muuta, mutta ammatillista osaamista ei edistä se, että otetaan äidinkieleen perustuvat ajattelun välineet pois. (Mielipide, 9.4.1998) Example 28 Tilanne Suomessa on tietysti aivan toinen kuin Intiassa, mutta mekin saamme pitää varamme, ettei vain lapsi pääsisi livahtamaan viemäriin kielikylpyveden mukana tai takertumaan puolikielisyyden nettiin. En toki halua olla alarmisti, mutta äidinkielen kompetenssin defenssiaktiviteettejä

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olisi kyllä intensifioitava, tai kansainvälistymisemme stoori jää happy endittä. (Mielipide, 31.3.1999) Example 29 Suomella ja Irlannilla paljon yhteistä Maailman menon kummallisuuksiin kuuluu, että suomalainen tuntee olonsa kotoisaksi juuri Irlannissa, Euroopan toisella äärellä, kaukana pauhaavan Atlantin, loputtoman sateen ja vihreän nurmikon liki puuttomalla saarella. Näin siitä huolimatta, että suomalaiset ja irlantilaiset eivät pääsääntöisesti tienneet toisistaan mitään vielä muutama vuosi sitten, kun molemmat kamppailivat omaa eristyneisyyttään vastaan ja imivät siitä samalla voimansa. Yhdistäviä tekijöitä on paljon. Suuri ylivaltaan pyrkivä naapuri, uskontojen rajamaa, köyhyys, tarinan kertomiseen nojaava oman kulttuurin suojelu vaikeinakin aikoina, kummallinen pieni kieli, samanlaiset juopottelutavat – listaa riittää loputtomiin. (Pääkirjoitus, 4.10.1998)

8 Multilingualism in Nordic Cooperation – a View from the Margin Maisa Martin

Languages in the Nordic countries The unit of the North The Nordic area is often seen as culturally and politically quite homogeneous, not only from the outside but also by the Nordic people themselves. Democratic traditions, Lutheran ethics, avoidance of extremes, and close relationship with nature are all attributes associated with us. Of course we vie for victory in ice hockey or Nordic skiing, consider some of the traditional foods of our neighbours disgusting, and tell jokes where Finns put down Swedes or Norwegians make fun of Finns, but nevertheless support many joint activities and stick together in the crowd of nationalities in the larger international arena. Linguistically, however, the Nordic1 countries are far from homogeneous. This is not always acknowledged in Nordic contexts such as pan-Nordic conferences or meetings of political bodies where skandinaviska (‘Scandinavian’) is used as the common language. In this chapter the linguistic diversity and its consequences are discussed from the viewpoint of a speaker of a nonScandinavian language. This brings up one of the central themes of the book, namely, the ideological notion of purity at the service of unity. Within the Nordic context, an insistence on a shared language policy in Nordic activities and encounters is officially purported to enhance the sense of the Nordic area as a culturally and ideologically unified territory where all the nationalities can allegedly meet, communicate and act together equally. In practice, however, what happens is that the choice of skandinaviska creates a new kind of inequality, a situation in which some participants – the native speakers of Scandinavian languages – end up, in fact, being more equal than those participants with a completely different language background – such as Finns and immigrant participants – for whom a Scandinavian language is a second or foreign language. A new category – skandinaviska as the lingua franca – which is actively preferred for its assumed democratic and 176

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egalitarian potential – thus creates new kinds of divisions and hierarchies and ends up marginalizing some participants as fully active members in the Nordic forums. In addition, the fact that most Nordic citizens are now relatively proficient in English further complicates the picture. This is because English is seen as an intruding language which threatens to jeopardize the unity that is taken to partly derive from the universal use of skandinaviska. What this chapter hopes to offer is a critical analysis of the ideological notion of skandinaviska as an emblem of unity. It shows how the Nordic language policy helps to set ‘us’ apart from ‘others’, but how it, in reality, ends up creating new inequalities because not everyone shares the language equally well. The policy thus limits the agency of some participants in communication and assigns more power to others who are in a position to use their first language and set limits to what extent linguistic variation or detours to other languages are allowed. Historically, Nordic cooperation has deep roots but its current institutions date back mainly to the early 1950s (Nordic Institutions, 31 August 2011). The period during which the author has gathered her observations described in this chapter is about a decade before and after the millennium. Recent changes and trends have had little effect on the Nordic institutions so far, leaving operational practices mainly unchanged. It remains to be seen whether globalization, late modernity (see Blommaert et al., this volume) and super-diversity (Vertovec, 2006) will strengthen or demolish these institutions. In the following the languages of the North and some Nordic institutions will be briefly presented. This will provide the backdrop against which the use, status and role of three languages – English, skandinaviska and suomi (Finnish) – as well as attitudes and language policy issues of the individual countries and the Nordic institutions will be discussed. In this section of the chapter the pros and cons of each of the choices which can be made in the actual meeting contexts with speakers from the various Nordic linguistic communities will be investigated in detail. Finally some conclusions are drawn on the effects of language choices on Nordic cooperation. The rainbow of languages and Nordic institutions There are five Nordic countries: Denmark (population 5,534,738), Finland (5,351,427), Iceland (317, 630), Norway (4,858,199) and Sweden (9,256,347). The population of the Faroe Islands is 48,650, Greenland 56,194 and Åland 27,734.2 The national languages are respectively Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. Danish, Finnish and Swedish are also official languages of the European Union, while Norway and Iceland have stayed outside the EU, even if in practice they participate in many of its activities, making it possible for all the Nordic countries to act together in EU projects when necessary.

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Of the national majority languages Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are closely related and mutually comprehensible, more so in writing than in speech, but at least educated native speakers of these languages usually seem to be able to communicate also orally, albeit not without some difficulty, repetitions and negotiations of meaning. (For further discussion on the issue and the actual extent of receptive multilingualism in Scandinavia see Delsing, 2007; Doetjes, 2007; Zeevaert, 2007; Goskeens and Hilton, 2010.) Icelandic is historically related to these languages but structurally more complex, with many indigenous or conservative features no longer present in the modern versions of the others, and not comprehensible without considerable practice and/or study. Sweden, Denmark and Iceland each have their own national written standard. Norway has two official languages, Bokmål (‘Book Language’) and Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’). Bokmål is based on Danish, Nynorsk on Norwegian dialects. Both are taught as school subjects and the dominance between the two is regionally determined. While other major Nordic languages are Germanic in origin, Finnish is not a member of the Indo-European language family at all but a FinnoUgric language, with a very different typological structure and vocabulary. However, the long shared history with Sweden has influenced Finnish conceptually and stylistically, making translating between Finnish and Swedish fairly easy, as the meanings of particularly abstract concepts relating to administration and social life are often semantically equivalent. Even some structural features are influenced (see Dahl, 2008 for arguments for some similarities between Finnish and its neighbours), but the sound structure, words and grammar are different enough to make the language completely opaque (and weird or exotic, depending on attitudes) for the speakers of Scandinavian languages. National majority languages, however, are not the whole picture. In Finland the local standard variety of Swedish (291,153 speakers, Statistics Finland, 31 August 2011) is the second official3 language in the mainland and the only official language of Åland. In Sweden it is estimated4 that there are 450,000 speakers of Finnish (National Association of Finns in Sweden, 31 August 2011). Speakers of Swedish in Finland consider themselves as Finns and are a part of the ‘original’ population of the country, while most Finns in Sweden are immigrants and their descendants. In addition, a language called Meän kieli is an indigenous form of speech in northern Sweden and in western parts of northern Finland. It is considered a language in its own right, separate from Finnish, in Sweden, and a dialect of Finnish on the Finnish side of the river Tornio/Torneå, which since 1809 has been the border between Sweden and Finland (see Vaattovaara, 2009; also for the debate on the status of Meän kieli see Meän kieli, 31 August 2011). It is easily comprehensible for Finns. In northern Norway another form of Finnish called Kveeni is spoken (Kveeni, 31 August 2011) and has some official recognition as a minority language.

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The Faroe Islands are a part of Denmark with their own language, Faroese, which in turn is somewhat similar to Icelandic, although not immediately totally comprehensible to Icelanders (Faroese, 31 August 2011). Another part of Denmark, Greenland, has, besides Danish, Greenlandic Inuktitut, a member of the Eskimo-Aleut or Inuit language family, as its official language (Greenlandic Inuktitut, 31 August 2011). Inuktitut is another non-Germanic, non-Indo-European language not related to any of the other languages spoken in the Nordic area. There are also native speakers of German in Denmark. The Sámi languages (Sámi, 31 August 2011; see also Pietikäinen and KellyHolmes, this volume) are spoken in three of the Nordic countries, as they span across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland. The Sámi languages are a part of the Finno-Ugric language family, but not comprehensible to speakers of Finnish. Not all Sámi speakers understand the different forms of Sámi either, and the group is usually divided into ten languages/dialects, many if not all of them endangered due to the small number of native speakers, although revival efforts have been somewhat successful in parts of the Sámi area. In addition to these minority languages definable by geographical area, there are indigenous minority languages spoken by populations dispersed across the Nordic countries, such as the speakers of the Roma language (Romany, 31 August 2011) – with different versions in different Nordic countries – and sign language users. Contrary to common belief, all signers do not understand each other. A user of Swedish Sign Language does not automatically understand Finnish Sign Language (Finnish Sign Language, 31 August 2011), although close historical and educational contacts have brought these languages closer to each other than for example American Sign Language. In recent decades increased mobility has brought yet another set of languages into the Nordic Babel: the immigrant languages. Some of these are not completely new, like Russian in Finland (see Lähteenmäki and Vanhala-Aniszewski, this volume) or Finnish in Sweden or Norway, where Finnish is both an original local language in some rural areas and a new immigrant language. Others are more exotic to the local population, such as Vietnamese or Somali. Even if these groups gradually integrate in Nordic societies, they bring another aspect to the Nordic linguistic rainbow (see Suni and Latomaa, this volume for the situation in Finland) and add to the number of non-native speakers of Nordic languages – a question in focus later in this chapter. Nordic institutions (Nordic Council, Nordic Council of Ministers, and all the offices and programmes supported by them) may use any Scandinavian language, in other words Danish, Norwegian or Swedish, in their official documents or speeches. Finnish and Icelandic are not used in this manner, but the speakers of these languages are assumed to use one of the Scandinavian languages or request for translation or interpretation. As Copenhagen is

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the home base of the Councils, Danish tends to be preferred, but as many activities are also located in the other countries, it provides opportunities for the use of Swedish and Norwegian (but not the other languages). The language question is a fundamental element of Nordic fellowship. The language policy work is coordinated and run by an Advisory Committee, the Nordic Language Council, with the following main objectives (see Nordic Institutions, 31 August 2011). Interestingly enough, the aims are only available in Danish. • To promote inter-Nordic language understanding • To strengthen knowledge of languages in the Nordic countries • To promote democratic language policy and outlook on language in the Nordic countries • To strengthen the status of the Nordic languages within and outside the Nordic countries In spite of such elevated ideals, English is also used with increasing frequency in Nordic gatherings. The use of Icelandic or Finnish (or Sámi, for that matter) leads to the use of interpreters. While interpretation can be provided, it is not always an unproblematic solution. The three alternative media of communication are discussed below. Each of the five Nordic countries has its own more or less official language policy. They are not discussed in detail here, but some characteristic features are pointed out as they bear on the way people from each of the Nordic countries view the joint linguistic policies, as well as on the actual choices made in their encounters. Unless there is a reference to a specific source, the data discussed in this chapter refer to the ethnographic observations the present author has gathered in connection with her active participation for over 25 years in numerous Nordic encounters, including for example working groups in the area of language learning and teaching and joint research ventures, some exclusively Nordic, some European or North American with members from several Nordic countries. Because the data drawn on here have been retrieved in connection with meetings in which the author happened to be a member, they are admittedly somewhat random and anecdotal in nature. Nevertheless, thanks to the author’s long-term active involvement, they can offer valuable emic (analysing cultural phenomena from the perspective of a participant), first-hand insights into what can be taken as typical grassroots practices of language policing in institutional and academic Nordic contexts.

Skandinaviska, a lingua franca? Skandinaviska is a hybrid language based on Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. It has no standard form and it is not normally written. Each speaker uses the

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Scandinavian language with which s/he is most familiar, tries to pronounce it clearly, and replaces the most language-specific words, expressions and forms with more widely known variants. The extent of such replacements varies by speaker, as the process requires both knowledge of the differences between the languages and the metalinguistic ability to monitor one’s speech even in the heat of discussion. With time, certain recurrent strategies have, however, emerged. For example, one of the most common adjustments is the replacement of the complicated Danish numbers with the simpler Swedish ones. Skandinaviska sounds like the ideal solution to the linguistic problems of Nordic cooperation. It is nobody’s first language, so all users are equal – in theory. It has no standard or norms, so you cannot be made to feel that you are using it incorrectly. As it is based on the languages which everyone in the Nordic countries has either as a first language (in Sweden, Norway and Denmark as well as a part of the population of Finland) or is learning at school (Danish in Iceland, Faroe Islands and Greenland; Swedish in Finland), everyone is assumed to know it. Skandinaviska is also an interesting example of inherent and acceptable hybridity. Even those who demand linguistic purity and stability in their own language never criticize the users of skandinaviska for the variability and mixing involved. However, for Finns skandinaviska poses many problems. This is because their school-learnt Swedish is often simply not enough to follow a meeting, let alone to fully participate in it. Furthermore, standard Swedish spoken in Sweden differs a great deal from the variety spoken in Finland, particularly the pronunciation and some of the vocabulary. Many dialects of Swedish can be even more difficult to understand. Tests of mutual comprehension in Nordic communication show that understanding dialects or closely related languages is easier for those who speak a Scandinavian language as a first language (Delsing, 2007, p. 238). Thus Finns’ participation in a meeting in Swedish can be very exhausting, even for those with relatively good schoolacquired skills in Swedish. What often happens, then, is that they end up simply sitting silent, rather than trying actively to follow the conversation or formulate a comment or question. In addition to language proficiency issues, Finns experience difficulty in situations where skandinaviska is used for reasons related to attitudes. Their productive ability is hampered by the strong Finnish normative tradition whereby in official contexts at least, one needs to strive for linguistic purity and adhere to norms and a prescribed standard. This attitude dates back to the 1800s when Finns had to fight for their language to become the medium of education and government. A great deal of effort was spent creating evidence of the independence of the Finnish language by designing grammar rules and actively avoiding loanwords. The development of the folk school at the same time made it possible to plant the ideas of purity in the entire population. Even today there is a Language Board in Finland

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which makes official pronouncements on acceptable structures and words for written Finnish. These attitudes have also coloured the teaching of Swedish (and other languages), in which limited but error-free production has often been valued over fluency and comprehensibility. Another attitudinal factor which may make it harder for Finns to acquire both the productive and the receptive skills of Swedish – and thereby skandinaviska – is related to the role of Swedish in Finnish schools. Swedish is a mandatory school subject in Finland for those whose first language is Finnish – as is Finnish for those who belong to the Swedish-speaking section of the population. As a result, those from Swedish-speaking homes are usually quite bilingual, as they see the need to become fluent in the majority language and have plenty of opportunities to use it. At the same time, many speakers of the majority language subjected to ‘forced Swedish’, as it is commonly called, learn hardly any Swedish during their school years, due to lack of motivation and general opinion: in monolingual Finnish regions it may be social suicide for a pupil to admit to liking learning Swedish. (For further discussion of this issue, see Salo in this volume.) The often heated media discussion on the mandatory status of Swedish in Finnish schools colours the attitudes of many Finns.5 Swedish is seen as a nuisance, even a danger to the overall level of educational achievement in Finland: it takes up time which many feel should be used for more ‘useful’ or ‘important’ subjects at school or university. Mandatory Swedish is also seen as a danger to ‘true’ multilingualism: if only we did not need to study Swedish, we would become truly multilingual, in other words learn English better, or even some German or French! Finns’ attitudes vis-à-vis Swedish were also affected by the lower social status of the speakers of Finnish, as compared to the Swedish-speaking ruling class, until the early 1900s, even if there no longer are any significant socio-economic differences between the two linguistic groups. Swedish speakers are often considered as having unfair advantages, as most of them are bilingual, and in the Nordic contexts they find it easier to deal with skandinaviska. Nevertheless, a working knowledge of Swedish is a required part of all academic degrees in Finland. In the eyes of other Nordic people this official requirement, whether adhered to or not, leads to the belief that any educated Finnish person is able to participate in Nordic cooperation in skandinaviska. In reality, however, it is English that is spoken by most members of the younger generation, and with much more ease than Swedish (Leppänen et al., 2008). The great variability of skandinaviska creates another set of problems, not only for Finns but also for all Nordic people. Norwegians are better at understanding Danish and Swedish than vice versa (Delsing, 2007). This is partly because they take more advantage of the media of their neighbours and thus have more exposure to their languages. Another reason for the variability is Norwegian language policy. Norwegians take pride in their

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own dialects and use them in all contexts. In their view, it is up to the listeners to understand them. In this manner they themselves naturally become quite proficient in understanding many different ways of speaking. For an outsider, however, this freedom of linguistic form seems admirably unlimited, but also demanding, as one has to adjust to a new way of talking with each speaker. A non-native speaker of Scandinavian languages is thus faced with a formidable task. While listening to Norwegian variants of skandinaviska is taxing for a Finn, Danish presents an even bigger challenge: it is practically impenetrable. Reading Danish is fairly easy with a reasonable level of proficiency in Swedish, but spoken Danish is characterized by considerable contractions of word forms. This makes spoken Danish quite incomprehensible for most people outside Denmark. Even native speakers of Swedish have difficulty with it (Maurud, 1976; Delsing, 2007). Norwegians do better, as do Swedes living in southern Sweden. Most Icelanders have learnt Danish as a mandatory school subject and thus have a headstart, as do people from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Many have also had their higher education in Denmark, Sweden or Norway, and have thus had a chance to become accustomed to several varieties of skandinaviska. Both Norwegians and Danes are usually quite easygoing about their language and they are, in principle, willing to make an effort to understand others and to adapt their own speech by attempting to speak more clearly, to use common Scandinavian or Swedish words instead of less well-known local ones. Unfortunately, few people manage to keep this up for more than the first minute or so, after which the subject matter becomes the sole focus and language their normal way of speaking. Normally, Icelanders speaking Danish are somewhat easier to understand, as they speak skandinaviska as a foreign language, hence usually more slowly and with less reduction. Most Scandinavians understand the Finnish variety of Swedish very well; some even claim that it is easier to understand than the native varieties. However, this, too, gives rise to yet another problem: it is that most people strongly believe that comprehension precedes production in foreign languages. Thus a person who can produce Finnish Swedish reasonably fluently is also deemed to be a competent user of skandinaviska. Even linguists find it almost impossible to believe that a Finnish person who can actually speak quite understandable Swedish, understands practically nothing of what is said in Danish, Norwegian or even rapid Stockholm Swedish. As a result, they can mistake Finns’ sheer linguistic inability for a lack of willingness to use skandinaviska, to be a member of the great Scandinavian family. Finns thus face a constant dilemma between unity and the opportunity to express themselves fully: staggering along in halting skandinaviska is a symbol of togetherness, but usually involves a trade-off in the content of the interaction.

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The equality issues related to the use of skandinaviska are not limited to native speakers of national languages like Finnish and Icelandic. The indigenous minority groups discussed above, such as Greenlandic Inuit and Sámi, not only have to learn the national language to function in their home country, but to exercise their rights as Nordic citizens they may also be required to learn one of the Scandinavian languages. The same is true of immigrants. For an immigrant child in Finland it is possible that s/he is exempted from learning Swedish at school, as many of them are already learning Finnish, English and perhaps also literacy skills in their home language. While this may be seen as a relief at the time, lacking even a basic knowledge of Swedish can, in fact, disadvantage people with an immigrant background not only in higher education, where Swedish is required for all degrees, but also in the competition for positions in Nordic institutions. Immigration issues are commonly discussed on the Nordic level, but rarely with immigrants present. The use of skandinaviska limits the communication of most Finns, leading to the dilution of the message they aim at conveying to their Scandinavian interlocutors (for the concept in a broadcasting context cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, this volume). While they may be able to express a basic opinion, or to make a comment or a suggestion, they may not be able to do so in a way which would help the argument to be accepted. Important nuances may be lost, and requests or proposals may be interpreted as commands, leading to emotional opposition. For reasons such as these, Finnish participants in Nordic gatherings often feel, share and talk with one another of feelings of acute communicative anxiety and inadequacy. The use of skandinaviska also has properties of symbolic production. It is something ‘we’ all allegedly share. It is informal, just like we like to think ourselves to be, with no unnecessary rules or standards. Yet few people speak it without some loss of quality of the message, as even native speakers of Scandinavian languages have to concentrate on the linguistic form of their speech, rather than the content alone. The crucial role as a symbol of unity is highlighted even in situations in which it is clear from the beginning that a meeting cannot be conducted in skandinaviska. In such cases, some phrases in skandinaviska are always used, as a reminder to the participants of what Nordic people have in common. Skandinaviska thus symbolizes the ideals of Nordic cooperation: we are alike, we share culture, we understand each other. It is an emblem of unity, an emblem of Northern identity.

English, practical but foreign Most Finns and Icelanders who participate in Nordic activities, be they exchanges between schools, political gatherings or academic events, are more comfortable with English than they are with skandinaviska. Sometimes this is true of Scandinavians as well. In specific working contexts, such as

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business and academia, for example, daily activities are conducted in English so often that many feel that they know the terminology and other specific language better in English than in their mother tongue. For these reasons resorting to English also in Nordic contexts is increasingly common. The inclusion of the Baltic countries in Nordic activities, as has widely happened after Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania gained independence in the early 1990s, has given new impetus and justification to the use of English. Unlike officially bilingual Finns who can be expected to know Swedish, the Baltic people, who rarely study Scandinavian languages, cannot be expected to switch to skandinaviska in Nordic contexts. Despite the fact that most Scandinavians in business and science find using English quite natural as far as the official part of the meeting goes, these very same people tend to strike up conversations in their own language as soon as the coffee break or dinner time arrives, leaving the Finns talking to each other. This practice usually remains unchallenged, as most Finns feel that they should be able to participate in such conversations in Swedish and are ashamed of admitting that they actually cannot. Nor can Scandinavians be deemed impolite, as most of them are under the assumption that the official bilingualism of Finland means that all Finns are actually bilingual. Nevertheless, one result of this is that an important part of the event, the informal networking, remains out of reach for many participants. In practice, in many contexts, especially within institutionalized Nordic meetings,6 the use of English is frowned upon. For example, the Nordic Council and its suborganizations as well as the publications of PohjolaNorden (a non-governmental organization which aims to promote Nordic cooperation) often publish surveys on their websites on the increasing use of English or the lack of skills in Nordic languages as bad news. In the same vein, while the interest of Finnish youth in Nordic affairs is applauded, their unwillingness to learn and use Swedish is lamented at the same time. That the interest in Scandinavian languages is generally waning also shows in the fact that young Scandinavians are claimed to have more difficulties in understanding the languages of their neighbours than their elders have (for evidence, see e.g. Maurud, 1976; and Delsing, 2007 for comparative analyses). As a result, there have been calls for measures to correct this situation, but with not much success. For example, the formerly popular summer courses for Nordic students to study each others’ languages (see Nordic Institutions, 31 August 2011) have fewer applicants each year, in spite of the free tuition, room and board offered. For some, the increasing difficulties involved in the requirement for skandinaviska as the lingua franca in Nordic encounters have also given rise to a more liberal policy. One example of this is the resolution of the Nordic Youth Council (NYC), a forum of young Nordic politicians in 2008 (http://www.norden.org/en/nordic-council/ nordic- youth-council-nyc/ resolutions/unr-s-resolutioner-2008) that it is, in principle, acceptable to

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use English in situations where it is not possible to understand each other in the Nordic languages. This decision was, however, met with a great deal of resistance: for instance, Nordic ministers and MPs were strongly against it. According to them, understanding the Nordic languages is fundamental to Nordic cooperation. They also swiftly provided the NYC money so that they can hire interpreters and translators for their meetings. Any supporter of multilingualism would obviously hail granting money for translation services for youth events as a measure to counteract the increasing use of English. The young people themselves may not, however, see it in the same way, as for them asking and waiting for interpretation may seem ridiculous when everyone is fluent in English and uses it as soon as no one in authority is listening. This kind of opposition to the use of English stems from two main sources: on the one hand, English lacks the emblematic character of skandinaviska described above; on the other, it is seen as a danger to very existence of the small Nordic languages (see e.g. Mål i mun, 2002; Suomen kielen toimintaohjelma, 2009). Seeing English as ‘the killer language’ (the term is borrowed from Skutnabb-Kangas, 31 August 2011) is common in the public opinion of all Nordic countries. English expressions, business and product names, and the use of English in media are disapproved of, as is also evidenced by letters to editors striking up the discussion over and over again (see Leppänen and Pahta in this volume for many examples of such media content in Finland). The situation is quite similar in Sweden: even if Swedish has more speakers than any other Nordic language, there is a great deal of worry that it might decline and English take over. Educated Swedes generally speak English very well, sprinkle their speech liberally with English expressions without even seeming to notice it themselves. For those whose Swedish skills are lacking it could also be liberating. In practice, it could mean for them that as long as you frame your sentence with something resembling Swedish, and fill vocabulary gaps with English words: Voilà – you pass as a user of Swedish! For purists, the increasing use of English clearly is a problem. The opponents of English argue that the purity or very existence of their native language is endangered. At the same time, schools teaching all or several subjects in English grow in popularity, enterprises choose to use English as their working language and universities offer whole programmes in English. Most linguists agree that English poses no real danger to the national languages at the moment in everyday usage (see also Leppänen et al., 2011). It may cause the languages to change, or add to them, but it does not seem likely that they would disappear altogether. However, there is reason to be concerned that in academic contexts the Nordic languages may fall into decay, as in some disciplines all publications are written in English and consequently no terminology or expressions are developed for new concepts and issues (Hiidenmaa, 2003; Leppänen and Nikula, 2007). Against this background, Nordic academic cooperation could help to fight this

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development by offering an international scientific forum for the use of Nordic languages, but this only seems to function in areas where language is the focus of study, and even there English is often allowed.7 The two views about the use of English in Nordic contexts are in constant contradiction with one another. It is not only that different people or groups of people hold different opinions, but even those who argue strongly for the use of Nordic languages often actually use English, either because it is often so much more convenient or because they bend under the demands of those who find linguistic diversity a nuisance and a cost factor. In this view language is seen as a tool, a set of machinery for communication with no intrinsic, symbolic or emotional value. In Nordic contexts, English may sometimes be preferred, because it is seen as connected with modernity and progress. Admiration of the English language may also be based on political allegiances or attachment with English-speaking popular culture. While such attitudes may be more typical of those involved in commerce or science than in arts and humanities, many different views on the nature of language exist side by side in all groups involved in Nordic cooperation. Fighting against the use of English, in words if not in deeds, however, is another issue which unifies speakers of Nordic languages. While the use of English is practical and widely spread, it does not carry the same symbolic notions and values as does the use of skandinaviska or even the use of interpreters. English marks the gathering as international, but not as specifically Nordic. For this reason at least, it is believed that some formal or ritual parts of the event must be conducted in skandinaviska or provided with interpretation.

Suomi, the poor cousin While the Nordic languages are technically equal in Nordic contexts, there is the notable exception of Finnish. There is no point trying to use Finnish, as apart from those of Finnish descent in Sweden and Norway, very few people in the other Nordic countries actually understand Finnish. The Nordkurs organization (Nordic Institutions, 31 August 2011) which funds summer courses in all Nordic languages, also invests in summer courses in Finnish, but demand for these has, in practice, dwindled to almost zero. As a consequence, speakers of Finnish face the choice of having to cope with whatever Swedish they managed to learn at school, using English, or asking for an interpreter. For them, none of the choices is good. As was described above, the fact that Finns often have to struggle to express themselves in Swedish or to overextend their capacities in order to understand Norwegian or Danish means a serious reduction of the message and a weakening of the power of their speech. Not only are their arguments less persuasively formulated but the sheer cognitive burden makes them less

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likely to ask for the floor. Also, never being sure of what, say, the Dane just said and not being able to function at the level of their L1 performance, erodes their self-confidence. In this situation, they might find English a far easier language to use accurately and effectively, but, if they do so, its use marks them as infidels, undermining Nordic unity, and this may exclude them from the informal parts of the conversation. At least among the most Nordic-minded, the pull towards unity expressed by the choice of skandinaviska over interpretation or English often overrides the quality of the interaction. Sometimes this also means that people who are perfectly aware of the deficiencies in Finns’ ability to use skandinaviska will repeatedly strike up conversation in it, enduring the halting speech and the need to repeat their own utterances, even when both parties are aware that the exchange could easily be conducted in English. A critical interpretation of this practice could be that the native speakers of Scandinavian languages like to torture the less linguistically capable Finns. A less drastic interpretation, also backed up by the present author’s experiences, is that, in addition to kindly allowing the Finns to practise their Swedish and to patiently suffer its inadequacies, they genuinely feel that this is what makes us Nordic friends. Another example of what kind of complex communicative and linguistic outcomes the consensus over skandinaviska in Nordic meetings can produce is highlighted by a grassroots decision by some of the participants in a small long-term working group. In this group each time a Danish member suggested or commented on something in skandinaviska, either the Swedish or Icelandic members, who clearly knew that the Finns were unsure of what had just been said, asked for the floor and briefly summarized the previous turn in clear Swedish before adding their own contributions. Interestingly, this practice was never discussed, and it is not clear whether all the group members ever noticed it, but it actually made full participation of the Finnish members possible. When the participants who are less proficient in skandinaviska exercise their right to use an interpreter in a Nordic meeting, this clearly has the advantage that it allows them to concentrate on the issues being discussed instead of the language. At the same time, it also has definite disadvantages. For example, in big meetings interpretation may be easily provided for the official parts, but is not available for each individual during informal gatherings. In small meetings, in turn, it may not be available at all or asking for it is not welcome. This is illustrated by a recent e-mail discussion among the members of a Nordic working group which revealed rather strong attitudes against interpreting which a Finnish member of the group had suggested for an upcoming conference. Even people with a long experience of working together with people from all the Nordic countries expressed concern not only about the extra expense but also because they felt that interpreting sets people apart. The implied message in this discussion was that a member

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who requires interpretation is not one of ‘us’ if we need to talk with him/her using an interpreter. In addition, as on many previous occasions, in this discussion the official bilingualism of Finland was used as an additional argument – or a weapon – against the use of interpreters in two ways. On the one hand, it was clearly assumed that all Finns really are bilingual and, if they do not act accordingly, they are just causing trouble or being lazy. On the other hand, it was suggested that Finland should only send delegates who are fluent in skandinaviska. In practice, this would mean that those Finns with Swedish as their L1 are much more likely to participate in Nordic cooperation than Finnish-speaking Finns, not to mention those with some other L1, Finnish as L2 and with very marginal skills, if any, in Swedish. Once again, the choice of language thus became an equality issue, and a simple request for interpretation led to a situation in which some members of the group assumed the power to determine the languages which define the group and offer the appropriate way to display group membership.

Conclusions: no perfect alternative The linguistic situation in the Nordic contexts described in this chapter could be seen as a conventional multilingual situation in which individuals are assumed to have a firm ethnic identity which is, in turn, connected to a relatively monocultural national background and a national language. In this sense, this situation is not an example of the diversified diversity, or super-diversity, described by Vertovec (2006). Nevertheless, one of the characteristic goals of multi-ethnic communities, as described by Vertovec, pertains for the Nordic contexts discussed here as well: this is the coexistence of cohesion and separateness. In Nordic encounters the goal of cohesion is manifest in the ideological consensus which pulls everyone towards the use of Scandinavian languages as a means to maintain unity. The goal of separateness, in turn, is related to the individual needs of the participants to be able to express themselves as fully as possible and to maintain whatever professional, cultural or personal identity they associate with their linguistic resources. The fact that all the Nordic countries separately and all together have seen it necessary to either legislate or otherwise attempt to influence the status of their various languages at the beginning of the new millennium reveals that problems exist. Partly, they are due to the global tendency whereby English tends to be selected as the lingua franca in supranational encounters. Partly, the problems derive from the fact that the group of people participating in Nordic activities has also changed. With the growth of exchange programmes, on the one hand, and the pressures of acting together with others with similar regional interests both in European and worldwide organizations, on the other, it is no longer only the small culturally and linguistically minded group of academics and civil servants who need to

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cope with the Nordic languages on a higher than tourist level of proficiency. Furthermore, pressures for democratic practices make it impossible to send only Swedish-speaking delegates to Nordic events, although fewer and fewer of even highly educated Finns or Icelanders are willing or able to cope with skandinaviska (see e.g. Delsing, 2007). There seems to be a degree of structural and ideological denial of the changing reality, at least in the situations where skandinaviska is expected. The norm stipulates that everyone must at least pretend to understand what is going on, and the goal of togetherness overrides the need for actual participation. In relation to the parameters presented in Blommaert et al. (in this volume), it could be argued that skandinaviska represents order and normality, interpretation or the use of English, disorder and abnormality. The closer to the cultural and political core of Nordic cooperation the discourse context is located, the stronger the demand for the unity and order skandinaviska symbolizes. On the outskirts, when the issues are technical or trivial, or when the Nordic family is extended to include the Baltic countries, English becomes more acceptable. The third parameter – purity and impurity – suggested by Blommaert et al. is, however, the most interesting one in the Nordic context. Skandinaviska itself is impure and non-orderly, as it involves crossing, code-switching, variability, instability and hybridity, not only across the Scandinavian languages but also across other languages, as some ways of using English are rapidly becoming a part of the spoken norm in these languages, and even French appears here and there, as a traditional part of Swedish. Yet the use of skandinaviska represents the purity of the Nordic identity, and in a way acts as a means for separating ‘us’ from the others, the nonScandinavians. The case of Nordic cooperation is, in fact, a good example of the current challenges of multilingualism. The circumstances for flourishing multilingualism are ideal: the political will exists (at least in official speeches and publications), the governments finance language teaching and language policy-making, there is goodwill and tolerance among the participants in cooperation to make allowances and to understand each other. Yet not everybody is comfortable and linguistically at home in the Nordic region. There is no perfect solution in sight, unless it is an open discussion of the problems and new ways of communication combining languages and discarding whatever purist notions hold us back from creative use of our linguistic and extralinguistic resources.

Notes 1. Nordic refers to the Nordic area, which includes the states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and their more or less autonomous parts, the Faroe Islands and Greenland (which belong to Denmark) and Åland (a part of Finland).

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Scandinavia refers to Sweden, Norway and mainland Denmark, Scandinavian to the (non-immigrant) people or the national languages of these three countries. All the population figures from Nordic Statistics as of 1 January 2010 (2009 for Sweden and Greenland). See . In administrative and educational contexts the term used in Finland is toinen kotimainen kieli ‘second domestic language’ which refers to both Swedish for the speakers of Finnish, or to Finnish, when the point of view is that of the Swedishspeaking population. For more information about the linguistic situation in Finland see Salo (this volume). There are no official statistics of languages in Sweden, as the question about the mother tongue is not asked when information for population statistics is gathered. The popularity of this attitude was evinced by the landslide victory of a populist party Perussuomalaiset (The Finns) in the parliamentary elections of April 2011. The removal of mandatory Swedish from the Finnish school system is one of their major aims. An anecdotal example: the president of Iceland herself once scolded me and an Icelandic colleague, educated in the USA, for speaking English during a coffee break at a Nordic conference. For example Nordand, the Nordic journal of second language acquisition research, actively promotes the use of Nordic languages, but allows articles to be written in English, too.

References Dahl, Ö. (2008) Kuinka eksoottinen kieli suomi on? [How exotic a language is Finnish?] Virittäjä, 112 (4), pp. 545–59. [Online.] Available in Finnish at , date accessed 31 August 2011; and in Swedish at , date accessed 31 August 2011. Delsing, L.-O. (2007) Scandinavian intercomprehension today. In J.D. ten Thije and L. Zeevaert (eds) Receptive Multilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 231–48. Doetjes, G. (2007) Understanding differences in inter-Scandinavian language understanding. In J.D. ten Thije and L. Zeevaert (eds) Receptive Multilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 217–30. CEFR 2001. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 31 August 2011. Centre for Domestic Languages , date accessed 31 August 2011. Faroese , date accessed 31 August 2011. Finnish Sign Language , date accessed 31 August 2011. Gooskens, C. and N.H. Hilton (2010) The effect of social factors on the comprehension of a closely related language. Presentation at the 24th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. University of Eastern Finland, 26 August 2010. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 31 August 2011.

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Greenlandic Inuktitut , date accessed 31 August 2011. Hiidenmaa, P. (2003) Suomen kieli – Who Cares? [The Finnish Language – Who Cares?]. Helsinki: Otava. Kveeni [in Finnish and Norwegian] , date accessed 31 August 2011. Leppänen, S. and T. Nikula (2007) Diverse uses of English in Finnish society: discoursepragmatic insights into media, educational and business contexts. Multilingua, 26(4), pp. 333–80. Leppänen, S., T. Nikula and L. Kääntä (eds) (2008) Kolmas kotimainen: lähikuvia englannin käytöstä Suomessa [The Third Domestic Language: Case Studies on the Use of English in Finland]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, T. Nikula, S. Kytölä, T. Törmäkangas, K. Nissinen, L. Kääntä, T. Räisänen, M. Laitinen, P. Pahta, H. Koskela, S. Lähdesmäki and H. Jousmäki (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 8 September 2011. Maurud, Ø. (1976) Nabospråksforståelse i Skandinavia. En undersøkelse om gjensidig forståelse av tale og skriftspråk i Danmark, Norge og Sverige. Stockholm: Nordiska rådet. Meän kieli [in Finnish] , date accessed 31 August 2011. Mål i mun 2002 , date accessed 31 August 2011. National Association of Finns in Sweden [a summary in English, complete pages in Finnish and Swedish] , date accessed 31 August 2011. Nordic institutions: Nordic Language Council , date accessed 31 August 2011. The Nordic Council , date accessed 31 August 2011. Nordic Youth Council , date accessed 31 August 2011. Nordkurs , date accessed 31 August 2011. Pohjola-Norden , date accessed 31 August 2011. Romany , date accessed 31 August 2011. Sámi languages , date accessed 31 August 2011. Skunabb-Kangas, T. , date accessed 31 August 2011. Statistics Finland < http://www.stat.fi/index_en.html>, date accessed 31 August 2011. Suomen kielen tulevaisuus. Kielipoliittinen toimintaohjelma 2009 [The Future of the Finnish Language. Language Political Action Plan 2009]. , date accessed 31 August 2011.

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Vaattovaara, J. (2009) Meän tapa puhua: Tornionlaakso pellolaisnuorten subjektiivisena paikkana ja murrealueena [Our Way of Talking: the Tornio River Valley as the Subjective Place and Dialect Region of Young Pello People]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Valhalla , date accessed 31 August 2011. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Zeevaert, L. (2007) Receptive multilingualism and inter-Scandinavian semicommunication. In J.D. ten Thije and L. Zeevaert (eds) Receptive Multilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 103–36.

9 The Dangers of Normativity – the Case of Minority Language Media Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes

Introduction Minority language media are often a focal site for particular normative logics and practices of minoritized language communities. Being highly regulated and ordered, ideologically invested in terms of prestige, visibility and voice, and central for minority language practices, innovations and markets, minority media are at the heart of normativity (cf. Jaffe, 2007; Moriarty, 2009; Kelly-Holmes et al., 2009; Pietikäinen, 2008). Normativity is an intrinsic feature of every multilingual situation; it can be seen as an attempt to bring order to the potential disorder of multilingualism and heteroglossia and sometimes also as an attempt to delineate linguistic practices from each other in an attempt to demarcate languages and ‘purify’ them, as part of a modernizing project. But how does this normativity impact on speakers and on languages? In this chapter,1 we want to explore whether and how normativity can be both dangerous and protective for languages and speakers, using the case of minority language media, and drawing on our own long-standing work in Sámi and Irish language media. The normative logics in mediated language practices manifest themselves in a variety of ways: for example, in overt and covert language policies (Shohamy, 2006), in prescriptions of language choices and hierarchies created from the linguistic repertoire of a speech community, and in the order and logic of allocation of media space to specific languages and their variants. As Spitulnik (1998) concludes in relation to her work on radio in Zambia, national media ‘build the communicative space for the nation’, necessarily bringing all of the nation’s languages into hierarchical and power relations with each other – and this applies not just to the languages that are present in the media, but also to those languages that are not present, that are excluded. However, alongside these norm-regulated and reinforcing activities driven by aims of stability and standardization, there is always norm-challenging creativity and innovation taking place, too. To examine this dialectic and the possible tensions arising from it, we 194

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start by looking at the dangers of the former, the ‘stabilizing norms’, which are aimed at standardization and regulation of and between languages, and which can be seen as a feature of ‘high modernity’, as discussed in Blommaert et al. (this volume). We then go on to look at the latter, the ‘fluid norms’, which arise from challenges to the ‘stable norms’, and which in turn come to take the place of previously stable norms. Fluid norms with their situated character can be seen as a feature of postmodern practices, which challenge the stable norms of modernity. Using the examples of Irish and Sámi media, we want to show how normativity is both dangerous and protective in multilingual situations, and how all normative practices have the potential to be both.

Dangers of stabilizing norms We can identify a practical and ideological concern with ‘stabilizing norms’ (i.e. standardization, purism, corpus planning) as a starting point and guiding principle for much minority language media engagement and programming. This normativity is born out of and informed by the modernist project of constructing a coherent homogeneous nation linked to the concept of territoriality and linguistic purity (Heller, 2006; Jaffe, 2007; Pujolar, 2007). In this context, language is not seen as a socially bounded, relational, situated resource (Blommaert et al., 2005; Heller, 2007; Pietikäinen et al., 2008) but instead constructed as a closed, bounded system that can be counted, kept pure, codified and standardized. The aim of stabilizing norms is to fix language borders and create a particular hierarchy between languages and a pattern to use them in order to secure and protect a particular variant and ways of using languages. In the media context, the stabilizing norms are also used to regulate and secure scarce resources, such as media space. As Moschonas (2004, p. 177) points out, purity and standardization are needed in order for the language to ‘be thought of as a manageable communication means’, and the concern with developing norms is a necessary means of achieving media in these languages. Norms are always ecological – not absolute – and are inevitably created by practical issues and political aspirations. At the time when Sámi radio was founded (1938) the aspiration was to change and challenge the monolingual norm of majority media and create new rules for the media space within the nation state. The mission was – and continues to be – to produce media by Sámi in Sámi for Sámi (Pietikäinen, 2008). Similarly, when Raidió Éireann was set up in the 1920s, in the newly independent Irish state, it had a policy of monolingualism and language purism in an attempt to reverse the prevailing language situation of English language dominance. Even though Raidió Éireann gradually switched to making English the normal language of media in Ireland, this monolingual and purist policy was adopted by Raidió na Gaeltachta (RnaG), which is primarily aimed at first language speakers living

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in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht areas and which was set up as a result of a linguistic human rights campaign in the late 1960s. This norm of language purity and protection still regulates the use of linguistic resources and language choices in media programming and practices. The minority language-only norm, developed and adopted in a specific social and political context of modernization, standardizes the minority language as the only or main legitimate language in the daily practices of producing minority programmes (cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2011). This norm prescribes the daily working practices of the journalists in minority language media and many have adopted this norm as part of their professional identity as a minority language journalist: to use and promote minority language is an ‘unwritten rule’ or a normative practice. This can lead to shortcomings in terms of journalistic practices and audience. For example, in Sámi radio, majority languages are dubbed and translated into Sámi in a language situation where everyone could understand Finnish but few can understand Sámi. This is done in order to follow the purist norm; to create a Sámi-only media space and erase multilingual practices and repertoires, both of journalistic work and within the community itself, from the final products broadcast. These practices require lots of time and effort, putting an extra burden on the scarce resources of often understaffed and underfunded minority media. In terms of audience, the puristic norm leads to particular patterns of giving media access to, and voicing opinions and concerns of, the community. The same people (those listed or known as fluent minority language speakers) get interviewed over and over again, while others (those with limited or non-existing minority language skill) rarely get access to minority media, leading potentially to a narrower perspective. For example in Ireland, politicians, academics, and so on, who are competent speakers, are inevitably interviewed in preference to speakers who lack this competence, in order to avoid diluting the broadcasting norm with more English. In the media profile of the staff of the University of Limerick, the faculty are asked, along with expertise, if they are able to be interviewed in Irish. These stabilizing norms tend to disregard multilingual repertoires, which are an inevitable part of the linguistic capabilities of speakers of minoritized languages, and the complexities within the concept of the speaker itself (cf. Moore et al., 2010). Stabilizing norms can lead to an ever-diminishing circle where the media producers search for the real native speaker and the (predominantly) minority-language-speaking audience, a concept that is extremely difficult in minority language contexts, which in practice are multilingual and where the competence in the minoritized language varies (cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2011). An unintended consequence of these standardizing norms is a loss of voice and agency in that language for many potential minority language speakers, since ownership is then vested in the ideal speaker. For example in Sámi radio, when examining the journalistic

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practices of Sámi media production, journalists commented on the difficulties of getting people to phone into Sámi radio programmes or be interviewed, as people felt their skills were not fluent enough (Pietikäinen, 2008). Also the Internet services in Sámi languages have been affected by the fact that few Sámi consider themselves fluent writers in their minority languages. Furthermore, the fact that Irish is taught as a subject for all of the compulsory period of schooling (as part of the acquisition policy) has reinforced the purity norm, and the association of Irish as a school language rather than a living language for many L2 speakers. This has compounded a sense of alienation from a media norm and a reluctance to use the language in media contexts, even informal, bottom-up media contexts such as a discussion on YouTube about an advertisement in Irish by Carlsberg (7 December 2009). Contributors to the discussion apologized for their poor Irish, and its unsuitability for use on the site, in Irish (cf. Kelly-Holmes, 2010). These conceptions of language can result in diglossic situations, and speakers may not identify with or see themselves reflected in media that are provided for them. Instead, such media norms may reinforce a sense of inferiority and failure by presenting speakers with an unachievable ideal. In the extreme case this can lead to a situation where the stabilizing normativity results in media products that are targeted at the whole community but consumed only by a few. Outside RnaG, Irish language programming features on the main national television and radio stations as a reflection of the constitutional status of Irish as the first official language of the country. The norm of such programming has up to relatively recently been that those who use Irish are fluent or native speakers. In fact, such speakers were often accused of condescension when they attempted to ‘simplify their speech to reach a wider audience’. Thus, the message was that to speak Irish in a media context meant that one was a fluent speaker. This purism norm also plays a role in hiring people to work in these media. Both Sámi Radio and RnaG adopted a native speaker model of recruitment, reinforcing this ideal as a norm. Furthermore, the ideology behind this is the belief that a ‘native’ speaker comes with the pure and full linguistic competence as well as an ‘authentic’ worldview, knowledge and network needed for an essentialist construction of ‘nativeness’. However, such ‘native speakers’ are hard to find within minoritized language communities, which are so often characterized by language shift and truncated competence in the minority language. Thus, both Sámi media and RnaG have gradually moved to hiring fluent second language speakers. In addition, in both Sámi and Irish media, this norm also regulated the choice of music: until recently, priority was given to music with minority language lyrics. However, normativity is not only for fixing language relations between minority and majority languages, but also operates for management of internal heteroglossia (cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2011). Just as national governments have to make decisions about managing internal

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multilingualism and balancing it against the pressure to appear externally homogeneous, minority language media actors have to decide how to manage and create norms for their internal multilingualism while coping with the need to appear a coherent and homogeneous linguistic group in terms of its dealings with the state. Normativity arises from such processes. Sámi radio, for instance, has to balance issues of politics, rights, equality and viability in decisions on programming for 35,000 Northern Sámi speakers compared with 350 Inari Sámi and Skolts Sámi speakers. We can see this as an example of fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal, 2000), whereby the processes and normativity that resulted in the marginalizing of the Sámi language within the frame of nation state, are reproduced now in the internal hierarchy that prioritizes one language (Northern Sámi) over the others. Significantly, however, despite the fact that RnaG did not reflect bilingual practice in relation to mixing English and Irish, it did foster internal heteroglossia and multilingualism in Irish, by giving media space and time to all of the dialects.

Dangers of fluid norms While normative frameworks of stability and purism still persist, at least part of contemporary minority language media practice has moved away from these normativities to encompass heteroglossia, multilingualism, hybridity and multimodality (Busch, 2006; Kelly-Holmes et al., 2009; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2011). Many of these new practices have come about as a result of a challenge to prevailing norms outlined above; however, this shift of course creates new kinds of normativity – what we are calling norms of fluidity. We can identify many reasons for this shift: technological change in the form of digital media has resulted in a multiplicity of media actors, practices and formats; a shift in language rights from a focus on the group and the territory to a focus on the individual; postmodern notions of audience and voice, which enable the individual to pick and choose from and play with a wider, but possibly shallower, linguistic repertoire; and the new economy and its practices, which exploit these truncated practices (cf. Heller, 2003; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2011). These and other factors have led to a situation where old, stabilizing norms are challenged, changed, adjusted, mobilized and appropriated in order to come to terms with the new possibilities and constraints. The arrival of new technology has had a number of effects. It is no coincidence that a move away from both purity and stabilizing normativity has been witnessed at the same time that digital technology has made the question of resource allocation less crucial. For example, the deregulation of broadcasting that has accompanied these technological changes means that where speakers are economically powerful, they can demand and receive products in the language of their choice from private producers (cf. Kelly-Holmes,

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2005 re the ‘multilingualizing’ of Eurosport as a result of consumer pressure). Being a speaker of a minority language then becomes similar to having an interest in sport and subscribing to a particular sports channel. Lower media production costs and decentred and deregulated sites of production and producers can introduce new norms and challenge the old ones. Speakers no longer need to wait to be provided with media products by a powerful actor such as a national or community media station, instead they can create their own. For example, Facebook has introduced a ‘community translation’ service, which allows users to produce and regulate their own translations in a range of languages, including Irish and Northern Sámi (cf. Lenihan, 2011). Thus, fluid norms are derived in a polycentric and fragmented way. Speakers can make media products in their own voice, resisting the standardizing and prescriptivism necessarily inherent in the stabilizing processes, and regardless of the completeness of their competences. It is not just that the distance between the media speaker and the everyday speaker has been shortened; media are now expected to speak in the language of the user (cf. Fairclough, 2006), which necessarily implies multivoicedness and fluidity in norms. The introduction of the Irish language television channel TG4 in 1996 has challenged many of the stabilizing norms of Irish language media practices outlined earlier. The station uses English language subtitles for programmes, automatically changing the norms of who is an authentic viewer of such a programme. The station’s presenters have developed a type of ‘cool’ Irish, designed to appeal to younger audiences. One of the most successful of these new, cool presenters, Hector O hEochagain, is an L2 speaker from Navan (not from the Gaeltacht), who has been criticized for using Irish in a non-L1 and even far from perfect way. He uses a high degree of codemixing and English loanwords in his Irish, and in a media context in which viewers are used to the ‘native speaker’ norm, his approach has certainly challenged and destabilized established norms of Irish language broadcasting. In fact, one of the recommendations of a MORI poll on Irish language broadcasting, which identified ‘Generation Hector’ as a potential new audience group for Irish language programmes, was that Irish language programming should ‘reflect the heterogeneity of Irish language radio listeners, who are not necessarily proficient Irish speakers nor are they necessarily involved in Irish language activities’ (MORI, 2005). Even more than this, the professional media speaker has been supplemented – and in some cases completely supplanted – by non-professional speakers who may bring with them varied linguistic repertoires. Such practices inevitably challenge existing boundaries and hierarchies between languages and their speakers, as well as opening up opportunities for language and genre innovations, which may include play with language ideologies and standards of previous eras. A good example here is the use by Carlsberg, an international brand and by definition not a member of the Irish language community and without any claim of ownership of the language, of Irish in

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a 2001 advertisement. The advertisement’s slogan involved four unrelated words of Irish spoken by a typical school Irish speaker, intended to index school learners’ imperfect command of the language, traditionally a source of inferiority for such speakers. The slogan was then reprinted on t-shirts which are worn by young people in Ireland, both fluent speakers living in the Gaeltacht and non-fluent school speakers. On YouTube, where the advertisement is reproduced, over 300 comments have been posted about the advertisement using both English and Irish, some trying out their school or ‘imperfect’ Irish on this global media forum. It is fair to say that these speakers would never feature on RnaG. This example shows how the era of digital media together with the consumption model of media users and global flows present a challenge to norms, and also to issues of ownership, authentic and native speakers, expression, and definitions of language and multilingualism. The language can be used by anybody as a flexible resource as it is needed, and it cannot be controlled by being confined to a particular territory or media space or a particular style or idea: in this way it can be argued that there has been a relaxation from the constraints of stabilizing norms. Another example illustrates the development towards performativity in new hybrid minority language engagement. Under these conditions, Sámi rapper Amoc practises a playful language innovation that involves mixing the global genre of rap, the global language of English, the national language of Finnish and the highly localized Inari Sámi language and culture. This combination challenges some of the previous norms since new normative frameworks are introduced both by the demands of being a credible rapper and marketable requirements of differentiation and uniqueness. With his combination of using Inari Sámi for his lyrics, Finnish and English for interaction with his audience and fellow rappers and his clothing which mixes indexes of Sáminess (parts of the Sámi dress and/or colours) with those of a ‘rapper’ (baggy trousers, cap hat), Amoc performs a new way of owning, using and playing with his resources and the previous norms (Leppänen and Pietikäinen, 2010). Amoc’s very deliberate and conscious choices and performances can be seen as related to a particular socio-economic shift from tradition and purity to commodification of tradition and heritage. Under such circumstances, there is a need to adapt to this new situation and to reinvent and reproduce an identity that is both authentic and ‘real’, but also multilingual and hybrid (Pietikäinen, 2008). Amoc is performing himself clearly as a Sámi, but a Sámi with a postmodern twist. The Carlsberg advertisement referred to above (cf. Kelly-Holmes, 2010 for extensive discussion) or use of Sámi words in naming places, items and activities within Finnish or English marketing discourses are examples of the truncated use of language in the practices of the ‘globalized new economy’ (Heller, 2003), which places language at the heart of both products and processes of production, and which consequently creates

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new norms. Emblematic or fetishized (Kelly-Holmes, 2005) language use is a characteristic of such practices, and languages in such a scheme have more in common with graphics or music than with instrumental use of language. But although there is freedom in this usage from prescriptive usage, there is also danger. It is important to ask whether this emblematic usage is sufficient. Does it make languages into a type of Latin, a visual or sonic resource for ‘adding colour’, or can it be an opportunity for revival and revitalization? Also, are the norms created by these new processes enabling or restricting? Norms in advertising language tend to be derived through imitation – thus a norm may well evolve around the use of Irish in advertisements for beers, restricting its usage to this product type, and inevitably also creating this association for the language, which is limiting. Although purism may persist in some media spaces, emblematic, performative and truncated usages pose a challenge to this, as does the commodification of the language and its use by individuals, groups and corporations who would not in previous eras have been seen as ‘authentic speakers’ or members of the minority language speech community, as we saw in the case of Carlsberg mentioned above. Although we now have freedom, in some domains, from prescribed norms and standards, we also have to ask whether this truncated and emblematic use is enough. What might happen if states that grant rights, including media rights, on the basis of being a defined language began to adopt these conceptions of language and use them to take away rights since ‘anything goes’ and there are no languages, simply genres and registers (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007)? Stabilizing norms of purism and homogeneity – presenting a unified front to the outside world – are clearly necessary in order to win the right to scarce media resources, and standardization may be needed in order to maximize these scarce resources. While corpus, status and acquisition planning may stifle creativity and individual multilingualism, we need to wonder what might happen without them. Furthermore, while people may now have access to a wider linguistic repertoire, primarily as a result of global media and marketing processes and greater mobility, we need to ask perhaps the difficult question of whether there has also been a loss of depth in the repertoire, and what the final result of this thinning but expanding process might be?

Conclusion As highlighted at the start of the chapter, minority media were themselves created out of a need to change the prevailing norms of media (i.e. the idea that only important, big and powerful languages can have media space), and also from a desire to challenge the idea that the normal state of affairs for a modern nation state, a great nation, was to have only one standard language. The emergence of minority language media necessarily

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challenges the abnormal status accorded to multilingualism by the official policies of most nation states. However, as the Sámi and Irish cases show, in order for media to be published and broadcast in minority languages, it was often necessary to adopt many of the ‘typical high-modern measures’ as identified by Blommaert et al. (this volume), namely ‘the denying or combating hybridity, multiplicity, crossing and related expressions of impurity’. So, the safeguarding of one particular dimension of multilingualism (small language versus big national language) can often involve a small language endangering even smaller languages. Blommaert et al. (this volume) identify the problematic of dangerous multilingualism as an example of the ‘anachronisms that reflect the ongoing and unresolved tensions between high modernity and post- or late modernity’. We can see in the context of Irish and Sámi media, that stabilizing norms reflect a desire to fix fluidity at a certain point in time and keep it stable. However it is important, certainly in the current consideration of minority language media, to recognize the necessity of stabilizing norms, which were needed in order to achieve the goal of such media. Furthermore, although the ‘anachronisms’ of high modernity have been challenged by postmodern notions of fluidity and fragmentation, we would argue that it is important to recognize that stabilizing norms are not outworn; they persist and they are necessary, particularly in the context of maintaining or safeguarding language rights, resources and provisions for minority language speakers and communities. This chapter has shown how minority language media are constantly engaged in a cycle of norms and reactions, and constant tension between the drive for stability (top-down) and the pressure for fluidity (bottom-up). New media contexts for minority language media increase the pressure on stabilizing norms. However, in order to have fluidity, there needs to be stabilization against which to measure fluidity. Furthermore, in the context of minority languages, without stabilizing norms and ‘typical modern measures’, Irish and Sámi may perhaps have declined in terms of numbers of speakers and domains of usage. As highlighted above, challenges to norms become norms in themselves. The practices outlined above as ‘fluidity’ not only challenge prevailing norms, they also create new, stabilizing norms. As the examples from Sámi and Irish media context show, norms are ecological, not absolute; they are both dangerous and protective.

Note 1. This chapter is produced in the context of a research project ‘Peripheral Multilingualism: Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Contestation and Innovation in Multilingual Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh Indigenous and Minority Language Contexts’, funded by the Academy of Finland.

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Pietikäinen, S. (2008) Broadcasting indigenous voices. European Journal of Communication, 23(2), pp. 173–91. Pietikäinen, S. and H. Kelly-Holmes (2011) Gifting, service and performance: three eras in minority language media policy and practice. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 21(1), pp. 51–70. Pietikäinen, S., R. Alanen, H. Dufva, P. Kalaja, S. Leppänen and A. Pitkänen-Huhta (2008) Languaging in ultima thule: multilingualism in the life of a Sámi boy. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(2), pp. 79−99. Pujolar, J. (2007) Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: a Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–95. Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge. Spitulnik, D. (1998) Mediating unity and diversity: the production of language ideologies in Zambian broadcasting. In B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard and P.V. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–88.

Part III Normality – Abnormality

10 Discourses of Proficiency and Normality – Endangering Aspects of English in an Individual’s Biography of Language Use Tiina Räisänen

Introduction Background Individuals’ life-worlds and their experiences with languages are important in sociolinguistic analyses of multilingualism. Studies of the possibilities and constraints caused by languages shed light on the sociolinguistic realities of people’s lives today (Heller, 2001; Pietikäinen et al., 2008). Dealing with individual multilingualism (Blommaert et al., this volume), this chapter focuses on an individual’s biography of language use in the context of globalized Finland. From within an ethnographic, discourse analytic and sociolinguistic framework1 it looks at the problems and dangers that language causes to a person’s life. As part of a larger study2 of five Finnish engineers’ trajectories from educational and stay abroad contexts to globalized working life, this chapter explores three interviews with an individual who has learned English as a foreign language at school, has his first daily experiences in using it during a four-month stay abroad period in Germany as a student, and to whom the language finally becomes a routine tool in doing business with the Chinese. The interview data analysed in this chapter were gathered in three different stages: before and after the participant’s stay in Germany in 2003 and in 2008 when he was employed full-time in an international company. The theme interviews were conducted in Finnish and they resembled casual conversations, focusing on the interviewee’s uses of English in different contexts, his feelings about using English, his perceptions of himself as a language user and self-evaluations of his language proficiency. The analysis of the interviews aims at answering the following questions: What is problematic and dangerous about English for the individual and how? What social functions cannot be reached because of English? In order to answer these questions, particular attention will be paid to discourses emergent in 207

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the data which focus on the use of English and the proficiency in it, and their relation to language and linguistic behaviour as problematic. In this study, problematic aspects of English manifest, in particular, in the individual’s positions within discourses of using English. In his discursive orientations to language proficiency, conceptualizations of norms, of normality and abnormality (Foucault, 2003) come to the fore. More specifically, by investigating the individual’s trajectories of socialization (Wortham, 2005) into globalized working life, the present chapter will discuss what kinds of possibilities for action, social participation and identification with English evolve during these trajectories, and the ways in which language at times prevents the individual from reaching these social functions. The chapter also shows how the individual’s linguistic repertoire and the meanings and values of his linguistic resources change over time. These, often unexpected, changes imply trouble and pose him new challenges which he needs to address. English as a problem In the globalized Finnish society, Finns have relatively easy access to English. As the most popular foreign language in Finland, English is a valuable resource which Finns acquire from a relatively early age onwards and it can be studied in most educational domains (see e.g. Leppänen and Nikula, 2007; Leppänen et al. 2011; Salo, this volume). At the age of nine, most Finnish pupils begin to learn English and continue doing so throughout their education, at least until coming of age. English is part of the core curriculum and particularly in higher education there are plenty of opportunities to learn English for example through student exchange abroad.3 In fact, an increasing number of students nowadays enrol in exchange programmes to learn more about foreign cultures and languages (CIMO, accessed 22 June 2009). For many future professionals, the investment in English is crucial, since it functions increasingly as the lingua franca in today’s working life (Louhiala-Salminen et al., 2005). In globalized business it is seen as an indispensable asset, although other foreign languages are needed, too. This image of English may indicate that Finns’ relationship with it is an easy and straightforward one. However, when it is investigated from an individual’s perspective, problems and dangers often emerge. This is true of our present individual, too: although he has studied English throughout his life and gained access to English, during his trajectory as a learner and user of English, he has also had phases and experiences of regression and failure. Firstly, he feels that he cannot develop his language skills abroad in the way he wants. Secondly, even though he is working in international business with English as the daily working language – which initially represented his dream come true professionally, he needs to use it in ways which he considers problematic. Below, these problematic aspects of his language situation will be investigated in detail. In this analysis, the notion of repertoire involving the collection of different linguistic resources with uneven values provides a useful starting point.

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Dangerous resources For an individual with a long learning trajectory with English, such as the young engineer under investigation in this chapter, the meaning of the language is bound to change over time and across contexts. At this point it is important to understand that when we refer to the English Language here, we are really talking about a collection of various resources – bits of language people use for different purposes. Linguistic resources are unevenly distributed in societies, domains and groups, and their value is determined by their power and currency in different markets. The same resources do not have equal value everywhere. People’s individual linguistic repertoires consist of different resource constellations which determine what people can do with language in each situation (Hymes, 1996; Blommaert, 2005; Blommaert and Backus, 2012). For example, if success in the job market is defined by specific language skills, without such resources one is not able to compete in those markets. This is a practical problem for certain people, but the lack of particular resources may also mean that the person lacking a resource can have low selfesteem, and his/her abilities in negotiating desirable identities can be limited. In such cases, the problem is that the person has an inadequate linguistic repertoire: it either cannot be used in a desired way due to for example contextual constraints or the lack of resources needed in a particular space. Another aspect of the dangerousness of English lies in its power to discriminate between people in social encounters. For example, if two people speak a language that is not known to the third party, the person left out is being discriminated against through the choice of language. In such a situation the resources are thus unevenly distributed, which can also mean that power in the social encounter is uneven (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 648; 1991). Access and ability to use particular resources are thus consequential in terms of the participants’ agency and voice (Hymes, 1996). Power can also be exercised by means of institutions and language policies which can for instance determine what kind of language is required. Institutions thus use power by imposing particular norms and thereby restricting people’s access to other resources. They are important sites of socialization into linguistic resources – an example of this is how education socializes students to the use of Standard English (Agha, 2003, 2007). Often this means that individuals tend to see their language use through the lenses of the socializing institution – this will be demonstrated by the case analysed in this chapter, too. Discourses as a tool in examining the problems of English Power can also be manifested in people’s positions within discourses. An individual can exercise power through discursively positioning him/herself and others as particular kinds of people with particular kinds of linguistic

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resources. For instance, when interviewees talk about themselves and others as language users and do so by drawing on discourses, they at the same time produce typifications of people and of what is normal or abnormal in their linguistic behaviour, i.e. metapragmatic typifications (e.g. Agha, 2003, 2007). In the case under investigation here, these typifications stem from conceptions of, and attitudes to, the use of English. When people reproduce them in discourses, they also draw on their own earlier experiences in contexts where they have used the language. These discursive strategies are powerful resources which people draw on to make sense of their lives with language. However, a danger encompassed by the potential and power of linguistic resources, represented in discourses, is that they can delimit the particular desired social functions available to individuals, in terms of both their actual behaviour and on the ideological level. Discourses of language and proficiency are hence tools of normalization and abnormalization. An investigation of discursive practices such as typifications helps explain how language can be dangerous, how resource production and distribution are regulated by people and how these put constraints on people’s access to social functions (Heller, 2001; Blommaert, 2010). As will be shown below, who gets access to which resources is a source of problems in social encounters involving English (see also Kytölä, this volume). Linguistic resources have the power to position people in various ways and thereby endanger an individual’s opportunities for action, participation and identification in different contexts.

Oskari’s journey with English Analysing the case The case explored here is Oskari (a pseudonym), a young Finnish engineer. His educational background is very typical: he began school at the age of seven and his English studies at the age of nine. After studying English for seven years at junior and secondary school, he continued to study it for three years in high school and at polytechnic during his studies in machine engineering. At the time of his work practice in Germany in 2003, he was in his early twenties and halfway through his engineering studies. This is when I became acquainted with him and a dozen other Finns who had moved to work in Germany for four to six months. While in Germany, I was able to get to know Oskari, spend time and have informal discussions with him at work and in his free time. Prior to his internship Oskari had not travelled abroad for more than two weeks and had not used English in Finland apart from at school, to which his experience of using English was almost entirely limited. In Germany he worked as an industrial production worker in a factory with mostly German and Portuguese employees and lived in a student dormitory which accommodated people with varied cultural backgrounds (e.g. German, Greek, Chinese and Indian). Except for communicating with

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other Finns and for work, where all the employees were advised to use German, Oskari used English. He knew very little German. Oskari graduated in 2005. At the time of the third interview, he was working as a project manager in an international engineering company with a global business network in Europe and Asia. In addition, he travelled regularly to China. Oskari’s biography is divided into three different stages which reveal two main types of trajectory. Firstly, there is a trajectory of mobility which became manifest through the data collection and which encompasses the different stages of Oskari’s life. Secondly, another trajectory is the analytical observation which distinguished three stages in Oskari’s life with English and his repertoire. During the three stages – education, stay abroad and working life – Oskari, in the same way as many other Finns, gradually gains access to English. In my analysis, I will pay attention to Oskari’s talk about language and about the problematic aspects of language use by himself and his interactants, particularly in metapragmatic comments and typifications about language use. There are, for instance, evaluations and descriptions of one’s own and other people’s language in small stories which function as positioning cues (Georgakopoulou, 2007, p. 126). Oskari’s orientations to language as a problem with various linguistic choices (e.g. vocabulary, emotion verbs) are investigated micro-discourse analytically in the stories. For instance, instances where he talks about his negative experiences in using the language are seen as an emic (the interviewee’s) perspective on the problems of language use. As not all problems are explicitly talked about, my analytic interpretation becomes important when, from an etic (the interviewer’s) perspective, I try to identify and make sense of the implicit problems in the interviewee’s talk. By telling small stories and choosing the ways in which he represents his and other people’s repertoires, Oskari draws on different discourses of language use and proficiency in the axis of normality–abnormality where he is discursively subjected to and positions himself and other people (Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré and van Langenhove, 1999). Oskari’s positions can be characterized as positive or negative (Bucholtz, 1999, pp. 211–12). Over time, Oskari moves across different positions which are invested with different degrees of power. By means of a discursive struggle (Heller, 2001), Oskari either accepts or resists certain discourses and their associated positions. In other words, he struggles to produce particular discourses and to impose them, as well as to deal with discourses produced by others. The ways in which he thus engages with positioning is a dialogical and active process whereby social discourses are drawn on to create one’s own position. Through identifying prominent discourses and their associated positioning in his talk, the analyst can also contextualize them to macro issues of language policies, ideologies and issues of globalization from the perspective of the distribution and value of linguistic resources (Heller, 2001). The impact

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of context is significant: it affects the ways in which an individual views his/her own linguistic repertoire, attaches values to different resources and discursively positions him/herself as a language user. Hence, by looking at contextual differences across timescales, one can begin to understand the value and the politics of access to resources. The following section presents the analysis stage by stage and the problems Oskari has with English. Stage 1 – stories from home In the first stage Oskari draws on discourses of using English in Finland and at school. Rather than focusing on the English he knows, Oskari orients to his problems. His talk echoes school values, which is understandable considering his history of ten years of formal school learning. It also reflects what Oskari sees as normal linguistic behaviour and, in contrast, what he views as abnormal. At this stage, Oskari struggles amidst different norms shown on the one hand in the way he evaluates his own language use and, on the other, in how he sees language proficiency in general. Good language proficiency for him means surviving in real life, but he does not relate his own proficiency to that norm at all. Instead, judged by his selfevaluations, he relies on another norm, that of linguistic correctness, which leads him to evaluate his own language as deviant, rudimentary and simple, thus obviously not good. It appears that some norms have more power than others and thus the value Oskari attaches to his own language is low. As Oskari ranks his language as a lower-scale language compared to a norm of linguistic correctness, he is not granted what he desires, such as feelings of competence and courage (see also Virkkula and Nikula, 2010). Such discourses of proficiency clearly endanger Oskari as a language-using subject, and because of his lack of proficiency he has a restricted voice, which means that he is incapable of making himself understood in a desired way and of accomplishing desired functions through language (Hymes, 1996; Blommaert, 2005, p. 68). Further, there is a link between his subjective experience and the Finnish and school contexts. The way in which this link manifests can be explained with reference to the scale hierarchy within which Oskari is positioned. Scale is a sociolinguistic concept for understanding linguistic stratification in society. It is a social phenomenon and a form of power: because of their inadequate repertoires, some people are not entitled to higher scales in a social hierarchy (cf. Silverstein, 2006 as cited in Blommaert, 2007). Oskari is a case in point: due to his limited resources and inadequate repertoire, he is not able to jump to a higher, more desired social scale where linguistic correctness has power because he lacks the resources valued on that scale. In this view, a restricted voice is about not being able to move to a scale where desired functions would be possible. Hence his actual resources fail to fulfil the desired functions. The implicit norm Oskari orients to acts as a powerful tool in regulating Oskari’s access to particular social functions. The first example illustrates how Oskari evaluates

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his own English proficiency. All the examples in this chapter are translations of interviews that were originally conducted in Finnish. Example 1.4 Oskari’s evaluation of his own language proficiency 1 T well do you think you have good language proficiency in English 2 O well I wouldn’t say it’s good since speaking really isn’t that (2.0) 3 so (.) especially a new and unfamiliar situation (2.0) 4 for example getting the phone extension 5 an odd situation (.) one [that I have] never encountered before 6 then it is totally about searching for words and like that (2.0) 7 so I wouldn’t say it’s good […] 10 T how about speaking English then (.) what kind of sentences you 11 produce and words so how well do you think it works 12 O (3.0) well (2.0) speaking does not work so well (.) I think (3.0) 13 especially if I have to like (3.0) like explain something (.) 14 I don’t know (.) if the situation creates a kind of pressure or what (.) 15 you like know it or if you think about it later and you would have 16 known the word (.) but in the situation in which I explain it I use 17 those substitute words (2.0) which kind of do not exactly mean it 18 but something like that (2.0) like (2.0) I can’t give you an example 19 now but I have just noticed it that it becomes this kind of like 20 rudimentary kind of talk 21 I mean very simple words 22 T yeah (.) why do you think that is (.) can you say 23 O well I think it’s because I haven’t talked 24 I haven’t been in situations in which I would have needed to speak 25 you kind of don’t give yourself enough time to think about the words 26 and you feel a kind of (2.0) pressure to talk there (.) and mm (.) 27 those those easiest words come out which we have dealt with from the start Directed by the interviewer’s question, Oskari orients to language proficiency through a story of his actual experiences in situations where he needs to speak English. This marks his authentic position as an incompetent speaker. From the beginning on (line 2) he orients to negative aspects of his language skills: I wouldn’t say it’s good. Self-mockery and an orientation to problems are manifested in his word choices such as rudimentary and very simple. Furthermore, speaking has high value and for him proficiency really is about being proficient in speaking: this comes out in his reference to having to search for words, which, in fact, is typical for language learners when they speak a foreign language. Oskari views himself as a bad speaker with

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attributes such as speaking does not work so well (line 12), rudimentary kind of talk (line 20), very simple words (line 21). Furthermore, vocabulary is problematic for Oskari and it causes feelings of frustration and pressure. Although it points towards pragmatic proficiency, using substitute words (lines 16–18) does not constitute a skill for him. In his opinion, the reasons behind his lack of proficiency and a restricted voice are not having spoken English (line 24), which could be described as speechlessness, and the fact that he has not been in situations where speaking is required (line 26). Restricted voice also speaks of his position in the local context, which he thinks has not provided him with enough opportunities to speak. It is also possible that Oskari himself has not actively sought opportunities to speak English in Finland. Even though he has learned English at school for over ten years, he thus still sees himself as inexperienced in speaking, and stresses the fact that he uses English only seldom in Finland. In the last lines (26–27), the expression those easiest words come out that we have dealt with from the start might refer to the first days of learning English at school which implies that Oskari sees language learning in classrooms (we refers to pupils) as something that begins with the easiest words. Using only the easiest words, which practically everyone knows, even at this stage constitutes a problem and something not normal for a language user who should in principle progress with language skills and thus gradually use more complex words. This implicit norm of gradual development from the easiest to advanced words is a yardstick on which Oskari relies when problematizing his own ‘abnormal’ proficiency. In other words, he is not at all highlighting what he knows, but emphasizing what he does not know. Example 2 illustrates explicitly what Oskari thinks about language learning at school and how problematic he considers what he has got from it. Example 2. Language learning at school 1 O no you don’t achieve good proficiency only at school 2 I think (.) 3 for example in my case (.) I would say that I can read English (.) 4 quite well but compared to speaking it is (.) 5 the gap is big (.) 6 and speaking is not nearly on the level as it should be 7 T why do you think that is 8 O I think it’s because maybe (.) it’s because of the lack of speaking 9 you don’t encounter situations where you would have to speak 10 well at school there’s some (.) well we did speak at school 11 but they were always the kind of situations that you basically didn’t have to 12 you didn’t sort of get enough guidance or 13 or otherwise it was like (.) I think there’s little

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that that (.) maybe it’d be good for everyone to take a language course somewhere or something

Here Oskari explicitly argues how good language skills are not entirely learned at school. He makes a distinction between reading and speaking skills and how there are not enough opportunities to practise speaking at school. Again, he thus refers to the lack of opportunities: speaking should be rehearsed precisely at school, but this is not clearly the case in his opinion. By arguing that there is not enough guidance at school (line 12), Oskari seems to blame it for his poor speaking skills. Interestingly, out-of-school contexts are not mentioned as potential contexts for learning. Hence, the roots of Oskari’s discursive position as speechless lie in the school context. In spelling this out, he is drawing on a norm, an ideal way of using language which is defined in terms of speaking. According to this norm, in order to be normal, one should have a particular kind of language proficiency and speak in a certain way. However, Oskari seems to rely on other norms of speaking as well. In the interview his speech also echoes public discourses about the use of English. For instance, in the press, Finns’ skill in speaking English is a frequently discussed topic. As an illustration of a widely typical theme in discussions of accents in mass media (Cavanaugh, 2005, p. 131), these public discussions are marked with evaluations of Finns’ speech as diverging from that of natives (see Leppänen and Pahta, this volume). The very same view also surfaces in Oskari’s talk. The reliance on institutional norms of this type might be typical of individuals, like Oskari in this stage of his trajectory, who do not have experience in using language outside institutional control. The discourses characterizing the first stage have a strong individual dimension: Oskari evaluates himself with reference to norms but not to actual communicative situations in which the pragmatic proficiency of being able to use substitute words would count as successful communication. These discourses about normal linguistic behaviour seem to be dangerous for the individual’s desired social functions and identity options. In the later stages of Oskari’s biography, in contrast, very different discourses and norms become prominent. Stage 2 – stories from abroad The second stage in Oskari’s biography illustrates his experience of using English in Germany. During his four months’ visit there, Oskari was in daily contact with other international students and Germans. Both at work and during free time English was most often used as the language of communication. In this phase, Oskari’s repertoire gains new elements, but also new problems emerge. When comparing this stage to the previous one, the

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assumption that there is a correct way of using a language persists, but also norms about what kind of English is needed in everyday encounters come to the fore. As a result, Oskari begins to dissociate himself from the norm of grammatical correctness. His position is thus changing and he has access to new discursive resources. Importantly, his individual linguistic repertoire has not necessarily changed at all because of the short amount of time spent abroad, but the social meaning of his repertoire and his resources has. The following extract is from the first interview when Oskari had already stayed for two weeks in Germany. In this extract, he explains how he feels about speaking English and points out that there have already been some significant changes. The norms about using language correctly are losing their power, as norms about speaking in real life begin to take over. Example 3. Crossing the border – speaking skills in a test 1 T how do you feel now about speaking English more as you haven’t 2 used it that much in Finland 3 O well (2.0) it is really (2.0) there was a threshold at the beginning but 4 it does go down all the time and will come down 5 so so (3.0) it doesn’t like anymore (2.0) make me feel annoyed 6 if it doesn’t come out exactly right (.) the threshold has diminished (.) 7 but at the beginning (3.0) it was pretty high 8 T it was at the airport right [when we lost our luggage] 9 O yeah at the airport 10 T how did it make you feel when you weren’t really able to [speak] 11 O well it was just that as it came so suddenly the situation (.) 12 must say that (.) I almost totally froze (.) I wasn’t prepared for that (.) 13 but I managed Oskari distinguishes the situation before and at present (line 3 there was a threshold at the beginning). The term ‘threshold’ shows his initial feeling when facing the need to speak English. From the first to the second stage a trajectory of feelings emerges: in lines 5–6 Oskari explains how it does not make him annoyed anymore if his speech does not come out exactly right (i.e. if he does not speak correctly), implying that this is how he felt before when he strived for correctness. Earlier, the demand for correctness triggered in him such negative feelings as anxiety to speak and annoyance about deficient language use; this is illustrated by his anecdote about the airport incident when his luggage was lost. This incident also signals communicative norms of real life where one has to, and eventually can, manage even with what Oskari described as rudimentary kind of talk (see Example 1). As Oskari’s experience of using language outside school begins to accumulate, so do his stories about using English with others. The interlocutor

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and the language used in a more global context begin to gain importance in the discourses Oskari draws on. At the same time, he gains access to new discursive resources also involving a certain power to evaluate other people’s language. This, in turn, allows him to jump onto a higher social scale. In fact, access to this new order is being granted to him through the local norms that he has relied on earlier. Norms about what is appropriate still exist, but English begins to have new social functions which, again, contribute to the emergence of new problems. Oskari still continues to have a restricted voice, but at this stage it is mainly due to others’ inappropriate language. Thus, normal and acceptable language and abnormal and unacceptable language are being reconceptualized. This shows clearly in Example 4 where the topic is Oskari’s adjustment to Germany with the help of his English skills. Example 4. My language is not worse than the locals’ language 1 O well yes it [linguistic proficiency] has helped to some extent 2 [in my adjusting to Germany] 3 since at least it’s not worse than the locals’ […] 4 I don’t believe that if it were a lot better 5 that it would have helped here (.) in coping 6 because there isn’t anyone that you could have 7 talked to anything else except this basic stuff In line 3 my language is not worse than the locals’ points towards Oskari’s negative evaluation of his language proficiency with reference to others, in other words ‘my skills are bad but so are those by the locals’. Oskari seems to downgrade other people’s skills as he has not been able to talk anything else except basic stuff. The word basic denotes something that is viewed as easy. It resembles his earlier views where basic language was seen as abnormal since it was the kind of language he had been dealing with from the beginning. However, not only others’ language proficiency, but also Oskari’s own language continues to be a problem. The following extract, Example 5, introduces yet another, and more specific, problem: his accent. This particular aspect of speaking creates problems for Oskari; because of his accent he cannot fully participate in certain situations and gain access to desired social functions. He has to face the situation that there seem to be different markets of accents (Blommaert, 2009) where the value of his own accent varies. Example 5. Problem with my accent 1 O well maybe pronunciation [has made the adjustment more difficult] 2 sometimes the mind moves faster than the mouth 3 and it has caused problems every now and then 4 T has it occurred that the other person has not understood you 5 O yeah the other hasn’t understood me or

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I’ve had to say it a few times but then again I’m not sure whether the problem is me and my unclear pronunciation or the fact that he doesn’t know the word

As part of Oskari’s language proficiency, pronunciation is a problem (characterized as unclear in line 8) which has caused trouble for him in communication with other people. However, he is not sure where the actual communication problems lie: whether it is his unclear pronunciation or other people’s insufficient vocabulary. Oskari not only positions himself with these metapragmatic evaluations, but he also positions others in relation to himself, thus illustrating the fact how metapragmatic typifications are not only statements about language but also, implicitly or explicitly, statements about human beings in the world (e.g. Yngve, 1996 as cited in Makoni and Pennycook, 2007, p. 27; Williams, 1977, p. 21 as cited in Woolard, 1998, p. 3). Such typifications also echo discourses of otherness (see also Kytölä, this volume): this shows, for example, in how Oskari talks about himself in relation to other people. This example also shows how discourses about language use are associated with specific groups and types of situations (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). Rather than his own incapacity to understand, it is others’ accent which endangers Oskari’s social participation. Following Agha (2003), it could be argued that this ideological work by Oskari converts his perceived sound variation into a contrast in language proficiency. He uses accent as a social currency to position himself and others (Cavanaugh, 2005, p. 132). This is particularly visible in the following Example 6 in which Oskari discusses communication with Indians, one of the cultural groups housed in the student dormitory. Example 6. Their accent is so difficult 1 O well (.) communication has been really difficult at times 2 Indians have a good vocabulary 3 and they don’t have to think much about paraphrases or anything 4 but then their accent is so so difficult 5 I’ve had to ask three times even a basic question like 6 how are you or something (.) @what does he say@ […] 7 well some of them have focused on that a little 8 and they focus on their pronunciation a bit more 9 but then I’ve noticed that when they speak English with each other 10 they don’t have to pay attention to their pronunciation 11 practically at all since they speak it with the same style 12 seem to understand it 13 although for a bystander it doesn’t sound like English at all

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In this example, Oskari positions himself through other-positioning. He focuses on the Indians’ extensive vocabulary (lines 2–3), and the way in which they do not have to search for alternative expressions when speaking. Nevertheless, he still sees their accent as a problem (it is defined as difficult in line 4). Oskari’s position in the actual situation he refers to is notably authentic as he echoes his own words in the situation he is talking about: he cannot understand at all what they are saying. This type of authenticity has a particular structure: ‘I was just doing X . . . when Y’ (Wooffitt, 1991). Here Oskari uses this recognizable and culturally available resource to make his point. X here refers to a mundane activity, a simple greeting targeted at the Indian interlocutors (how are you). Y is an extraordinary event or experience: Oskari not being able to understand a simple greeting. This structure is a positioning clue portraying Oskari as an ordinary person taking part in an ordinary activity interrupted by something extraordinary. Following Wooffitt (1991), portraying a normal event in this way is yet another means of highlighting the contrast between normal and abnormal language use. The last line in Example 6 is significant in terms of Oskari’s view of language: it [Indians’ speech] doesn’t sound like English at all. His delicate and subtle descriptions of the situation in lines 5–6 and 13–14 could, in fact, be seen as instances of encountering foreignness. Oskari’s behaviour here echoes typical reactions by Westerners listening to foreigners whose English sounds odd: they often attribute it to grammatical inadequacies or to phonological characteristics, that is, accent (Young, 1982, p. 73; Pihko, 1997). As Lippi-Green (1997, p. 72) notes, Oskari is here repeating a familiar practice: the accent he hears goes through his own language ideology filters. His talk about language hence reflects language ideologies and norms. Stage 3 – stories about socialization into the Chinese workplace After graduating, Oskari has worked in international business as a project engineer and a project manager. His company has a subsidiary in China which was launched after Oskari began working in the company. At the time of writing, Oskari had worked in this company for about a third of his career. Using English with the Chinese is a significant part of his work and, consequently, the third stage in his trajectory highlights the problematic aspects it has given rise to. In Example 7 Oskari tells a story about his first arrival in Shanghai and about an encounter with a Chinese colleague with whom he was about to do business. Once more, he uses the strategy ‘I was just doing X when Y’, similar to Example 6. Example 7. Entering China – no language 1 O I remember when going to Shanghai for the first time 2 this Chen picked me up with the taxi driver 3 it took me at least the first half an hour 4 or half the trip that we drove

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

I didn’t understand a word he said before I grasped the sort of accent and tone I was like no way and I had been told that much that @yes yes he speaks very good English@ and that he’s just excellent ((laughter)) I was totally astonished and thought what is going on here that heheh this guy doesn’t speak any language

In this extract there is a clash between what Oskari had heard about the Chinese English skills (very good) and what he noticed upon arrival: I was totally astonished what’s going on here, this guy doesn’t speak any language (lines 11–12). Compared to the second stage, when accent was a minor problem in the casual, everyday use of English, it has now become much more serious as it is now used for professional reasons. A closer look at Oskari’s evaluations of other people’s language reveals, in fact, that he thinks that unfamiliar and incomprehensible accents are not English at all, especially when he encounters them for the first time. It should be noted, however, that such an evaluation focuses on a strange language, and not necessarily on the person speaking. At the same time, this view of his brings in the notion of scales again and the value of resources across them. Throughout his biography, Oskari, paying attention to accent, ranks many people’s languages as lower in scale. By implication, he is thus relying on a norm, a standard which he ranks as higher. However, it is not clear where Oskari situates his own linguistic repertoire and, in particular, his accent in this hierarchy. It is probable that it is somewhere between the highest- and the lowest-scale accents, when scales are seen as a fluid phenomenon which is always defined anew when people interact and use their resources. As Oskari moves across spaces, the value of his resources changes because of the differences between the scales of social structure. In a certain space, at a certain time, one resource is needed more than another to achieve particular social functions. Linguistic resources shift meanings and functions when they are mobile (see Blommaert, 2010) – for example, the value of Oskari’s initially insufficient skills is higher when they enter global contexts (see also Virkkula and Nikula, 2010). Working in a new environment requires socializing into new forms of language, and as Example 7 indicates, into new phonological forms of language. In a sense Oskari’s comments about Chinese English can be seen as part of a process of enregisterment through which Chinese English, in some similar ways as Standard English in Britain (Agha, 2003), becomes a socially recognized, differentiable phonolexical register for Oskari, a target

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of metapragmatic typifications and a yardstick for comparison. With time, during the process of settling into the Chinese workplace, Oskari has had to learn to cope with this register, as Example 8 illustrates: Example 8. On the process of socialization into an unfamiliar register 1 O and in general it took some time to (.) 2 our Chinese workers 3 that you learned to listen to them 4 and to sort of understood some of the words they said 5 because some words are not bent in their mouths at all 6 or they pronounce English in a very different way from Finns Learning to understand Chinese English has taken time because of its lexical and phonological peculiarities: words are not bent in their mouths at all (this is a literal translation of his Finnish expression the meaning of which can be linked to the difficulty in understanding the other party’s pronunciation). Although Oskari focuses on others’ deficiencies, there still seem to be two different discursive positions for him: one that disqualifies Chinese pronunciation as not being according to norms at all, and another that contrasts the pronunciation of Chinese and Finns. Initially, Oskari’s typifications of Chinese English as being ‘no language’ show his unfamiliarity with it. However, being socialized into the new environment and becoming acquainted with this new register, he begins to acknowledge and understand registers and their differences. But from the point of view of one’s own language proficiency, using English with the Chinese continues to create problems: Example 9. Regressing language skills 1 O but otherwise I don’t know (1.0) 2 in China it feels like (.) in contrast it regresses 3 well language proficiency (.) occasionally 4 because it (.) 5 I don’t know if I have mentioned it to you earlier 6 but sometimes you have to go with the kind of 7 very basic (.) basic words and kind of 8 that it’s just putting words after one another and 9 and the guy either understands or not 10 that sometimes they have even said (.) 11 well that that you should use kind of simpler words 12 and this (.) manager of our China office 13 once told me among other things that 14 @noh you shouldn’t use too fa-@fancy@ words@ 15 sort of in quotation marks that they aren’t 16 and yes I kind of noticed it too

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17 18

but then you would like to diversify your own (.) language proficiency kind of in some level

There is a clash between Oskari’s desires and needs in his job: he needs a simple lexical register (basic words line 7, simpler words line 11, not too fancy words line 14), although he would like to use more versatile language (line 17). The use of simple language is beyond his control, since the purpose of communicating in the workplace is to get the job done. As the Chinese workers do not understand too complex language, it cannot be used. When comparing these accounts to those in the first stage during which Oskari’s repertoire was restricted to a simple lexical register, because it was all he knew, after socializing into international working life, his repertoire has expanded and gained in value when used in the Chinese context. A simple lexical register still remains in his repertoire, but now it functions on a different scale of social structure where its value is different: he has to simplify his language because of others. A clear distinction exists in the social capital of that language across stages and contexts. Entering into China means entering into new social orders and discourses, which also results in the loss of the value of the resources one already possesses. In other words, in the new order, where Oskari needs to develop a context-appropriate register, his current repertoire is no longer valuable. His metapragmatic typifications show his struggles between different discourses and registers. Without being able to use the language he wants, or failing to use locally appropriate language, he loses authenticity and voice. The difference between English1 (English on ideological level) and English2 (English used in real practices) (Blommaert, 2010, p. 100) can here explain the clash in Oskari’s wants and needs: ‘English1 [is] an ideologically conceived homogeneous and idealized notion of “English-the-language-of-success”, and English2 [is] a situationally and locally organized pragmatics of using “English” in ways rather distant from English1.’ Oskari’s life is about socializing into new language forms, making his repertoire appropriate and fitting it for specific purposes and spaces where he moves. His story shows how one does not necessarily have agency for choosing particular, for himself favourable, language varieties in each situation (Hymes, 1996). Oskari’s repertoire is closely tied with his life as an engineer (-to-be) and he seems to have a truncated repertoire, which characterizes his trajectory of language use: his repertoire is restricted to a simple register either because of his own proficiency or because of the register of others. Thus, even if his repertoire did not change much, the contextual constraints determine what kind of effect, meanings and functions particular linguistic resources have. Although linguistic structures may be identical, their functions can differ in accordance with the place of linguistic resources in people’s repertoires (Hymes, 1996; Blommaert, 2005, p. 70; 2010). There is thus a trajectory in the value of the resources.

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Oskari’s story thus shows how through his mobility, resources change their value depending on his location and history. This is also why they represent a problem for Oskari: having too few resources in one space and not being able to use one’s full linguistic potential in another. Oskari’s trajectories meant that he moved from the local space, the educational environment and Finland where he positioned himself as an ‘incompetent’ user of English without valuable linguistic resources, to global spaces where his linguistic resources had value but where problems emerged because he could not use all of his resources in a desired way. Socialization into the global workplace meant that his repertoire gained in value on a global scale, compared to the local one. The values of the resources seemed to be locked into specific scale levels in particular spaces (see Blommaert, 2010) which resulted in a truncated repertoire or a truncated competence and a restricted voice. Repertoire thus indexed changes in time and space.

Discussion Although Finns have an easy access to English and the language is seen as enabling different functions in social life, it has both potential for, and gives rise to, real problems: what the context defines as appropriate can clash with individual wants, needs, abilities and expectations (see also Pitkänen-Huhta and Hujo, this volume; Kytölä, this volume). In its exploration of problematic and endangering aspects that English can present for an individual, this chapter has shown that there are features of English which are not ‘productive, empowering and nice to contemplate’ (Blommaert et al., this volume). With the help of an ethnographically and sociolinguistically informed discourse analysis, the present chapter identified the focal participant’s positive and negative self- and other-positioning in discourses which reflected his movement across contexts. His sociolinguistic background, power structures, institutions, environment and situational factors were shown to influence the value of his resources and the discourses that he drew on (e.g. Agha, 2005, 2007). Institutional and contextual factors partly explained the changes in his repertoire. Along the lines of Bourdieu (1977, p. 657), it could be argued that the participant’s repertoire depended on the available linguistic resources which, in turn, depended on the relationship between his positions ‘in the structure of the distribution of specifically linguistic capital and, even more, the other forms of capital’. In the analysis of this story of one individual, this chapter has also captured some high-modern values in his production of discourses of language use and proficiency. It showed how while a context is governed by certain specific norms, an individual may not, nevertheless, be able to act according to these norms. The discourses drawn on in making sense and explaining linguistic behaviour displayed the interplay of different

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institutional actors in what was perceived as normal and abnormal in globalized environments. The participant’s attitudes about his own and other people’s language proficiency both reflected norms as well as created them (see also Blommaert, 2009). The discourses which Oskari exemplified showed how norms are developed, conceptualized and enforced in interaction, and how they can also be endangering to people. They can become tools for sanctioning oneself and others. In the process of socialization, the localization of norms can create problems for individual subjectivity and for the ability to have a voice (see Blommaert, 2010). The power to choose what kind of language is and should be used could, in fact, be described in Agha’s (2007, p. 166) words, as ‘thresholds of fluency depend[ing] on trajectories of extended socialization mediated by access to criterial institutions’. Lack of practice, because of situational factors as well as of socialization into unfamiliar language forms, can result in thresholds and problems. Although one can gain power to evaluate others, one can at the same time struggle with language. Hence language proficiency from the individual perspective can also move towards regression, instead of progressing, or remaining constant. In other words, although proficiency can function as an empowering tool in one context, its value is not the same in another. Blommaert et al. (2005, p. 197) crystallize this view as follows: Multilingualism is not what individuals have and don’t have, but what the environment, as structured determinations and interactional emergence, enables and disables. Consequently, multilingualism often occurs as truncated competence, which depending on scalar judgments may be declared ‘valued assets’ or dismissed as ‘having no language’. In Oskari’s case, ‘valued assets’ refer to language which has value for him, such as the more complicated language than what he has to use with the Chinese. Furthermore, Oskari’s story shows that although he has a language to communicate with people, in a sense he does not have language – he does not have the kind of language he desires. Hence ‘having no language’ is seen from the perspective of the participant’s discursive position. As a concluding remark, it could be argued that a study like the present one, an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of human life in its complex multilingual contexts, represents not only a way to gain knowledge about the sociolinguistic realities in which people live and the possibilities and constraints in their mobile trajectories, but also a method for giving voice to individual language users to create more complex subject positions than those traditionally created for them in most discourses. In Heller’s (2001) words, the relationship of language practices to the production and distribution of symbolic and material resources has been shifting because of some

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fundamental political economic transformations which position people differently with respect to the impact on their lives, especially in terms of the changing value of the resources they possess, and their relative ease of access to these and other resources. The resources that we have change their value in different spaces. Because of different social, historical and economic changes, some resources can become more valuable than others in often unexpected ways. Importantly, however, different resources and their values not only cause problems, but they also provide discursive tools for constructing a sense of oneself, one’s identity in the globalized world.

Notes 1. See e.g. Hymes (1996), Blommaert (2005, 2010), Rampton (2006), Wortham (2005), Agha (2003, 2007) and Gee (2005). 2. Working title: ‘Language, Identity and Trajectories of Socialization into Globalized Professional Life: a Multidisciplinary Approach to Finnish Engineers’ Linguistic and Discursive Repertoires across Multiple Timescales’. 3. On the whole, the Finnish educational system has been praised for its efficiency and high quality (see e.g. PISA studies on 15-year-olds’ school performance and comments thereon: www.oecd.org) (OECD, accessed 22 June 2009). 4. Finnish examples are excluded for reasons of space. In the transcript, bold is used to mark speaker emphasis, (2.0) length of pause, @ modified speech, dots in square brackets [...] omitted speech that is not relevant for analysis, and words in square brackets [linguistic proficiency] provide additional information for the reader about the topic.

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Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (2006) Old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, pp. 481–96. Virkkula, T. and T. Nikula (2010) Identity construction in ELF contexts: a case study of Finnish engineering students working in Germany. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(2), pp. 251–73. Wooffitt, R.C. (1991) ‘I was just doing X . . . when Y’: some inferential properties of a device in accounts of paranormal experiences. Text, 11, pp. 267–88. Woolard, K.A. (1998) Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard and P. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press, pp. 3–47. Wortham, S. (2005) Socialization beyond the speech event. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), pp. 95–112. Young, L.W.L. (1982) Inscrutability revisited. In J. Gumperz (ed.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 72–84.

11 Peer Normativity and Sanctioning of Linguistic Resources-in-Use – on Non-Standard Englishes in Finnish Football Forums Online1 Samu Kytölä

Introduction While the previous chapters in this volume have dealt with more institutionally constructed language-ideological discourses, this chapter shifts the lens to language ideologies at play on a markedly ‘grassroots’ level of language use. The sociocultural and technological context of this chapter is interactive, multi-authored discussion forums of the web that allow participants an extent of anonymity. Web forums are a distinctive format of computer-mediated discourse (CMD), most often a discourse domain with little institutional control, and thus relatively free of high-modernist constraints and demands for ‘purity’ of language use. Instead, late-modern hybridity, freedom of stylized expression, and identity play enable a different order of peer regulation and normativity, on which this chapter aims at opening a conceptual and empirical window. The internet, especially recent, increasingly interactive developments of ‘web 2.0’ (see Androutsopoulos, 2011), has often been praised as a mediator of enhanced democracy as considerably larger numbers of people or communities have increased opportunities for agency and voice online. In the Western world, indeed, the internet has activated participation; even globally many pro-democratic, pro-equality projects and enterprises blossom through the mediating means of the web, and the specific communication formats such as web forums, wikis, blogs, Twitter or Facebook. While institutional languageideological discourses can have power in the ‘structural denial’ of hybridity and diversity (see other chapters in this volume) and in the stratification of the ‘unmanageable’, informal ‘grassroots’ domains such as much of web 2.0 can, in theory, enable the formation of discourse spaces where hybridity and diversity are welcomed (Leppänen, 2012; Androutsopoulos, 2011). This chapter, however, documents and analyses two cases where the use of particular linguistic (and semiotic) resources by a particular social 228

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actor entering or occupying the discourse space (community) is severely sanctioned through a process of negotiation, regulation and peer normativity (cf. Leppänen, 2009 on policing) that is markedly different from the institutionally stratified processes of normativity. These cases illustrate individual, (more or less) multilingual subjects operating on multilingual spaces, where their specific, idiosyncratic multilingualism becomes an obstacle to particular, desired social trajectories as well as a cause of abnormalization (the shared theme of this section). The communication format researched – asynchronous web forums with the affordance of archived discussions and traceability of text trajectories – enables a chronological, sequential analysis of how particular language-ideological discourses unfold and emerge in situ. The practical methodology of this chapter is therefore informed by interactional sociolinguistics, albeit with important caveats spelled out by Blommaert (2005, pp. 50–67): interlocutors enter interactional exchanges with personal histories and sociocultural loads that readily affect the constellation of the exchange – before it even begins. The data selection for this chapter includes abundant mixing of Finnish and idiosyncratic uses of markedly non-Standard2 English(es) that acquire social meaning loaded with connotations and evaluation. In contrast to the ‘neat order’ of high modernity (see Blommart et al., this volume), late modernity is characterized by increasing hybridity, ambiguity and ‘chaos’ of recycling and revolving discourses. Even if the default audience of the web-based Finnish football communities is – explicitly and implicitly – framed as Finnish-speaking Finns, they have developed explicitly multilingual, mixed and hybrid discursive practices (cf. the pioneering works by Androutsopoulos, 2006, 2007; Hinrichs, 2006). Due to its specific trajectory as a world language that has spread to Finnish society through various channels (see Leppänen et al., 2011), English has a very distinctive role in these practices. The two football forums researched here (Futisforum and Futisforum2) can be seen as stratified discourse spaces with several languages, their varieties, semiotic means (e.g. affordances offered by the use of emoticons or pictures), registers, genres and styles (Kytölä, 2012, forthcoming). The notion of super-diversity coined by Vertovec (2006) and developed further in Blommaert (2010) lends itself well to describe the communicative ‘mutations’ (Jacquemet, 2005) that emerge in the form of ‘memes’ (e.g. Shifman and Thelwall, 2009), ‘fads’ and innovations in computer-mediated settings. However, these important works contain little in the way of actual analyses of computer-mediated chains of interactive communicative events (but see Blommaert, 2010, pp. 54–6). This gap is duly noted and theoretically discussed in Blommaert and Rampton (2011), and here I offer a detailed case study that can shed more light on ways in which super-diversity can be manifest and ways how transidiomatic practices may evolve.

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Linguistic resources-in-use in online performance – from shortage to excess This chapter illustrates the sociolinguistic dimension of the dynamics of ‘abnormalization’ with two cases where messages written in non-Standard English within the discourse space become targets of extended metalinguistic, language-ideological discourse, both explicit and implicit. The two cases stand in contrast to each other: in the first sequence of events, an online actor is considered to lack resources to acceptably participate on equal terms, while in the other, a displayed excess of an individual’s repertoire is deemed unacceptable by a ‘gatekeeper’ majority of interlocutors. Both chains of events lead to an overload of discriminative discourse targeted at the abnormal ‘freak’ and, more or less, to the exclusion of these users of ‘the wrong codes’. Drawing from Hymes (1996) and Blommaert (2005), I suggest that an imbalance of linguistic-semiotic resources in these interactions in ‘language’ brings about an imbalance of power between the participants. In the ‘endangering’ cases here the imbalance becomes manifest in the lack of voice, and downright discrimination. While these cases are delimited by factors such as register/genre (informal football discourse), locality (Finlandbased), or discourse format (interactive web forum), they are ‘telling cases’ with a great degree of indexicality, where the micro-level dynamics of the emergence of meta-talk points us to plausible interpretation lines about the larger scheme of language ideology at work in our time frame of late modernity. In the cases studied here, uses of different ‘codes’ (i.e. not pure ‘languages’, or even their ‘whole’ varieties, but rather very emblematic, strongly indexical ‘bits and pieces’, cf. Blommaert, 2005, 2010) become discussed, regulated and sanctioned, a means of demarcation, embedded within the overall discourse on mostly football-related topics. The two cases are contrasting, each casting a different light on the dynamics of normativity as negotiated, co-constructed and performed (cf. Rampton, 1999; Pennycook, 2007; Danet and Herring, 2007, pp. 8–13; Leppänen, 2009) on a level of informal, peerregulated ‘grassroots’ context. The first case represents a situation where an individual (I rename him Altan), attempting to be an acceptable social actor within the selected discourse space, lacks some of the required or acceptable resources to succeed. It is made salient that a non-Finn (‘other’, ‘them’) is entering a virtual space framed for Finns (‘us’), which becomes an issue in its own right (cf. the review of mainly pre-web ‘text and talk about “them”’ by van Dijk et al., 1997, pp. 164–5). Altan’s observed deficiency in written English (together with an insufficient knowledge of the factual topics of discussion and meta-knowledge of the forum’s practices) causes a considerable wave of mockery and, subsequently, screen persona Altan’s exit from the community. Anfield_mate (nickname changed), in contrast, is a case where the performance/display of particular multilingual repertoires in an

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‘inappropriate’ space or manner forms obstacles to full participation and approval within the discourse (sub)space. It is part of the story of a Finnish fan of Liverpool FC3 who builds a remarkable reputation as such a fan on the Finnish Futisforum (a site where Finnish football has had louder and more influential advocates than international football). Anfield_mate’s prolific contributions are largely read, discussed, debated and mostly tolerated, even appreciated for years, but it is his activity in a British LFC fan forum (connected to the discovery of his offline identity) that triggers a wave of ruthless disapproval and mockery. Closely tied to the demolition of Anfield_mate’s online reputation is the overuse of a dialectal/sociolectal variety of English, working-class Scouse, deemed ‘fake’ and unacceptable for a middle-class welloff young Finn. While Altan’s non-Standard English is stigmatized as ‘bad’ and emblematic of absolute ‘otherness’ (cf. van Dijk et al., 1997; Leppänen and Häkkinen, forthcoming), Anfield_mate’s working-class vernacular Scouse becomes dislodged from its ‘natural habitat’ and emblematic of ‘the man whore’ [sic; a distinguish emic category within the Futisforums].

Methodological considerations on discourse-centred online ethnography As Blommaert and Rampton (2011) aptly argue, linguistic ethnography is well equipped for the study of such sociolinguistic diversity that is becoming accumulatively less stable, less binary and less predictable. My research into Finland-based online football forums4 has involved a considerable period of observation and data collection informed by sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography (Hymes, 1996) and ‘discourse-centred online ethnography’ (Androutsopoulos, 2008; Kytölä and Androutsopoulos, 2012). The cases that here illustrate the potentially ‘dangerous’ aspects in the multilingual contact space of the forums are selected from a much larger database. In the Futisforums that have been under investigation, multilingualism as a positive resource, rather than as a problem, is often more manifest, though the two facets often co-occur (e.g. when a specific constellation of multilingualism is a useful resource for some, but a problem for others; cf. Hymes, 1996; Blommaert, 2010). The long period I was involved in data collection on the Finland-based football web forums (and often in websites beyond them) has led me to important insights into such research data that have theoretical and methodological value. They are discussed in more detail elsewhere (Kytölä and Androutsopoulos, 2012; Kytölä, forthcoming); here a brief summary is in order. Locating research data for my study of multilingualism involved long observation within the selected spaces: getting acquainted with the different subsections, getting ‘inside the general spirit’ of the communities, getting to know ‘who is who’, and getting to understand the idiosyncratic slang of the forums (an absolutely crucial acquisition process for writing

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a thesis on any linguistically oriented topic; see Androutsopoulos, 2008). Yet another important insight gained was that the discussions and topics that had emerged right during my core fieldwork period gave me a different, more ‘insider’ perspective than the data I found some months (or even years) after the discussions actually occurred. With the former, I felt I ‘was there’ as the stories unfolded (cf. being present in a sequence of oral conversations); with the latter, I felt that I lacked a degree of ‘literacy’ needed to understand the stories (cf. discovering heated correspondence in newspapers from two or three years ago). Case Altan mainly co-occurred with my most active observation period, offering me a relatively good position to understand and interpret the discourse, whereas I came across most episodes of case Anfield_mate only later through archives (for epistemological and practical discussion, see Androutsopoulos, 2008; Kytölä and Androutsopoulos, 2012; Kyto ¨ la¨, forthcoming). Moreover, ethical considerations regarding the use of web forum data are more fully discussed elsewhere (Kytölä, forthcoming; Sixsmith and Murray, 2001; Brownlow and O’Dell, 2002). This chapter follows the plausible assumption that most Futisforum authors have gone online voluntarily, fully realizing that their contributions are more or less permanently traceable on the web. Regardless of the features of the communication format, however, the line between public and private exchanges is not straightforward, especially in cases where individual online actors (and by extension, the real human beings behind the online personae) are scolded or discriminated against. As online life and reputation are potentially ‘as real as the real’ for many, I have here decided to change all screen names (although it could be argued that the ‘real’ screen personae would deserve credit both for their innovations and for their immoral or questionable behaviour).5

Case 1 – ‘Altan’ and ‘broken English’ The default participant on Futisforum is a Finn and/or understands Finnish: this can be verified by even a short period of observation at multiple layers of the overall discourse. The Futisforums have – since their early stages – developed into Finnish virtual spaces, occupied mostly by Finns, for discussion of Finnish and international football – in Finnish. This sets the frame of expectation that participants who do not show a command of Finnish in their contributions, are ‘outsiders’, ‘guests’, ‘foreigners’, and so on. Many such cases surfaced during my observation periods, and with a few exceptions (Finnish–Swedish speakers who opt for Swedish) the code chosen for interaction is, rather expectably, English. While most of such participants are ‘guests’ with only a few retraceable postings on the forums on a limited number of topics, some participants stay(ed) on one of the Futisforums for a longer time, contributing to a number of topics. An outstanding example is Altan, who identifies himself as a Turk and expresses a persistent interest in Finnish national football.

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The screen name Altan registers in the forum6 in early 2005, identifies himself7 as Turkish and opens a new topic in the sub-forum ‘Muut Suomen sarjat’ (‘Other Finnish competitions [than Veikkausliiga]’). The topic opening is titled ‘welcome I am from turkey’:

This first message is in distinctly non-Standard English: • there are no punctuation marks at all, • the only capitalized word is the personal pronoun ‘I’ (twice), • there are unexpected pragmatic choices and lexical combinations (‘welcome’, ‘club teams’), • the word order is deviant, • and the clause formation is highly elliptical. Yet the message is fully understandable to one who knows English, and it constitutes a logical conversational turn comprising: • introducing oneself, • requesting information, • excusing the self-evaluated low proficiency in English. It is notable that the message contains several explicit politeness phrases (‘welcome’, ‘pls’, ‘thank you’). Of these non-Standard features, lack of punctuation, lack of capitalization, and ellipsis are frequent phenomena in many genres of computer-mediated communication, and also found much in Futisforum. Thus, more salient distinctive factors in Altan’s idiosyncratic English here – in its very first manifestation – are lexical choices, word order and clause formation, for instance, the redundant word ‘am’ in the clause, ‘ı am very very poor speak englısh’. We begin to see that the pragmatic purpose of the message is hardly to ‘welcome’ anyone from the Finnish forum to the Turkish one mentioned, ‘soccerforum in turkey’. Instead, the message is a markedly polite introduction and a tentative inquiry about a subject matter related to Finnish

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football, in other words about player transfers during the pre-season of 2005.8 Furthermore, and rather significantly for what happens later, Altan already here excuses himself for his ‘very very poor’ English skills. The first reply comes in a minute:

[‘saved my day’9] The phrase in Finnish combined with a happy-looking emoticon (‘smiley’), may suggest that Altan’s opening is taken as humour. Altan immediately replies,

and requests up-to-date information on the transfers of Finnish players (in advance of the Finnish 2005 season). Even though he explicitly identifies himself as the moderator of a Turkish football forum responsible for Finnish football, the informational aspect of the topic becomes overwhelmed by ‘meta-topics’ that permeate the discussion: negotiation of Altan’s real identity, humour and play with non-Standard English, Turkishness and soon even more generically ‘otherness’ (cf. Leppänen and Häkkinen, forthcoming). The expectations of the Turk drastically differ from the responses and reactions by Finnish forumists. This thread, as well as others with Altan, frequently drifts off-topic, in many cases implicitly or explicitly to deal with the idiosyncratic English used. The Finnish majority of the discussants regulate the conversation by frequent switching and mixing10 between Finnish, English and emoticons, and, to a lesser extent, other linguistic and semiotic resources. There appears to be a shared understanding of the Turk’s idiosyncratic English as ‘funny’ and ‘amusing’. One common-sense explanation is that in Turkey, the exposure to English language teaching is simply much less than in Finland (cf. Dog˘ançay-Aktuna, 1998 or Dog˘ançay-Aktuna and Kiziltepe, 2005 with Leppänen et al., 2011). Altan is likely to have had very different processes of encounter and acquisition of English than his Finnish interlocutors here

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(cf. Blommaert, 2010, pp. 102–36). In other words, the histories of the (mainly English) resources that Altan brings to the encounter are drastically different from those that are brought by the Finnish members (at least those who bother to write here). However, among the range of different responses that Altan receives to his entrée is a collective negotiation of the ‘real’ identity of this supposed Turk: is it a real Turkish person or just an inventive joke, possibly by some well-established, savvy Finnish forum member? But Altan did not enter an idealized tabula rasa. While my research on case Altan was well underway, I came across trajectories of earlier Turkey discourses in the local history of Futisforum, which pointed towards a better understanding of the suspicion of the Turk. In early 2004 at least one mockTurkish nickname and a related mock-Arabic nickname had been operating on the forum, using deliberately ‘bad’ Finnish in their contributions (cf. mock-Spanish in Hill, 2008, pp. 128–57). One of these mock personae actually switched from ‘bad’ into native-like Finnish overnight at the end of his life span as a writer at Futisforum. Hence the suspicion of ‘another Turk’ trying to join the community becomes even more understandable in the light of salient previous events – and only to those readers who were aware of them (cf. Kytölä and Androutsopoulos, 2012). To summarize, between spring 2005 and summer 2006, Altan participated in circa 25 discussion topics, most of which dealt with Finnish national football, especially the Veikkausliiga, the highest level of Finnish club football. The reception of Altan by Finns ranged from helpful, benevolent and informative to suspicious, jocular and, at times, downright rude and racist. Parallel to that, ‘off-topic’ commentary in ‘bad English’ and on Turkey, Turks and the Middle East more generally, frequently surfaced. Altan’s English along with, for instance, another Turk’s personal homepage became the target of fun, abnormalization and stigmatization as ‘freak’. However, it was not until summer 2006 that Altan’s idiosyncratic English became a ‘classic’ known to a larger mass of active Futisforum readers. On that day, he posted a single message that launched an enormous wave of imitations, recycling and performative play of idiosyncratic ‘Altanese’, still not entirely stopped years later. With that message, Altan actually opened a new topic:

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A brief look at the linguistic facet of this message reveals very similar features as the ones reviewed above: non-Standard punctuation, almost total lack of capital letters, deviant word order, elliptical clauses and unusual pragmatic and lexical combinations. Yet the message is – again – pragmatically and interactionally valid, since it explicitly includes interlocutors through the means of address, and invites comment. Shifting the focus to the informational facet, an explanation of the immediate context is in place in order to even partially understand this ‘messy’ slice of discourse and its follow-up. Altan is here referring to the Veikkausliiga match TPS vs FC KooTeePee, the result of which was an exceptionally big 7–0 home win. Even if the most likely explanation of such an overwhelming score was probably the simple fact that TPS were in better form that day, Altan’s suspicions about betting fraud (‘match rigging’) are not entirely without warrant. A betting fraud scandal had indeed deeply touched Finnish football in the summer of 2005, which was still far from forgotten by Finnish football fans a year later.11 In fact, the mere presence of Altan had been connected – in jocular and serious ways – by other forumists with ‘suspicious’ Asian businessmen allegedly responsible for the most severe frauds. However, when we look at how Finnish forumists respond to Altan, his suspicions are regarded as nonsensical. Only eight minutes later greaves replies:

This is a quote from the already large ‘pool of bad English’ deployed by the members for in-group humour purposes such as imitation, doublevoicing and mockery. The target of mockery here is an utterance by the Finnish sports reporter Jari Porttila on a live TV broadcast of the match Finland vs Turkey in 1999, which had circulated as a ‘meme’ (Shifman and Thelwall, 2009) in the forums for a long time. The ‘pool of bad English’ contained, at this point, ‘funny’ quotes from celebrities, models, sports coaches, rally or Formula 1 drivers, most of them Finnish in contrast to Altan. The same Porttila quote had come up in at least three previous discussions with Altan as a participant. In the Futisforum emic conception of the discursive reality, Altan’s idiosyncratic form of communicating himself seems closely associated with Porttila’s renowned utterance in ‘bad’ English. This is arguably due to the non-Standardness of the exact items of English at hand, but is perhaps further emphasized by the Turkey connection.

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The humorous citation is quickly followed by Altan’s quick, slightly apologetic response (note the beginning with the conjunction ‘but’):

While Altan tries to dodge the first mocking comments by some further arguments and speculations on the possible consequences of such a big defeat (‘sack manager’ of the losing side), the Finnish forumists are inextricably and ruthlessly carrying the discussion in other directions. Few interlocutors who post on this topic (and we do not know about the far more numerous lurkers, those who just read) seem to take Altan’s turns seriously at all. The responses, in sum, fall into one of three main categories: 1. Earlier inside jokes of Futisforum translated literally into ‘funny’ English; for instance

[Originally in Finnish ‘joku vitun hadji on taas saanut kuningasidean’.] 2. Messages that explicitly dismiss Altan (or Turkey, Turkishness in general); for example

3. Meta-linguistic commentary on the language choice or the ‘badness’ of English used; for instance

[‘ameerika’ ⫽ ‘amerikka’ ⫽ ‘America(n)’; misspelled probably intentionally ‘vittu’ ⫽ the closest Finnish equivalent of the exclamation ‘Fuck!’.]

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The appropriation of stylized ‘Altanese-English’ Two days after Altan’s new topic opening, the nickname Sivu Nikki12 (a clearly Finnish screen persona, judging from both the nickname and a glance at its message history) recycles Altan’s posting, applying the same idiosyncratic forms and patterns to another match, played on 4 June 2006, in which FF Jaro beat TPS 5–0 in the town of Pietarsaari ( Jakobstad). This mock topic was titled in concordance with Altan’s non-Standard English.

The opening message of the new topic repeats Altan’s earlier message almost word for word: only the name of the defeated team in the heading has been substituted. Ironically, the same team (TPS) that was the winning side of the extraordinary game noted by Altan had become the losing side three days later. It only takes approximately two minutes until the other ‘classic’, emblematic meme of non-Standard English within the community, the reporter Jari Porttila, is quoted again:

In turn, the discussants draw upon several sources of what is perceived as ‘bad’ non-Standard English. This shared, mutual humour is somewhat harsh on any of its targets but particularly cruel to Altan himself; as Altan had regularly (if not weekly) participated in the Veikkausliiga discussions, he would be a potential reader of this topic, too. The initiator of the thread goes one step further by deploying another idiosyncratic turn of Altan:

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The irony (and fun13) of the message comes mainly from replacing Altan’s Turkish context of rioting fans in Istanbul (a true European football metropole) by a peripheral Finnish context, Eurajoki. The concept of rioting football fans in Eurajoki after a lost match is plainly absurd. This juxtaposition combined with the ‘inherently’ humorous forms of ‘Altanese’ creates in-group humour; at the same time, however, Altan is being severely ridiculed. This topic – and other mock-Altan topics – is evidently regarded as good humour by the forumists themselves: the amount of positive emoticons (such as ‘thumb up’ or ‘LOL’) in responses posted to this topic (5 out of 12 responses), as well as the quick spread of the ‘mock-Altan’ discourse on the forum, suggest that the jocular function of this ‘innovation’ is arguably very salient from an emic point of view, not just in my interpretation. The beginning of this topic is framed in mock-English, the broadly defined ‘variety’ that is used most in the entire topic. Only 15 postings occur in total, two of which are Sivu Nikki’s mock-Altan initiations. Three postings contain Finnish; for instance:

This posting, with switches from Finnish to emoticons and to English, contains a direct addressing of Altan and an explicit request for his comments. A modification of the ‘classic’ utterance by the reporter Jari Porttila is deployed once again, this time to address directly another user of unintentionally ‘bad’ English. It is here that Altan finally becomes the explicit target of mockery, although that has probably been clear from the start for most readers who had read Altan’s originals prior to the first imitations. The primary means of mockery is ‘deliberately bad’ English, while the exclusive purpose of the posting is emphasized by the use of a Finnish in-group favourite term ‘hulinaa’ (‘hullabaloo’) and the deployment of ingroup humour (the Porttila variation) when talking to an outsider who obviously is not equally aware of the practices. The remaining postings contain forms of mock-English not drawn directly from Altan but presumably elicited by ‘Altanese’ and the first round of recycling it for jocular purposes:

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[‘The bearded stevedore, etc…’.] The very last posting is a response by Altan himself: he participates in this first ‘mock’ topic approximately three days later. His posting is an explicit expression of confusion and sadness:

Ironically, and crudely enough, even this response by Altan becomes recycled in a later mock topic. This particular thread never (until 2 July 2011) received any more replies; possibly Altan’s honestly expressed, face-value disappointment had the effect of keeping away subsequent mockers – but only from this topic. Since then, the nickname Altan has not participated in any discussion in the Futisforum with the exception of one very brief ‘1–0’ comment in a topic concerning a single match. On the basis of my extensive research on the subject it seems unlikely that the same person has, since the time of the topics discussed above, posted any more replies or opened new topics. (The same nickname, however, resurfaced at FF2 for a short while in 2007 in a brief friendly Turkey-related exchange.) Nothing remotely similar to the ‘real’ Altan’s idiolect has been found – except for the abundant ‘mock-Altan’ topics by Finns. I shall turn to review them now. Case Altan and its aftermath (that I call here ‘mock-Altan’ and ‘Altanese’; cf. mock-Spanish in Hill, 2008) challenge straightforward, typological distinctions rooted in (high) modernist thinking, such as native/non-native,

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second language/foreign language or correct/incorrect. The concept of English as a positive lingua franca for intercultural communication (as advocated by e.g. Seidlhofer, 2001 or House, 2003) is complicated and challenged by the Finns’ appropriation of distinct ‘bits and pieces’ of deliberately non-Standard English. This subset of my multilingual Futisforum data is strongly characterized by the appropriation of Altan’s idiosyncratic, highly non-Standard English by Finnish forum members for purposes such as in-group humour, demarcation and discrimination. The first such ‘mock topic’ (or possibly the first few ones) still appear to have a lingua franca function (of including or inviting Altan into the discussion) to a certain degree, whereas later, the idiosyncratic mock-English becomes embedded in the forumists’ communicative repertoires (in a way, their ‘mixed code’), and the lingua franca function is greatly diminished as Altan fades out of the conversations with the Finnish forumists. A chronological, sequential and ethnographically grounded analysis of that data subset reveals the emergence of a new sub-genre of Futisforum writing, and a new way of hybridized English-based talk that I here call ‘Altanese’. It remains still, in theory, unsolved for certain whether there is a real Turkish person in the flesh behind the screen name Altan or if it is a virtual fake identity. To me, Altan is without doubt a real Turk performing in the Futisforum at face value (but on virtual identities, see Thurlow et al., 2004, pp. 99–105), albeit within the constraints set by his limited repertoire of English expression. This is supported, first of all, by the orthography of Altan’s messages, which regularly contain characters from the Turkish alphabet (‘gençlerbirlig˘i’, ’denızlıspor’, ’allıansa’, ’FI˙NNI˙SH’). Second, while a false Turkish virtual identity would be relatively easy to develop and even to maintain for a while, and while characters from the Turkish alphabet are readily available online and in standard word processors (e.g. Microsoft Word), Altan’s language use has several features of non-native, ‘truncated’ English that seem naturally occurring rather than invented. For instance, he appears to have a very good command of football terminology and vocabulary in English (‘bits and pieces’, ‘truncated repertoire’, Blommaert, 2005, 2010), but the syntactic level shows remarkable ellipticity and deficiency by any standards, even in the context of informal computer-mediated genres. Creating such a realistic idiosyncracy would indeed take a considerable amount of time, energy and creativity. Furthermore, the cohesion and pragmatic dimension (e.g. punctuation, phatic communion) of Altan’s postings are credible and logical, yet unlikely to have been invented for the prolonged maintenance of a false identity. In the end, Altan’s ‘real’ identity is irrelevant to this study, although it needs to be pointed out that it would surely have been important for Altan himself for his voice to be ‘heard’ and accepted in the forum. Here we have a representation of a Turk mediated in a multiply complicated way – not least

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through the non-Standard English used by Altan and subsequently, by the Finnish interlocutors. It is against this representation that all discussions with and about Altan are more or less judged and negotiated. Language use, language choice and code alternation are being adjusted and negotiated as the participation framework of the interaction possibly involves a nonFinnish, non-Finnish-speaking Turkish discussant. Finnish members deploy their in-group power position (awareness of the history, practices and (n)etiquettes of Futisforum, knowledge of Finnish, expertise in English, the sheer fact that they are ‘many against one’, etc.) to discriminate against the Turkish screen name.

Mock-Altan discourse and beyond After the first proper mock-Altan topic and the subsequent fade-out of the screen name Altan from the community, there emerged a large wave of topics initiated and written in ‘Altanese’ mixed intertextually with other older sources and innovations of ‘bad’ non-Standard English. Below is a sample of the topic headings (in total, 50 or so) written in Altanese from summer to autumn 2006: • • • • • •

Why Why Why Why Why Why

Serbia-Montenegro 6–0 lose England again penalty shoot out lose switzerland 0 goals penalty shootout? san marino 0–13 lose? lahti 5–0 lose? inter 6–0 lose?

These all repeat and parody (‘double-voice’ according to Bakhtin, 1984) the original formula, including the ‘ungrammatical’ direct interrogative clause, lack of capital letters, and an allegedly unexpected result from the point of view of the losing side. After the highly formulaic headings, the actual postings deploy and recycle the syntactic and pragmatic features originally found in Altan’s postings: • • • • •

‘funny’ punctuation (e.g. ‘fans said that; go home manager’) capitalization (e.g. ‘i think sack tps manager’ pro ‘I’ or ‘TPS’) the word order (e.g. ‘what’s the next happen now then?’) clause formation (e.g. ‘eurajoki fans to rebel’) pragmatic choices and lexical combinations (e.g. ‘your answer’s to be curious about me’)

In addition to the Finnish Veikkausliiga matches, the matches of World Cup 2006 (held in Germany from 9 June to 9 July 2006) became topics particularly prone to the deployment of Altanese. Most, but not all, of the topics

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framed by a mock-Altanese heading recycled the original opening message more or less verbatim:

In the ‘second wave’ of mock-Altanese some months later, attendance figures14 as well as ice-hockey matches from autumn 2006 were included in this new genre of humorous mock discourse; e.g. • Why Honka announse ouver 3000 spektators? • Why KalPa 2725 spektators? • Why HIFK 10–1 lose? The variation in this stylized way of writing also encompasses rather clearly ‘Finnishized’ items, mainly in the form of spelling (‘announse’, ‘spektators’), which further complicates the picture and draws attention perhaps a notch away from the allegedly Turkish origin of the meme. In addition, even more serious, political issues would be discussed in this emergent style (in the spirit of carnivalization, Bakhtin, 1984). The opening message of the thread ‘why russia no human rights’ is as follows:

At the heart of this type of appropriation of English for ‘deliberately bad’ style of communication is the underlying sociolinguistic context: those engaging in such mock-English talk – drawing from however many sources – are de facto rather proficient in English, which seems one of the prerequisites of such mock usages to occur in the first place. This is aptly put by one discussant in one of the Altanese humour threads; the first

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interlocutor asks in Swedish ‘why one does not write bad Swedish’, and the second gives an explanation:

[Cf. Salo, this volume.] The spread and recycling of the mock-Altanese style was not limited to Futisforum or even its then emergent sister forum Futisforum2.org (henceforth FF2).15 Perhaps typical of many textual/discursive events of our time, particularly those referred to as ‘internet memes’ (Shifman and Thelwall, 2009), the style was actively distributed by a number of Futisforumists to other sites on the internet, including Estonian, Portuguese, Polish and diasporic Polish football forums, but also to many interactive websites that have little to do with football, for example the popular Finnish teenage and adolescent girls’ magazine Demi. Since Altan was more or less excluded or driven away at this point on the grounds of his ‘abnormal’, ‘freak’, activity on the forum, I conclude by summarizing the relevant aspects of his trajectory within the community. Altan’s English was already from the very beginning of this trajectory framed by other discussants as ‘deficient’, ‘bad’ and particularly ‘funny’ (cf. Räisänen, this volume). Several aspects of discourse and practice were simultaneously at play as Altan’s contribution and attempts were peer-evaluated: his alleged ethno-cultural background (Turkey), general negative discourse about ‘the other’ (Turks, people from the Middle East, ‘sand niggers’), the prior suspicious and potentially hostile spirit within Futisforum towards fake non-Finns, Altan’s insufficient knowledge of in-group practices and, finally, the perhaps unwarranted claims of new betting frauds. Together with such macro- and micro-level sociocultural

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factors, it is particularly Altan’s idiosyncratic linguistic output that is at stake; it is more or less a target of fun and mockery for a longer time but triggers an enhanced wave of imitation at a certain point. Ironically, when exactly the same forms (‘bits and pieces’) of non-Standard English become imitated, appropriated and recycled by Finnish in-group social actors, the value of that way of writing changes totally from ‘bad’/‘novice’/‘freak’ to ‘ironic’/‘savvy’/‘expert’. Moreover, with the spread of that idiosyncratic style outside Finnish contexts, the very same linguistic forms acquire a different value on the Polish or Portuguese forums, partly similar to Finns’ judgements on Altan’s original ‘deficiency’, but with an added complexity: Finnish forum members are actually having a parallel discussion topic on the reception of ‘Altanese’ in other forums (cf. Bauman and Briggs,1990, on entextualization; Blommaert, 2010 on the mobility of texts; Jacquemet, 2005 on transidiomatic practices).

Case 2 – ‘Anfield_mate’ and mocking the Scouse In contrast to Altan’s perceived deficiency in Standard English, I will now turn to a case where a significant cause for the exclusion and discrimination of an actor from a virtual space is an excessive, ‘too authentic’ display of multilingual resources. Screen name Anfield_mate was a Finnish fan of Liverpool FC whose use of Scouse-accented, stylized writing in a UK-based online Liverpool fan forum, particularly the morphemes and pragmatic features that distinguish Scouse from more Standard British English, trigger negative peer evaluation on the Finnish Futisforum and FF2. When interpreting this case, it is again crucial to understand that it is not only the display of linguistic and semiotic resources (‘the wrong language’) that is at stake. Instead, the entire sequence of events has to be understood as a complex skein of sociocultural factors and participants’ micro-histories that have overlapping trajectories in space and time. The actual linguistic–semiotic outcomes that became the target of fun and mockery here were heavily indexical of things unwanted of a proper Finnish football fan. Anfield_mate was a prolific member of Futisforum and FF2 between approximately 2000 and 2006 (contributing several hundreds of posts). In this analysis, it can be plausibly assumed that writers who had been active members for some time were very familiar with Anfield_mate’s forum history and activities as a football fan, and as a Liverpool FC fan in particular. While it has been customary for both Futisforums to allow a great degree of anonymity in the sense that a screen name (‘nick’) and the most fundamental facets of offline identity (real name, face) should not be connected, Anfield_mate had, at one point of the forum’s history, exceptionally acquired a status where his ‘real life identity’ was revealed – very much against the community etiquette:

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For reasons of privacy and space, I shall not go into close detail of that part of the history here. A brief summary is in order, however. Why the disclosure of Anfield_mate’s offline identity was accepted to a greater extent than would be expected, and why Anfield_mate was a particularly ‘likely’ target of agitated hate talk can be crystallized in two points. 1. Futisforum was during its formative years overtly framed as a community and a space for fans of Finnish football, whether the Finland national team, Finnish clubs in different divisions and competitions, or Finnish professional players abroad. There is certainly a patriotic undercurrent in the overall discourse, despite the fact that football hooliganism or other negative side effects of nationalism are very rare in the history of Finnish football. Whilst there was an early emergence of very active, even heated debates on international (especially British, German, Italian and Spanish) football, the dominant status quo was always favourable to the fandom of Finnish football, above all. This created a powerful discourse of the ‘man whore’ (an emic term; ‘mieshuora’ in Finnish),16 which referred to Finns’ fandom of non-Finnish clubs (also, to a lesser extent, foreign national squads). Although many members have openly supported nonFinnish clubs more passionately than anything Finnish, the general spirit, advocated loudest, was pro Finland and Finnish players. In contrast, Anfield_mate had developed a reputation within the community that was seen as the extreme archetype of ‘man whore’: he was a fervent supporter of an English club and often openly disparaged Finnish football, a cause of numerous ‘flamed’ (cf. Thurlow et al., 2004, pp. 70–5) discussion threads. 2. There was a perceived discrepancy between Anfield_mate’s ‘real’ identity as an upper-middle-class ‘gold toothed boy’ and his aspired ‘fake’ identity as a ‘wannabe’ Scouser. Some members of Futisforum tracked down Anfield_mate’s online activity on an England-based Liverpool fans’ forum (I leave it anonymous here), where he socialized with other Liverpool fans, mostly English ones. This became an issue of open disgust and deprecation on the Futisforums.17 It is when a member of FF2 spots one of Anfield_mate’s contributions from that English forum and posts it on FF2 that a big wave of imitation and mockery starts:

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[‘mutta, kaikkein paras’ ⫽ ‘but, the best of all’] This initial posting was partly edited the following day,18 but even the remaining, unedited part clearly frames Anfield_mate’s decontextualized contributions about his Liverpool-related tattoo as ‘ridiculous’ (supported by the exaggerated string of ‘laughing out loud’, ‘LOL’, emoticons). This is a case in point of how linguistic and visual resources – even when relatively unchanging at the surface level of lexis and syntax – can move quickly through different orders of indexicality and acquire very different sets of indexical potential (Blommaert, 2010, pp. 29–33). The Scouse ‘accent’ (here in mediated representation that contains deviations from written Standard English: e.g. ‘me’ as a possessive, the exclamation ‘ta’, ‘boss’ as an adjective) is very good capital (in the sense of Bourdieu, 1977) in the virtual space for English Liverpool fans, but on a relatively similar Finnish site (where the use of multilingual resources can also be appreciated) it becomes loaded with very low and negative connotations. But it is not solely the accent or the variety of English itself that is despised: it is particularly its detachment and deployment by an online actor whose identity is discovered to be Finnish, and what is even worse, upper (middle) class. There is a burst of replies (28) the same night, nearly all framed similarly to the opening, none showing any mercy for, or defence of, Anfield_mate. Explicit mock discourse on Scouse emerges (cf. mock-Altan above, or mock-Spanish analysed in Hill, 2008), and it is given the emic label lädi (‘lad’ in a pejorative sense). Example:

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This participant explicitly highlights (by using boldface font as a communicative modality) the features from Anfield_mate’s original contribution that are being despised: • the possessive pronoun ‘me’ instead of the Standard English form ‘my’ occurs five times (this is a lexico-grammatical feature) • the dialectal form ‘shite’ instead of the more standard ‘shit’ (which would be part of colloquial register anyway; this is a lexico-pragmatic feature) • references to Liverpool fandom: the ascribed mock pseudonym ‘Liväpuul läd’, ‘liver bird’, the emblematic LFC figure, and ‘respect to 96’ [people who died because of the Hillsborough disaster of 1989] (these are cultural–historical, emblematic features) Furthermore, this reply No. 13 overtly states the reason for contempt: ‘pahin ’ (‘the worst wannabe Liverpool lad ever’; wannabe-liväpuul-lädi ikinä here I take the spelling ‘liväpuul’ as pejorative). The same reply continues with a stylized utterance where Anfield_mate’s imagined line is framed with quotation marks and includes the indexical cues, possessive ‘me’ and exclamation ‘ta’ (instead of ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you’) that richly point to ‘fake-wannabe-Scouser’ identity (cf. ‘double-voicing’ originally in Bakhtin, 1984). This discussion thread lasts for approximately two days and nights, approaching the genre of (synchronous) chat, and accumulating 383 messages – a relatively great number even by the standards of the now popular and lively FF2. The main point in this thread is stylized mock-Scouse talk, where crossing (in the sense of Rampton, 1995, 1999) from Finnish or Standard English into ‘the others’’ way of speaking carries much more scorn and deprecation than loyalty or admiration (cf. Rampton, 1995, 1999; Pennycook, 2007; Blommaert, 2010, pp. 187–8). After two days, one of the moderators finally locks the topic, and the reasons he states for doing it are ‘jarring’ and ‘editing the picture of the victim’s dog’. Still, the moderator leaves the thread untouched and unremoved from the board.19 By far the majority of the nearly 400 replies are framed as humour, most of which centres around the 1. Scouse features of Anfield_mate’s postings on the England-based forum, 2. Scouse features contributed by Finnish forum members, 3. Mock/fake-Scouse (emblematically: any colloquial/vernacular/dialectal) features contributed by Finnish forum members, who cannot necessarily tell Scouse features from other English dialects. The rich indexical cues that the ‘discussion’ reveals frequently point to a number of extra-linguistic features, which are indeed often more embodied than discursive. To summarize such recurrent features that were explicitly

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ascribed by the nocturnal mockers to the imagined ‘Scouser’ identity (both as a community and as a language variety) by means of mock phrases and even explicit hate talk (cf. Billig, 2001), they are as follows: [they are] incestuous/inbreeding [they have] donkey face, big ears (in Finnish, pallokorvat) [they are] trash people, metal workers [they do] car stealing and sneaker dealing [they are] illiterate [they do] glue abuse [they are] stagnated in the eighteenth century (in particular regard to the exclamation ‘Ta mate!’) • [they are] (ab)normal (cf. Foucault, 2003); e.g. • • • • • • •

[‘A normal person would rather use the word excellent [than boss]’.]

[‘A normal person does not write on a Liverpool fan forum’.] The linguistic forms that are the target of the ruthless discrimination and disapproval include examples from phonology (h-dropping as in ’ere, ’ave; note that ‘phonology’, of course, is here mediated through written forms), syntax (the possessive ‘me’ or ‘yer’), lexis (mainly masculine or pejorative nouns such as ‘mate’, ‘lad’, ‘shite’, ‘scum’, ‘twat’, ‘cunts’, ‘wanker’; even the adjectival usage of ‘boss’), and exclamations and discourse markers (‘ta’, ‘cheers (mate)’, ‘oi’). Moreover, Liverpool FC related slogans are recycled in the sense of mockery (‘YNWA’, ‘Justice [to Hillsborough victims]’, ‘Five times’ [winning the European Cup]). There is surprisingly little defence on behalf of Anfield_mate in this humour/hatred topic; only about 12 postings out of 383 (albeit hard to judge at times) seem to take some kind of stance against the mockers.20

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The irony here is that Scouse, as any dialect, would be far more clearly distinctive in the spoken modality, and writing is bound to miss much of the variation of the ‘primary’ spoken mode. Yet even the written mode (syntactic variation such as the possessive me and lexical items such as lad, mate), stripped of much of the characteristics of first-hand spoken Scouse, is enough to trigger such a wave of web-mediated hatred. The Anfield_mate case is rich with indexical cues to larger patterns in society, the way in which those involved organize their worlds. In order for English dialectal/sociolectal features to make such a big difference, of course, there has to be a fairly developed knowledge of English within the community (cf. case mock-Altan: ‘Becasue the you must know to who write good engrish, to for writing in bad English’). Such hate talk directed towards the use of a dialectal (‘inferior’) form of English by a Finn can only be understood if there is a shared understanding of what is ‘Standard written’ (‘superior’). This interpretation is further supported by disparaging comments on certain Finnish dialects (e.g. Savo, Pori and Kotka dialects). What I have demonstrated here makes evident that this is a brutal and archetypical case of exclusion and discrimination, comparable to school or workplace bullying. It can be argued that Anfield_mate is, after some five years of prolific, often controversial but usually appropriate, activities within the communities, finally driven out of them. True, this nickname was often responsible for very provocative arguments and opinions on the forum, but so was the general spirit of the community in the first place – a very broad range of flaming, trolling and provocation was always allowed on the two Futisforums to the extremes. The defence of the discriminative side rings clear here: he always begged for it. This is explicitly mentioned multiple times in the ‘mock-Lädi’ hate topic:

[‘but [A] gets just what he asks for’.] But given the broad range of multilingual and multisemiotic resources that are deployed and tolerated (though often critically discussed; see Kytölä, forthcoming), it appears somewhat ironic and absurd that a rather skilled display of a sociolect/dialect of English should be judged any worse, any more a ‘forbidden’ code than other codes. We are obliged to think in terms of trajectories again. It is crucial to understand Anfield_mate’s social action here as a flurry of trajectories, where he displays multiple identities through the mediating means of the (social) web (several discussion forums, some edited content sites, IRC-Galleria,21 etc.). For tech-savvy

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actors shuttling in and between such virtual spaces, it is not a difficult task to find and track such identities through a range of such spaces by some ‘detective work’:

[‘Pieces of information from the internet calculated one plus one’; a sample from the earlier 2004 revelation thread.] Anfield_mate does little to conceal the fact that he is from a wealthy family living in one of the wealthier parts of metropolitan Helsinki. Neither does he make attempts to hide his real age, educational history or general whereabouts. He claims he can afford to engage in hobbies and activities that are highly indexical of the wealthy, and to travel to Liverpool to see his favourite club play a few times a year. This can be seen as a source of both envy and deprecation by other community members. While we can see that the wide, quite unanimous (and very loud) discrimination clearly has its roots in such trajectories that had, in the course of years, become deeply embedded in the forum history and folklore, its ‘tacit knowledge’ (e.g. Polanyi, 1967), the actual ‘weapons’ for such discriminative activity are exactly those tiny ingredients of language that can ‘give you away’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 6): single words, morphological variants, pronunciation of single phonemes or lexemes, albeit essentially mediated through a written/visual form of communication, ‘text’ on the screen. But it is largely after the disclosure of Anfield_mate’s offline identity and the connection to upper (middle) class wealthy lifestyle that his Liverpool fandom comes under more critical scrutiny and disapproval. The Liverpool fandom and association with working-class supporters speaking (or, here, writing) working-class sociodialect obtain a new indexical connection here. The subsequent postings by Anfield_mate are now inextricably indexical of a ‘double’ identity of a ‘wannabe Scouser lad’ (the archetypical ‘man whore’) and a ‘gold toothed boy’ and this double identity is regarded by many as ‘fake’, as one can judge from the abundance and quality of the negatively flavoured postings about Anfield_mate. A critical note on such judgement of double or false identity would, of course, suggest that we all carry multiple, dynamic identities on us all the time (e.g. Blommaert, 2005, pp. 203–7; Omoniyi and White, 2006). Identity negotiation,

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co-construction and identity play are, at any rate, always at the very heart of such online-based communities as the Futisforums. And are people’s lives in this late modernity not by default characterized by dynamic, fluid, (to some extent) changeable and overlapping identities? Even Futisforums appear(ed) to allow a great degree of identity play, particularly anonymization and provocative participant roles driven to the extreme – so why expect something ‘more honest’ or ‘more real’ from this prolific Liverpool fan? There is some evidence to suggest that in the negotiation of values and acceptability of different codes at the Futisforums, the Liverpudlian dialect/ sociolect is judged inferior or negative per se (in addition to gaining negative connotations because it is being used by someone who is considered irritating on other dimensions).

[‘And to Liverpool dialect yet another Right after German, the most disgusting language in the world.’] But more than that, it is the trajectory of single occurrences of that ‘foreign’ code that is at stake here, a code much more ‘other’ or ‘freak’ than Standard English. Anfield_mate never used Scouse vernacular to a great extent on the Futisforums, but the web, with particularly its early twenty-first-century ‘social’ applications (‘web 2.0’), allows extremely efficient and quick moves of pieces of discourse. The Scouse variety was (and is) probably the most appropriate code on the English Liverpool fans’ forum, where it enjoys a considerable degree of prestige (relevant social capital; Bourdieu, 1977), perhaps even compared to any more Standard (non-dialect, non-sociolect) form of English. It can be argued that the traces of Anfield_mate’s activity on that Liverpool-friendly inclusive space are dragged out of context, detextualized and entextualized again (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Blommaert, 2005). Yet this recontextualization is not completely new, since that particular personal obsession, the Liverpool fandom, was essentially an ingredient of Anfield_mate’s activity, and a topic of debate, also on the Finnish forums. Emblematic of the highly ‘rhizomatic’ (adopted from Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) nature of the web discussions, while the ‘Finnish Läds’ topic was very active for only two days, the discourse that emerged under that topic was rapidly transported and spread under other topics within the two Futisforums (cf. the distribution of ‘Altanese’ earlier). Under

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Liverpool FC’s season topic 2006/2007, on the same day, the following sequence appears:

[‘Trophy’ ⫽ ‘pokaali’ in Finnish, in German also ‘Pokal’: hence ‘pocal’, whether intentional or not.]

These authors apply the emically popular jocular practice of ‘post fixing’ (in Finnish usually: ‘korjasin viestisi’) to repair ‘problems’ in writing proper Liverpudlian, now already a valued in-group commodity with an ironic usage. Exactly the same forms (such as the possessive me) that were a problem for their earlier user Anfield_mate become valuable in-group resources, emblematic for knowledge of forum history and practices. A central notion to the cases documented is that a particular variety of a language (Altan’s ‘bad’ English, Anfield_mate’s Scouse) triggers a wave of imitation, and in that second-hand phase of the code’s existence (‘mock-Altanese’, ‘mock-Scouser’) it has acquired a persistently ironic meaning. When we add to that the abundant use of emoticons and attached pictures that ‘animate’ the mock talk, we have an interesting parallel to stylized talk documented in language-crossing literature (Rampton, 1999, 2006; Pennycook, 2007):

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For ethical considerations and reasons of space, I have here mainly focused on one aspect of anti-Anfield_mate activities, the mock discussions based on the stylized version of Scouse, ‘Lädi’. This is in line with the sociolinguistic focus of this volume, but importantly, this is only a part of the entire skein of activities and discourses that revolved around this web persona. Wrapping up case Anfield_mate with these caveats in mind, we see how several salient phenomena overlap in space and time to create a space for such ‘mock-Scouse’ discourse as depicted above. Finnish football fandom – and here especially the online dimension manifested in markedly twenty-first-century activities in the two Futisforums – has certainly looked outward to the football world for models of success and expertise, yet it has a nationalist–patriotic facet that runs counter to the likes of Anfield_mate, whose offline and online performance, ways of being and (importantly) ways of writing emphasize the superiority of the ‘foreign’ football cultures, in this case English and Liverpool FC.

Conclusion In an era of accelerated ‘globalization’, rapid movement of ideas, sociocultural flows and translocal activities are customary (Jacquemet, 2005; Blommaert, 2010). Even virtual spaces explicitly framed as ‘Finnish’ (primarily by means of the ‘code’ used, also by means of topics discussed), and thus, relatively ‘peripheral’ from the point of view of the world system, can attract aspiring participants from theoretically anywhere. Due to its history, spread and immense popularity throughout the globe, the discourse domain of football is probably more likely to elicit ‘intercultural’ (international, inter-ethnic, etc.) contacts, to arouse interest by ‘outsiders’ in the ‘periphery’, than many other Finland/Finnish-based discourses distributed over the internet. In the contemporary ‘order of things’, therefore, it can no longer be presupposed that Finnish-based football spaces on the web can stay ‘purely’ Finnish (Blommaert, 2010). To sum up the two cases and what lessons we can learn from them, I anchor them to the sociolinguistics of late modernity and globalization (Blommaert, 2003, 2005, 2010; Rampton, 2006), and the idea of ‘endangered individuals’ proposed in this section of this volume. Altan (regardless of his embodied origin, discursively constructed as non-Finn, outsider) displayed a lack of particular linguistic resources, and became embedded in discourses of ‘bad English’, and more general discourses of otherness

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(cf. the racist stance towards ‘them’ in text and talk, van Dijk et al., 1997), ‘the abnormal’ (Foucault, 2003) and ‘the freak’. Anfield_mate, the scorned ‘man whore’ (discursively constructed as a Finn with an international life trajectory), displayed an excess of particular linguistic resources (Scouse) in the wrong place and time. Altan entered Futisforum benevolently, with his personal history and communicative repertoire as affordances. His Turkish or other linguistic skills notwithstanding, it was his well-intended ‘broken’ English that drew most attention, not the informational or phatic facets of his writing. Anfield_mate’s activities accumulated malevolent uptake and response, which eventually burst into flames in the form of a ‘mockScouse’ or ‘mock-Lädi’ discourse about all things that this prolific screen name embodied and represented. Both sequences in and across the virtual spaces reviewed led to highly normative peer evaluation, harsh humour, mockery, discrimination and exclusion. Yet it should be acknowledged that these are two very different ‘victims’ – one because of racial stereotyping (vis-à-vis betting fraud), and the other because of class resentment (vis-à-vis fan behaviour). These constitute complex reasons for respondents’ reactions and attacks. While it is likely that both social actors found other, more benevolent spaces to replace their activity on the two Futisforums, their social capital and reputation on these major Finland-based arenas of social exchange about football were more or less demolished. And a major role in that procedure was played by their linguistic output/performance in a particular micro-context. ‘Dangerous multilingualism’, as defined in this volume, is essentially about inequality between individuals or communities. It is thus worth asking what we can do (if anything) to mitigate such occurrences of inequality, and to what extent can that be done? Inequality (see Blommaert et al., this volume) is very much inscribed in the most ephemeral acts of communication as it is in the ‘big picture’ of global history; but adjusting our focus to instances where the display of particular multilingual resources is a cause of inequality, can we do nothing more about it than raise the general level of awareness? Above I have provided documentation and interpretation of two interaction sequences from the same domain, and presented claims of real individuals who end up missing social opportunities due to their particular (and highly personal, idiosyncratic) kind of multilingualism. Without being too programmatic, and in the hope of not sounding too hypocritical, I’d like to conclude the chapter with an exercise of ethical consideration. Most of the interaction that goes on in the world is highly ephemeral: it comes and goes and pushes the interlocutors onwards to new events and tasks, and often very little can be done later to impair the possible wrongs caused or triggered by it. A speaker with a non-Standard (or nonnative) accent becomes scolded by a native speaker on the street,22 a fully deaf person proficient in a sign language faces misunderstanding in an interaction with non-signers (cf. Tapio and Takkinen, this volume), and so

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on. But it is part of the nature of certain web-mediated discourses such as illustrated here that they may leave traces, and these traces may be more or less lasting. Even if few people (apart from the researcher) actually bother to trace the trajectories of such entangled ‘messy stuff’, it can remain archived and open to reference for years. It may sometimes be that few people care, not even those originally involved. But given that humans’ ‘online life’ is potentially ‘as real as the real’, or better, very real itself and deeply embedded in other realizations of the real, it frequently does matter to real humans what one’s screen reputation contains, what connotations one’s screen name and screen activities (part of one’s social capital) evoke – in short, ‘who one is’ on the internet. I have illustrated how Altan and Anfield_mate were rather unfairly excluded if not from the entire Finnish online football fandom, at least from the specific subcommunity with which they might have wished to identify. Altan’s one main disadvantage was his ‘broken’ English, Anfield_mate became a victim largely due to his quest for ‘authenticity’ in Scouse (both language and other ways of being). Both the ‘hairy-arm kebab’ and ‘the ultimate man whore’ were stigmatized as ‘freaks’, abnormalized by peers on the basis of their skeins of activities, which were to a large extent linguistic and discursive (but with Anfield_mate, as discussed above, also offline, embodied in the intricacies of class issues). Their activities, aims and motives on the football forums were apparently too different from the majority, too abnormal to be accepted and included. This documentation, I hope, points us to a more general level of the dynamics of how the ubiquitous (and very old) phenomenon of discrimination on the grounds of the display of multilingual resources can be realized in a relatively recent online format of social interaction. In our twenty-first-century late-modern world, mediation through different technologies, older and newer, is likely to be ever more ubiquitous and more complex. Lives mediated through interactions on the screen are and will be deeply embedded in and with lives mediated in more embodied ways. The consequences of social and cultural discursive activity, regardless of the mediating means, potentially make a difference in real people’s lives. Therefore, I would like to conclude this chapter by wishing a good and reputable (online and offline) life to the persons referred to here as Altan and Anfield_mate.

Notes 1. Despite ambiguity, I have chosen to consistently use the British/European word ‘football’ to refer to the sport called ‘soccer’ in North America and some other parts of the globe. My most sincere thanks are due to the four editors of this volume for their invaluable comments on many earlier drafts of this chapter. Furthermore, Jan Blommaert deserves credit for coinage of the fitting term ‘Altanese’ that I deploy here. I would also like to thank Ari Häkkinen and Saara Leskinen for technical help with the data samples.

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2. I am highly aware of the problematics of such a broad umbrella term as ‘nonStandard’, which can have infinitely different and varying manifestations in real speech and writing (see e.g. Blommaert, 2010, pp. 133–4). However, in the absence of a more accurate one, I use it here to cover both cases represented. Moreover, on the basis of my linguistic–ethnographic immersion, I see the term as emically relevant, since the entire sequences of events described here are heavily based on the participants’ conception of the ways of writing as non-Standard (and therefore ‘funny’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘wrong’, or ‘worth mockery’). 3. Liverpool is a very famous and successful English football club with a fan base all over the world. The hub of LFC fan activity lies in Liverpool, but there is a global following, further accentuated by the late-modern developments of e.g. satellite television and the internet. 4. Most notably, and for purposes of this chapter, the interrelated Futisforum and Futisforum2, currently (16 July 2011) located at and , respectively. 5. However, I have decided not to manipulate or edit the data samples to hinder web searches for those interested in finding the original primary sources (of which some can still be left in the forums’ archives). 6. A new nickname at Futisforum can routinely be identified as ‘new’, since the registration date and the total number of posts by that user are automatically visible to other users below the username. 7. Informed by my long-time observation, I use the masculine third person pronoun for all ‘alleged male’ screen names and the feminine pronoun for those members who are identified as females. This may occasionally not match the member’s gender (transgender issues aside). 8. The message was sent in early 2005, and there were still some weeks left until the beginning of the Finnish competitive football summer season of that year (April 2005). 9. As the focus of this chapter is pragmatic and sociolinguistic, I will not provide detailed syntactical glosses of the non-English data excerpts, but instead, rather liberal pragmatic translations. 10. For the application of these canonical yet contested terms in computer-mediated discourse, see Hinrichs (2006) and Androutsopoulos (2007, 2011, forthcoming). 11. Another similar scandal surfaced in spring 2011, before this volume went to print. 12. Although the nicknames have been changed, I have deliberately retained a degree of non-Standard, idiosyncratic, stylized spellings. 13. While I personally find/found this particular joke amusing at times, I disclaim myself from the discriminative aspect of this cruel humour on Altan. Humour, therefore, is an emically motivated analytical category here rather than my personal judgement (cf. Billig, 2001). 14. Attendance figures are a perpetually popular topic within the Futisforum communities, with a particular emphasis on how desperately small audiences Finnish football manages to mobilize (in comparison to football elsewhere, or even ice hockey in Finland). 15. Futisforum was outgrown by FF2 relatively quickly: by late 2007, the younger FF2 was already the far more active forum by all standards (see Kytölä, forthcoming). 16. Note that, especially in Futisforum, there was a general belief that nearly all of the members were male. This has changed somewhat with the emergence of FF2, where clearly more members identify themselves overtly as females, and where gender is not made such a big issue as it always was in Futisforum.

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17. Futisforum is (and always was) moderated very little. In fact, it is one of the least moderated web forums I have encountered during my research, allowing a great degree of freedom of speech. This, of course, has multiple effects, negative and positive. I have frequently experienced disbelief and astonishment at the tone of writing found in Futisforum (and to a lesser extent, FF2) when I have discussed my research in personal communication with my colleagues and friends. To be fair, however, it should be remembered that this analysis of ‘discriminatory’ cases in the Futisforums is only one facet of the versatile and creative discourse community. Elsewhere I also attempt to do justice to the creative, celebratory and overall positive sides of the Futisforumists’ multilingual language uses and practices (see Kytölä, forthcoming). 18. One can see routinely when a message has been later edited, as this is part of the meta-information generated by the forum software. 19. The topic remained for more than two years on one of those FF2 subforums that only registered members can read. Although any internet user in the world can register, ethical considerations are, in my view, necessary when deploying such data for research purposes. 20. Although it is impossible to make an accurate gender analysis within a communication format such as anonymous web forums, it has to be noted that 6 of these 12 postings rising against the grain here are by 4 publicly female members, one of them an active fellow Liverpool fan (at times also mocked as ‘partner in crime’). Together with my ethnographically accrued knowledge of the aggression, antagonism and mockery by predominantly male members of the Futisforums, this might tentatively suggest that female peers are more sympathetic in this respect. However, a more fine-grained gender-based analysis remains outside this chapter. 21. IRC-Galleria is a popular social networking site that originated in Finland and preceded the big success of Facebook. 22. For a fictional yet very realistic and apt parallel, see the scene from the film by Andersson (2000), or its synopsis in Weman (2000, p. 1): An immigrant goes looking for a job at an enterprise but becomes rejected. He is totally ignored by the (Swedish) natives. Once he gets on the street and asks something, he becomes beaten by the two native interlocutors explicitly on the grounds of his non-native accent – while passers-by are just watching.

References Andersson, R. (dir.) (2000). Sånger från andra våningen [Songs from the Second Floor]. [Motion picture.] Roy Andersson Filmproduktion. Androutsopoulos, J. (2006) Multilingualism, diaspora, and the internet: codes and identities on German-based diaspora websites. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), pp. 520–47. Androutsopoulos, J. (2007) Language choice and code switching in German-based diasporic web forums. In B. Danet and S.C. Herring (eds) The Multilingual Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 340–61. Androutsopoulos, J. (2008) Potentials and limitations of discourse-centered online ethnography. Language@Internet, 5. [Online]. Available at , date accessed 15 August 2012.

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Androutsopoulos, J. (2011) From variation to heteroglossia in the study of computermediated discourse. In C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek (eds) Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 277–98. Androutsopoulos, J. (forthcoming) Code-switching in computer-mediated communication. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein and T. Virtanen (eds) Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, R. and C.L. Briggs (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, pp. 59–88. Billig, Michael (2001) Humour and hatred: the racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan. Discourse and Society, 12(3), pp. 267–89. Blommaert, J. (2003) Commentary: a sociolinguistics of globalization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), pp. 607–23. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and B. Rampton (2011) Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13 (2), a special issue. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brownlow, C. and L. O’Dell (2002) Ethical issues for qualitative research in online communities. Disability and Society, 17(6), pp. 685–94. Danet, B. and S.C. Herring (2007) Introduction: welcome to the multilingual internet. In B. Danet and S.C. Herring (eds) The Multilingual Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–39. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dog ˘ançay-Aktuna, S. (1998) The spread of English in Turkey and its current sociolinguistic profile. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 19(1), pp. 24–39. Dog ˘ançay-Aktuna, S. and Z. Kiziltepe (2005) English in Turkey. World Englishes, 24(2), pp. 253–65. Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975. Translated by G. Burchell. New York: Picador. Hill, J.H. (2008) The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hinrichs, L. (2006) Codeswitching on the Web. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. House, J. (2003) English as a lingua franca: a threat to multilingualism? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), pp. 556–78. Hymes, D. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality. Towards an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis. Jacquemet, M. (2005) Transidiomatic practices: language and power in the age of globalization. Language and Communication, 25, pp. 257–77. Kytölä, S. (2012) Researching the multilingualism of web discussion forums: theoretical, practical and methodological issues. In M. Sebba, S. Mahootian and C. Jonsson (eds) Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. London: Routledge, pp. 106–27. Kytölä, S. (forthcoming) Multilingual language use in Finnish football forums on the Web – a discourse-analytic study into the sociolinguistics of globalization. PhD thesis, University of Jyväskylä.

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Kytölä, S. and J. Androutsopoulos (2012) Ethnographic perspectives on multilingual computer-mediated discourse: insights from Finnish football forums on the web. In S. Gardner and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Multilingualism, Discourse, and Ethnography. London: Routledge, pp. 179–96. Leppänen, S. (2009) Playing with and policing language use and textuality in fan fiction. In I. Hotz-Davies, A. Kirchhofer and S. Leppänen (eds) Internet Fictions. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 62–83. Leppänen, S. (2012) Linguistic and discursive heteroglossia on the translocal internet: the case of web writing. In M. Sebba, S. Mahootian and C. Jonsson (eds) Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. London: Routledge, pp. 233–54. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, T. Nikula, S. Kytölä, T. Törmäkangas, K. Nissinen, L. Kääntä, T. Räisänen, M. Laitinen, P. Pahta, H. Koskela, S. Lähdesmäki and H. Jousmäki (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 26 August 2011. Leppänen, S. and A. Häkkinen (forthcoming) Buffalaxed super-diversity: representations of the ‘Other’ on YouTube. Diversities, 13 (2), a special issue. Omoniyi, T. and G. White (2006) Introduction. In T. Omoniyi and G. White (eds) The Sociolinguistics of Identity. London: Continuum, pp. 1–8. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. (1967) The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor Books. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London and New York: Longman. Rampton, B. (1999) Deutsch in Inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), pp. 480–504. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seidlhofer, B. (2001) Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as a lingua franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), pp. 133–58. Shifman, L. and M. Thelwall (2009) Assessing global diffusion with web memetics: the spread and evolution of a popular joke. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12), pp. 2567–76. Sixsmith, J. and C.D. Murray (2001) Ethical issues in the documentary data analysis of internet posts and archives. Qualitative Health Research, 11(3), pp. 423–32. Thurlow, C., L. Lengel and A. Tomic (2004) Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. London: SAGE. van Dijk, T.A., S. Ting-Toomey, G. Smitherman and D. Troutman (1997) Discourse, ethnicity, culture and racism. In T.A. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: a Multidisciplinary Introduction, vol. 2. London: SAGE, pp. 144–80. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Weman, M. (2000) Sånger från andra våningen. Filmhandledning utgiven av Svenska Filminstitutet [Songs from the second floor. Film guidance by the Swedish Film Institute]. Zoom 4/2000. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 2 July 2011.

12 Experiencing Multilingualism – the Elderly Becoming Marginalized? Anne Pitkänen-Huhta and Marja Hujo

Introduction Globalization and the multilingualism it brings along is lived reality for most people in the world, but how it touches different groups and how people experience it differ substantially: for some it provides opportunities and prosperity, for others it is an obstacle and threshold; it includes some but excludes others; for some it is a functional and useful everyday resource, others remain bystanders and face the threat of marginalization. As stated in Blommaert et al. (this volume), multilingualism is often cherished and connected to positive phenomena in society but its positive outcomes are not to be taken for granted. For some groups of people multilingualism may be a problem and it may cause them to become marginalized, at least in some spheres of life. For these groups multilingualism is something that takes place inevitably in their daily environment but they themselves remain bystanders and cannot take part in the development. It is precisely these bystanders that this chapter focuses on. The interest of this chapter lies in the consequences of multilingualism for individual subjects, namely the elderly. More specifically, this chapter examines how multilingualism poses a potential threat to this specific group, how it might endanger full participation in society and thus lead to exclusion and marginalization. This chapter tells a story told by a couple, two 90-year-olds, living in the Finnish countryside. This couple have seen 90 years of changes in Finnish society, and they tell a grassroots-level story of language contact and struggle with the strange, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and of marginalization and coping. This is indeed a case study focusing on two people, but this is a telling case (see e.g. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Duff, 2008), showing how ordinary people are touched by multilingualism, how they experience it and live through it willingly or unwillingly. Although this case is particularly about the elderly, it inevitably sheds light on other potentially marginalized groups of people as well. 261

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Multilingualism, globalization and marginalization How people experience multilingualism partly depends on how they understand multilingualism and how they see themselves in relation to it. What is considered multilingual and who can be said to be multilingual vary extensively in scholarly and policy as well as in lay discussions. One example in the European context is the following definition from the European Commission’s language policy (EurActiv Network, 2008): ‘The term “multilingualism” refers both to a person’s ability to use several languages and the co-existence of different language communities in one geographical area.’ Both aspects of this definition refer to people who use more than one language, but it ignores, however, the fact that even if people are not able to function in many languages, their lives are increasingly surrounded by multilingualism and they are affected by multilingualism in various ways. If we were to ask the elderly couple in focus here whether they are multilingual and whether their living surroundings are multilingual, their immediate reaction would without a doubt be no. Indeed, most Finns consider themselves monolingual, as shown by a recent survey on English in Finland (Leppänen et al., 2011). The same survey shows, however, that other languages are visible in Finns’ linguistic landscapes, even though older generations and people living in the countryside encounter foreign languages less often than young people and city dwellers. As pointed out above, multilingualism is generally considered to be beneficial to people and, for example, the EU’s official language policy promotes learning two languages in addition to one’s own language. Multilingualism is linked to education and work opportunities and the mobility of students and workers. Elderly citizens are, however, often excluded from policies concerning multilingual society and plurilingual citizens. The following two quotes from the EU’s language learning policy (EUbusiness, 2008, emphases added) illustrate the above-mentioned aspects of multilingualism: The European Union actively encourages its citizens to learn other European languages, both for reasons of professional and personal mobility within its single market, and as a force for cross-cultural contacts and mutual understanding. The ability to understand and communicate in more than one language – already a daily reality for the majority of people across the globe – is a desirable life-skill for all European citizens. Learning and speaking other languages encourages us to become more open to others, their cultures and outlooks; it improves cognitive skills and strengthens learners’ mother tongue skills; it enables us to take advantage of the freedom to work or study in another Member State.

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The focus appears to be on enhancing cognitive skills, increasing mutual understanding and harmony, learning for life, and mobility in the sense of working and studying across Europe. Most of these emphases are on people who are still part of the active and productive workforce. But what if you are not in the labour market any more? People who are not ‘useful’, productive members of society are not taken into account in policy-making, except for in the medical sense. Studies on the language use of the elderly are often medicalized studies concerning the effects of, for example, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease on language performance and in that way on their ability to function in society (for an extensive list of references, see De Bot and Makoni, 2005), or studies which have focused on language development and assessment (e.g. Baker, 1996). The language development and language use of the elderly in multilingual settings have been studied by for example Baker (1995) and De Bot and Makoni (2005). Less research has been conducted on how the elderly are affected by multilingualism in our society. In particular, this involves those who may not be multilingual in the obvious sense, in other words they may not have competence in languages other than their mother tongue, but their lives are still surrounded by increasing multilingualism and an implicit requirement to have multilingual competencies. In the European language policies, multilingualism is seen as the normal state in people’s lives, and those without the skills, abilities and perhaps the need for languages other than their native one are pushed into the position of abnormality; in this sense their situation echoes Foucault’s (2003) discussion of normality and abnormality in society. Multilingualism is connected to globalization, which, again, can be defined in various ways. It is most often connected to economy: terms such as the ‘global market’ or ‘the common markets beyond the nation states’ are used (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng, 2008). But globalization can, of course, also be a social and cultural phenomenon. Just like multilingualism, globalization has both positive and negative connotations. It can be seen as something that makes the world smaller and unites people across nations in a positive sense or it can be seen as causing a loss of cultural and linguistic diversity, which leads to divides between the rich and poor rather than to levelling the disparities (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng, 2008, p. 1). The term ‘globalization’ has been analysed by Scholte (2000), for example, who argues that it can be seen as internationalization, liberalization, universalization, westernization, modernization or deterritorialization. He further argues that only the last one is apt enough in explaining the current stage and form of globalization, that is its reference to the change of social spaces, which means in Scholte’s (2000, p. 3) words that ‘global and territorial spaces co-exist and interrelate in complex fashions’. As the social space people operate in becomes more diverse and complex, the possibility of ‘communicative inequality’ (Blommaert, 2008, p. 24) also rises. Blommaert

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illustrates this concept by documents that travel from one literacy regime to another, so that in this new regime the document is not understood in the same way as in its original regime. This kind of inequality can also happen in seemingly close circles, not just when we are talking about two very extreme contexts. Because of globalization and multilingualism familiar social spaces can also change in profound ways so that some people are not able to function in them and understand the documentation and discourses related to these spaces in ways that they are used to. Blommaert (2008) further argues that different parts of the world are connected but that does not mean that these parts will eventually become uniform. Aspects such as technological developments or the spread of English are often related to globalization, but there are many people who may not be able to speak English or who are not able or willing to use the internet. These people may be fully aware of the developments around them, but the more general changes taking place around them are not part of their everyday reality. As a potential consequence of the above-mentioned inequalities, some groups in society may become marginalized. Marginalization can be seen as one form of oppression. As suggested by Young (2000), it is possible to identify five categories of oppression – exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. He argues that of these marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous, because ‘a whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination’ (Young, 2000, p. 41). Marginalization is often related to the economy and thereby it also has ties with globalization. There are various (growing) groups in society, such as disabled people, unskilled workers or elderly citizens, who can, in fact, be seen as forming a new underclass, because the labour market does not have any use for them (Mullaly, 1997, p. 147). Marginalization is often related to material deprivation, but this is not always the case, as for example many elderly citizens are quite well off. Nevertheless, they may be ‘excluded from meaningful social participation and cannot exercise their capacities in socially defined and recognized ways’ (Mullaly, 1997, p. 148). It is often the case that in order to be productive and useful for society one has to be at work and one has to be young. Therefore, older people are often marginalized from society and this may lead to ‘feelings of uselessness, boredom, and lack of self-respect’ (Mullaly, 1997, p. 148).

Introducing the case The elderly couple, Erkki and Aino (pseudonyms), in focus here are both circa 90 years old and live in rural south-western Finland. The couple were interviewed by Marja Hujo as a part of her MA study in spring 2008. Erkki and Aino have lived in the same area all of their lives. They

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live in a village with about 2000 inhabitants: the administrative area the village was formerly part of had circa 5000 inhabitants, but due to recent merges of administrative areas in Finland, the village is now (from the beginning of 2009) part of a town totalling 25,000 inhabitants. Pori and Tampere are the bigger towns in the area, but they are so far away that the couple hardly ever visit them. The area their home is located in is nevertheless rural with farmland, forest and some small industries. The closest services (e.g. a shop and a bank) are about 3 kilometres away from their home. Before retirement Erkki was a carpenter and Aino delivered the mail. Both of them have been on pensions for the past 25 years. As to their education, both had four years of primary education and they have no history of language learning in formal education. Before their retirement they used to travel abroad a couple of times a year, mostly in the neighbouring Scandinavian countries. Thus they have had contact with languages other than Finnish and they have experience of situations where the knowledge of a foreign language might have been useful. The interview was a semi-structured interview (e.g. Dörnyei, 2007; Ruusuvuori and Tiittula, 2005), focusing especially on the role of English in these people’s lives and in Finland and the world more generally. The interview topics were partly based on the national survey on English in Finland (Leppänen et al., 2011). The interview was conducted in the couple’s home and it lasted for about an hour. It was audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis. The following transcription conventions were used: (2) pause in seconds . small pause less than a second // overlapping speech [a tabloid] transcriber’s explanations ((laughter)) non-verbal activities >xxx< fast speech In analysing the interview, the starting point was to treat the interview loosely as a story told by the couple and as discourse constructed in the interview situation. The interview was full of small stories (see Georgakopolou, 2007) and there was a narrative contract (Galasin´ski and Galasin´ska, 2005; Nikula and Pitkänen-Huhta, 2008) between the interviewer and the couple being interviewed, where the latter were expected to tell the story of their experiences to the interviewer. The account was analysed discourse analytically, paying attention not only to what is said, but how things are said. Aspects of language use such as choice of words and expressions, grammatical structures, or use of hesitation and laughter were taken into account. The interview was only audio-recorded and therefore the visual aspects of the discourse were excluded.

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The interview was a discussion between Marja (who was acquainted with the couple), Erkki and Aino. During the interview they constructed together an understanding of what English means to Erkki and Aino and how they see its role personally, nationally and globally. Thus Marja’s role in this construction cannot be ignored. Even though the couple had known Marja for a long time, there were certain inevitable power relations between them, and this has repercussions on the discourse. First of all, the topic of discussion is English and the couple must be aware that Marja is very good at English, as she is a university student of English, whereas the couple had had no formal education in English, or any other language for that matter. This puts Marja in a more powerful position as to the topic at hand. Another point is that Marja is a university student and she is now visiting the couple for the purposes of a scientific study, an MA thesis. This may create an atmosphere where the couple might feel that they need to have some knowledge that Marja is now about to inquire about, and this might cause tension in the situation.

Living through globalization and growing multilingualism In the following, the account of the couple is unfolded in their own voice when they reflect on their experiences of living amidst globalization and multilingualism and the feelings evoked by these experiences. Being aware of the spread of English Even though Aino and Erkki live in a small village and only occasionally visit the nearest town, they are very well aware of the status of English in Finland and globally. Aino in particular is almost surprisingly aware of the situation of the English language in the world. The fact that Aino names English as the world language gives some evidence of how up to date these people are, even though they have not travelled abroad for the past three decades. Extract 1 Marja: no nii lähdetää liikeelle . elikä ensimmäiseks mää ihan kysyisin teiltä että mitä teille ensimmäisenä tulee mielee mieleen englannin kielestä . mitä ajatuksia se herättää tai . mitä tulee mieleen (3) Aino: no se semmonen ensiks että että se se on ninkon maailman kieli ja sitä täytys joka ainoon osata . mutta kun ihminen on ollu kerran laiska ni se ei o viittiny sitä opetella vaikka olis ollu jo monta vuatta tilasuus kun televisiosta on oppinu aika paljon Marja: ok let’s get going . so first I would like to ask you that what is the first thing that comes to your mind about the English language . what thoughts does it raise . or what comes to your mind (3)

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well the first thing is that that it it’s like a world language and that every single person should be able to use it . but when a person has been so lazy that she hasn’t cared to learn it even though there has been the chance for it for many years but I have learnt quite a lot from TV

After Marja’s question there is a small pause, but then Aino expresses quite a clear opinion about English. In her opinion English is the world language and everybody should be able to use it. Aino’s quite emphatic every single person indicates that she feels there is an external compulsion to have English skills, as if there is some unidentified force pushing people to use English, and without skills in English it may be difficult to function in this world. She continues with a self-depreciating tone how she has been too lazy to start studying English, even though she would have had the time and plenty of opportunities to do so. Thus some feelings of lack of self-respect arise at this point. She points out, however, that she has learnt quite a lot from watching TV. Another example of the awareness of English is given in Extract 2 below. Again Aino is the one who gives her comments on the question concerning the visibility and spread of English in different areas of life. Extract 2 Marja: ootteko te ylipäätään kiinnittäny huamioo että toi englannin kieli että näkyykö sitä . kuinka paljon . tuleeks teille lehtiä tai jotain / ootteko te Aino: / no meitille tulee aika huanosti lehtiä että . mitä joskus ostetaan tualta noi iltasanomat ja tommoset että niisä ny paremmin paremmin näkkee mutta mutta sano kyllä siittä tiatosia ollaan että englannin kieli . valtaa alaa ei siinä mikkään auta kun kun se tullee ninkon yleiseks kiäleks mielellänsä eikös toi tiatokonekin o nykyänsä nykyänsä paljon semmonen että siältä löytyy niitä englanninkielisiä sanoja Marja: overall, have you noticed that the English language that do you see it . how much . do you get any magazines or something / have you Aino: / well we don’t really get magazines . just something that we buy sometimes like Iltasanomat [a tabloid] and such and in those you see but but we are very aware that the English language . is gaining ground and nothing can be done about it because it’s becoming a common language, isn’t the computer nowadays such a thing where you can find those English words English is quite prominently visible to most Finns today (Taavitsainen and Pahta, 2008; Leppänen and Nikula, 2007) and this couple are no exception.

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Aino explains that they do not subscribe to any magazines but she continues that English can be seen in some tabloids they sometimes buy. She also lays a strong emphasis on how they are very aware that the English language is gaining ground and how it is becoming a common language. Thus Aino in a way takes a defensive position in saying that they are not ignorant people, they do follow the world and they know what is going on. The way in which Aino says that the English language is gaining ground and nothing can be done about it again implies that she feels there are some external forces that drive the English language further and around the world, and they themselves are just bystanders watching this development. Furthermore, she mentions the computer and inquiringly suggests that is it not a device where one can find those English words. This is a further indication that they do follow current developments, as they do not have a computer nor have they ever used one, but they still know about the relationship of English and the new technology. In Extract 3 the couple ponder on how the use of English language has evolved and increased in Finland during their lives. Again Aino is more anxious in giving her views and showing her awareness of the matter. Extract 3 Marja:

ni että ootteko te huamannu nyt tässä ajan saatossa et se englanti on siältä lisääntyny hyvinki paljon ku tehän ette oo koulussakaan sitä lukenu että Aino: ei ei ei koulusa luettu luettu muttaa mutta sen huamaa kaikisa kun . me ny ei nin paljoo ennää liikuta mutta mutta esi esimerkiks niihin törmää kaikisa jos mennee [lähin kaupunki] nin siälä on aina aina noita sanoja essiintyy kaikkia ja . ja jatkuvasti niihin törmää Marja: so have you noticed now as the time has passed that English has increased a lot because you didn’t study it at school Aino: no no no we didn’t study study it at school but but you notice it everywhere . we don’t move a lot anymore but but for for example you run into it everywhere if you go to [the nearest town] and there is always always those words come up and . and all the time you bump into them The couple do indeed actively pay attention to their surroundings: Aino explains that even though they do not move around as much as before they still have noticed how the use of English has increased. From what Aino is saying one could conclude that it is difficult not to run into English even when living in the countryside. Interestingly, Aino uses a physical expression when describing the visibility of English: all the time you bump into them [English words]. The use of bumping into suggests that seeing English words is involuntary and thus it cannot be

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avoided. She also mentions that you run into English words everywhere and gives the nearest (small) town as an example. Even though Aino tells how you run into English all the time and in every place, she still does not mention any specific places or locations where in the nearest town she has seen English. It might be that they do not, in fact, recognize which words are from English, but the words seem unfamiliar to them. They can still navigate without difficulty in their familiar surroundings and they know what services are provided by different enterprises, but the linguistic landscape marking the familiar environment has changed. Living amidst globalization Being aware of the growing presence of English in their environment also means that the couple are inevitably touched by multilingualism. This section discusses the experiences the couple have of multilingualism, and of English, in particular, as well as the contacts they have with English in their daily lives. In the interviews, the couple told Marja how they used to travel every year, mainly to Sweden and Norway in their own car, but how, after they retired 25 years ago, they stopped making the trips. They have thus been in situations where they would perhaps have needed skills in other languages, but Erkki also says that now he does not even listen to the foreign language on TV: he follows the Finnish subtitles or listens to Finnish programmes. Extract 4 Erkki: Aino:

mää en o kuunnellu yleensä vierasta kieltä televisiosta nin et et varmaan o kun mää yleensä . ko mä oon siittä kiinnostunu Erkki: ne on ne on sano suamennettu ne . kirjotukset siä suameks Marja: niin on joo kyllä Erkki: ja sitten on suamalainen ohjelma tykkänänsä että kuulee puhheen Erkki: generally I haven’t listened to foreign languages on TV Aino: of course you haven’t, I have generally, ’cos I’m interested in that Erkki: they have they have been translated into Finnish, the texts are there in Finnish Marja: yes so they are Erkki: and then if it’s a Finnish programme altogether so you can hear the speech But Aino points out here that this is because languages do not interest Erkki, whereas she herself is interested in languages. Elsewhere she mentions that she is especially interested in Italian, which she hears on TV, and would

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have wanted to learn it, because it is such a beautiful language. But at school they never learned any languages: Extract 5 Marja:

Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Aino: Marja: Aino: Erkki: Aino: Marja:

Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Aino: Marja: Aino: Erkki: Aino:

joo aiva, aiva . no mites totanin öö tossa kyllä jo kyselylomakkeessa olikin että ootteko opetel opetellu englantia koulussa ja ilmeisesti siellä kansakoulussa ei ainaka ei ollu teidän aikana ei ollu ei ollu oliko siellä mitään mitään muita kieliä siis suo äidinkieltä varmaan jonkin verran oliko mitään muita vieraita kieliä ei ollu ei ei mitään ei ei tämmösisä maalaiskansakouluisa / ollu / eeei katos katos [opettajan nimi] oli tietysti opetellu opetellu sen mitä mitä hän osas mutta ei sitä ninkon oppilaille ikinä esille tuotu yes exactly, exactly, well how about well in the questionnaire there was already that have you learned English at school and apparently at least not in the primary school no there wasn’t in your time there wasn’t no there wasn’t were there any other languages, well mother tongue of course at least some but were there any other languages no there weren’t no nothing no no not in such country schools /as this / no: you see you see [name of a teacher] had of course learned what he knew but he never put it forward to the pupils

As becomes evident here, Erkki and Aino have not learnt any foreign languages at school, but what is interesting is that, when later shown samples of written English, Swedish and German, they recognize English and Swedish almost immediately and German too after a little bit of thinking. In Extract 5 above, Erkki and Aino talk about learning languages at school as if they had not been given access to languages. First of all, they are categorically claiming that there were no foreign languages as subjects in basic education, and

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add that in rural schools learning languages was not possible, thus suggesting a division between the countryside and the other areas of Finland, the former being somehow deprived of a privilege. Another point that comes up in the interview is that the teacher was the gatekeeper of knowledge at school: they assume that their teacher might have known other languages but he did not let his students have a share of his knowledge. This could also be interpreted as another slightly defensive position they adopt, perhaps in response to the unequal power relations in the interview situation: they do not know any languages because they have not been given access to learning them. The multilingual Finland of today is, in fact, nothing new to this couple: already at the beginning of the twentieth century one could encounter English in their village: Extract 6 Marja:

totanin (2) mitäs öö kuinka hyvin te ootte kiinnittäny huamioo tälläi ympäristöön tässä kotona tai kodin ulkopuolella että mihin kiäliin te törmäätte ylipäätään just ku te Aino: ei ei meikäläinen törmää täsä minkään minkään kieleen kieliin se on se on se on englanti ainoo sitten johon johon voi törmätä . kun kun kyllä kyllä täälä ennen vanhaan (2) tuli tuli semmosia kun kun sano sanottiin että ajettiin körökyytillä kotio ameriikasta nin ne osas muutaman jees sanan sitten sannoo / ((naurua)) Erkki: / ((naurua)) Marja: so (2) what umm how well have you noticed your surroundings here at home or outside your home so that what languages do you overall bump into when you Aino: no no I don’t bump into any any language languages here it’s a it’s a it’s English the only one that that can be bumped into. but but back in the old days (2) there came came such people trundling along from America who could say a few yes words / ((laughter)) Erkki: / ((laughter)) Aino expresses rather clearly the fact that they do not run into any languages because they stay at home or close to home. However, she does continue that English would be the most likely language to be bumped into. She reminisces how back in the old days (around the 1930s) it was possible to run into English even close to their home because some people came back from America and they were able to speak some English, or a few yes words, as Aino puts it and starts laughing. Erkki laughs at this too,

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which tells about their shared experience. The way Aino says how the people trundled along back to Finland (the Finnish expression körökyydillä means being compelled to come back home suddenly) shows some kind of contempt for these people, and their use of yes words is considered showing off with their skills of language that other people could perhaps not understand. There were a great number of emigrants to America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, especially from the western parts of Finland. These people left Finland in the hope of a better, more prosperous life, but some of them came back home having failed in America, and therefore they were looked down upon in those days. When travelling abroad earlier, the couple had been faced with situations where they would have needed skills in either Swedish or English, and they spend some time reminiscing about one such event. Currently, however, they do not go very far from their home any more and therefore they feel that they do not encounter foreign languages. It is notable here that running into foreign languages means running into foreign people, and there are not very many in the countryside: Extract 7 Marja: juu se on hyvä kyllä. no tuleeko nykypäivänä enää semmosia tilanteita sitte vastaan Aino: no ei /ei tu kon emme lähre minkään ennää tästä kauppaan aja Erkki: / eeei ei reissata ennää Aino: tästä kauppaan ajamme nin / ei siinä törmää minkään Erkki: / ni ei ((naurua)) Marja: nin aika vähän on ulkomaalaisia kuitenki täälä pienellä Erkki: on ei nin täälä kettään o semmosta Marja: yes that’s good. well do you face such situations these days Aino: well no / no because we don’t go anywhere anymore from here to the store Erkki: / no no we don’t travel anymore Aino: from here to the store we drive / so you don’t bump into anything Erkki: / yes no ((laughing)) Marja: yes there are only few foreigners here in a small [village] Erkki: yes there aren’t any such here For this couple, foreign languages seem to be connected to foreign people in particular. The couple feel that, as they live in the countryside and do not move much away from home, they do not bump into anything, i.e. into people speaking foreign languages, and consequently they have no need for skills in foreign languages. They do not seem to be aware that English and

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other languages enter their home through TV, radio and newspapers daily. Nevertheless, they have quite a firm opinion about the situation in towns: Extract 8 Marja:

no mitä luulette sitten että onko eroja maaseudun ja kaupungin välillä että tarvitaanko tarviiko kaupungissa asuvan osata englantia enemmän tai paremmin kun sit täällä maalla asuvan Aino: > kyllä tarttee . kyllä tarttee < . ei ei tu toimeen ennää kun ensikskin nin siälä törmää paljo enempi öö vieraskielisiin ihmisiin nin että ossaa jottain sanoo Marja: so what do you think are there any differences between the countryside and towns that do people living in towns need to know English better than people living here in the countryside Aino: > yes they do. they do < . you can’t can’t manage anymore because for one thing you bump into foreign people more so then you can say something Aino quite definitely believes that English skills are needed more in towns than in the countryside, even to an extent that you can’t manage anymore [without English skills]. At first she starts in a quiet voice as if not being sure of her opinion, but then continues in a more certain tone. She explains that one faces more foreign people in towns and thus it is good to be able to say something to them. It is rather self-evident that, in practice, the contact that this couple have with English is through TV, even though they themselves do not consider TV a contact with other languages. The following extract shows an example of what the couple have learnt from watching and listening to TV. Extract 9 gives a rather amusing example of what has been caught from different English language TV shows: Extract 9 Marja: no totanin onko tualta teeveestä tarttunu jotain englannin kielisiä sanoja mitä te osaatte tai termejä / onko jotain mitä mitä osaatte tai tiedätte Aino: / ((hyminää, hiljaista naurua)) (2) ai lav juu Erkki: ((naurua)) Marja: so are there any English words or terms that you have learnt from TV / are there any that you know Aino: / ((humming, quiet laughter)) (2) I love you Erkki: ((laughing)) After some hesitation and quiet laughter, Aino has the courage to give the expression I love you as an example of something that she has learnt from

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TV. Erkki starts laughing after this, which demonstrates that this expression is familiar to him, too. This example shows that both Aino and Erkki listen to the speech and not only follow the subtitles when watching TV, although Erkki said earlier that he rather reads the subtitles than listens to the speech when watching foreign TV shows. However, I love you seems to be familiar to both of them. The couple are evidently well aware of what is going on around them and how other languages appear in their environment, but only further away from home. Their home seems to be a ‘safe’ unchanging place from where they observe the changes taking place elsewhere and only occasionally when they step out of their home do they bump into other languages. To an extent they also feel that there have always been gatekeepers who have denied them access to other languages and therefore they have remained bystanders. Expressing lack of self-respect It is noticeable how often the couple talk about themselves or about their knowledge depreciatingly. They feel insecure even when talking about their own opinions and are somewhat apologetic at times. One can sense that the couple feel too old to have anything important or useful to say, which might at least partly be due to the power relations in the interview, but partly also because they might have had feelings of lack of self-respect in relation to languages in the same way as marginalized people often feel, according to Young (2000). Extract 10 below gives a good example of how directly the couple express what they believe to be the lack of their knowledge. Aino gives her opinions, which are relevant to the issue at hand, but she still thinks that what she is saying is not useful or good, perhaps pointing towards the research task of Marja: Extract 10 Marja: no tota mitä miältä ootte onko englannin kieli . teidän mielestä tärkeää että tarvitaanko sitä suomessa . englannin kielen taitoo (2) Aino: ((huokaus)) ei sitä muuten tarvita kun kylä täälä suamella pärjää mutta . mutta sano . kun eikös eikös ruppee matkailijoita tulleen nin kylä se hyvä olis kon tosa ossais neuvoo tiätä että ä älä ny älä nyt ton ojan ylitte että hyppää hyppää ((naurua)) seuraavasa paikasa vasta Marja: aiva (2) Aino: nin sano ei siihen muuta täälä törmää kun se on eri eri asia sitten. jos tullee. viaraskielinen vastaa nin miten se sitten haluaa esitellä sitä Marja: nii aiva (5)

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Aino:

> juu kyllä kyllä se on kuule kuule sano huanoo meiti< / ((naurua)) meitin tiatomme Erkki: / ((naurua)) Marja: so what do you think is the English language. in your opinion is it important do you need it in Finland . English skills (2) Aino: ((sigh)) no you don’t need it because you can manage here in Finnish but. but aren’t there more travellers coming so it would be good to be able to give some directions to them so you could tell them that don’t cross over that ditch jump jump ((laughter)) over the next one Marja: yes (2) Aino: so you know you don’t bump into it otherwise because it is a different thing. if there comes. foreign language speaker across your way so how you want to show it Marja: right yes (5) Aino: >yes you know you know our knowledge is quite bad< / ((laughter)) our knowledge Erkki: / ((laughter)) The fact that Aino starts talking after a small pause and with a deep sigh could imply that she has difficulties in answering this particular question about the importance of English in Finland. She talks about the increasing number of travellers and how it would be good to know some English to be able to give directions. Aino’s remark about giving directions on which ditch to jump over also shows irony: it seems probably very unlikely to her that there would be many foreign tourists in a small place such as theirs. The long pauses between utterances indicate, however, that this issue is somewhat difficult for Aino and Erkki to get into. Furthermore, after a longer pause, Aino starts quietly saying how their knowledge is bad and ends up laughing, with Erkki joining in. The laughter here could mean that what Aino is saying feels awkward to her and she eases it up by laughing. Erkki’s laughter probably indicates that he agrees with what Aino has just said. Another example, Extract 11, shows something of their lack of self-respect that has more to do with their life altogether. Aino and Erkki both talk about how they have managed their lives well without any skills in English but then turn it around by saying how their expectations have not been very high either: Extract 11 Marja: no tota onko teistä koskaan tuntunu siltä että olisitte jääny jostain asiasta ulkopuolelle tai paitsi sen takia että ette oo osannu englantia

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(2) / eei / en oo ainaka huamannu kaikki kaikki on käyny käyny aina että mitä mitä on koittanu nin kyä se on suamenkielellä käyny ihan . mutta se että vaatimustasokin on on vähän huano ((naurua)) Marja: so have you ever felt that you have been left outside of some matter or have you missed something because you haven’t had English skills (2) Aino: / no Erkki: / not that I have noticed Aino: everything everything has always worked worked out fine whatever there has been it has worked out in Finnish. but that’s because our demand level is is a bit low ((laughter)) Aino: Erkki: Aino:

Neither Aino nor Erkki feel that they have been left out of anything because of having no skills in English. They, however, paused for a while before saying anything, and it thus seems that they had to think about this for a couple of seconds. However, they also say that they have managed everything quite adequately in Finnish, hence they do not feel left out on anything, at least not in Finland. Nevertheless, Aino wants to add that their demands are low and therefore they have not needed English. It seems that Aino is really saying that their life has been so simple that they have not had any demand for English, as if the knowledge and use of English were somehow connected to a more prosperous, higher-class life. Again Aino laughs after finishing her sentence, maybe to hide her embarrassment a little. Nevertheless, the overall feeling one gets from Aino’s last sentence is rather self-depreciating, again giving an indication of the feelings of lack of self-respect. These feelings also seem to be connected to them being deprived of some things in society when they have not had access to languages earlier on in their life (Extract 5 above), and their feelings of belonging to a lower class in society (Extract 16 below). Exclusion from full social participation Even though Aino and Erkki themselves feel that they have not been left out of anything because of their lack of English skills, there are some indications of exclusion in the discourse constructed in the interview. Some aspects of life in Finland might, in fact, be difficult for Aino and Erkki to follow or to fully understand. Today there are many company names that are in English even when the ownership is Finnish and the company only functions in Finland (Taavitsainen and Pahta, 2008). This tendency of companies taking English

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names to either become more international or try to achieve certain prestige is becoming a reality, and this may actually cause problems to some people trying to figure out what services a specific company provides. Extract 12 shows an example of Aino and Erkki trying to determine what the named companies specialize in. Marja presents them with some examples of company names that make use of English: Extract 12 Marja: sit totanin mullon taas teille täälä ((naurahdus)) tämmänen paperilappu. tässä on muutaman suomalaisen yrityksen nimiä (2) tiedättekö mitä mitä totanin. mitä nää yritykset tekee tai myy tai Aino: jaa’a pap pappa tietää eikös nää metso metso kon se on metso papperi eiks se Erkki: toi on toi on paperi / paperifirma mutta >kompuuter< Marja: / joo’o metso paper (3) Aino: ja kyl kylä mää tommosen tommosen kompuutterin kuullu oon mutten mää sitä muista mikä se o ((naurua)) Marja: so now I again have here ((laugh)) a piece of paper. here are the names of a few Finnish companies (2) do you know what what. what these companies make or sell or Aino: well grand grandpa knows don’t these metso metso because it is metso paper so isn’t it Erkki: that is that is paper / paper firm but >computer< Marja: / yes metso paper (3) Aino: and yes yes I have seen that that computer I have heard it but I can’t remember what it is ((laughter)) Both Aino and Erkki seem to think really hard about the names they see. Throughout the whole interview, Aino has been the talkative participant, while Erkki has mostly stayed in the background, occasionally commenting on something, but now Aino gives Erkki the floor. It seems that she believes that Erkki has better knowledge of company names, thus perhaps resorting to traditional gender roles. The first one (Metso Paper) seems to be fairly easy to work out, perhaps because the clear resemblance of the Finnish word paperi and the English word paper, and Metso is the name of an old Finnish company, most likely familiar to them. Computer, however, is clearly more difficult for them, as Finnish does not help here (the Finnish word for computer is tietokone). The couple have to spend a few seconds trying to mouth the word. Aino, however, admits that she has heard and seen the word computer before, but cannot remember what it means. At this point Aino and Erkki do not seem to be very bothered

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about the fact that they do not understand the word computer, because at least Aino is rather content that she can claim to have heard and seen this word before. The name Hair Store, however, is not difficult to understand (Extract 13). Aino quite quickly figures out that it must have something to do with hair: Extract 13 Marja: joo (2) sitten on hair store (2) Aino: >se on se on oudompi mutta kyllä se kyllä sen täytyy jottain hiuksista sannoo< ((naurua)) Marja: yes (2) then there’s hair store (2) Aino: >that’s a little stranger but it has to it has to say something about hair < ((laughter)) The word hair must have appeared often in familiar hairdressers’ company names or in TV and magazine advertisements, because Aino recognizes it so easily. The word store is not, however, familiar. What all of this shows is that even older people can keep up with the changes in language to an extent, and they can recognize expressions that appear often enough in various familiar contexts (see also De Bot and Makoni, 2005 for language development in old age). But when the contexts are more abstract and the changes rapid, keeping up with them becomes more difficult. For example, Aino and Erkki were also asked to identify words that originate from English, but are adapted to Finnish. Some of these words have been in use for a longer time, but more recent words included innovaatio, globalisaatio and chattailla. However, these words are nowadays heard and seen daily in various media. Extract 14 demonstrates how difficult these well-adapted English words are to understand for this old couple, even though they come across them daily. Extract 14 Aino:

ja / (2) mikäs pakana toi innovaatio siitton ihan kysymys nyt ollu täsä viime aikoina Erkki: / innovaatio ((hiljaa)) Erkki: juur juur luin tosta tostakin Aino: nii ja globalisaatio on samate samaten (2) mutta kunnei pa mieleensä ((harmittelevasti)) Aino: >innovaatio< ((mietiskellen)) mikä ernomanen tommonen innovaatio on kun alvaria sen lehrestä lukkee Marja: nii meinasin just kysyä että onko ootteko kuitenki törmänny näihin sanoihin mitä tossa listalla on

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Aino: Erkki:

on / on molempiin ei ei tartte pitkältä / lukkee lehtee / on on on on / ihan ihan on ihan on ollu joka päivä tää tääkin tullee ku lukkee lehtee Marja: aiva Aino: and / (2) what on earth could that innovation be it has just been talked about quite recently Erkki: / innovation ((quietly)) Erkki: I just just read it somewhere Aino: yes and globalisation also (2) but one just won’t memorize them ((annoyed)) Aino: >innovation< ((pondering)) what on earth can that innovation be when you regularly read it on the papers Marja: yeah I was just about to ask whether you have seen anyway these words that are on the list Aino: yes / yes both of them one doesn’t have to read / the paper for long Erkki: / yes yes yes yes / it has been [in the paper] every day this too comes up when you read the paper Marja: exactly It becomes quite apparent that the words innovation and globalisation are not completely foreign to Aino and Erkki, because both of them explain how they have run into these words and read about them recently. Again they explicitly want to express that they have seen these words before, and that they are aware of the changes in their language. However, they still remain bystanders and outsiders when the full meaning of these concepts is in question. Both of them seem somewhat frustrated by the fact that they do not know what these words mean exactly. Especially Aino feels quite disappointed at herself for not memorizing the words and their meanings, again expressing feelings of self-depreciation. During the whole interview Erkki has been the quieter and less enthusiastic participant, because he said at the beginning of the interview that he has never been interested in languages. Aino, in contrast, has been very keen on talking about her interest in languages. However, when the company names are presented, it is Aino who quite rapidly makes it clear that these are Erkki’s ‘cup of tea’. Furthermore, in Extract 15 Aino makes some interesting claims about the words globalisation and innovation and their possible connection to traditional gendered division of labour. Extract 15 Aino: Erkki: Aino:

globalisaatio ((hyvin hiljaa mietiskellen)) onks toi joku semmonen ää (3) ää ne on ne on paremmin ninkon miästen asioita noi innovaatio ja globalisaatio

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Aino: Erkki: Aino:

globalisation ((pondering very quietly) is that some something uhm (3) uhm they are they are more like men’s affairs these innovations and globalisations

Aino quietly ponders upon the word globalisation and is obviously trying hard to find the right meaning for the word. However, even though Erkki has been the more silent participant, he now makes an attempt to contribute to the discussion by trying to explain what globalisation means, and therefore Aino soon makes assumptions that the words globalisation and innovation must be more familiar to men and really belong to men’s affairs as she explains. This assumption of men’s affairs could also imply that Aino is thinking about the time when it was mostly men who were engaged with current issues in politics or business, for example, and women were more tied to domestic chores. The following extract illustrates how elderly people feel about the changes in their own language and how they might react to unknown words and concepts: Extract 16 Aino: Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Aino: Marja: Erkki: Aino: Erkki: Marja: Aino:

Aino: Erkki: Marja: Erkki: Aino: Marja:

juu nin toi globalisaatio niin kun ne on ne on tuala jo noi öö valtion herrat ja ministerit . ne puhhuu näitä sanoja mainittee aiva mutta mää en kylä tiä yhtään sannoo että mitä se . ei se se on semmosta kun sen antaa mennä toisesta korvasta sissään ja toisesta ulos joo eikä kaikkee voi muistaa ei ne ne hypätään ylitte vaa ja jatketaan lukua / lukemista ((naurua)) / ((naurua)) lukemista eikä kiinnitetä siihe mittään huamioo että mitä se tarkottaa ni aiva juu ja kyllä se monta kertaa selitettykin on että että kyllä kyllä nää kyllä nää tiätää pitäs mutta kun mutta kun mennee kaikki tollai yes that globalisation yes because it is those it is those government officials and ministers. they talk about these and mention these words yes but I have no idea what it is. no it’s it’s so that you let it go in one ear and out of the other yes and you can’t remember everything

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no we just ignore them and keep on read / reading ((laughter)) / ((laughter)) reading and pay no attention to what it means yes exactly yes and that has been explained many times so that so that one should know these but they just all go past just like that

Two things become evident in this extract. First of all, it shows how the couple feel that some spheres of life are, in a way, beyond their reach. There are the ‘them’ in society, who use the kind of language that ‘we’ do not understand. In this case they are referring to government officials, and they use the Finnish expression valtion herrat, which literally means state masters (⫽ government officials), and the expression has deep roots in Finnish history. Generally, it refers to the division between poor farm workers and the wealthy upper classes, and this attitude has a centuries-old history. There have always been those who have been oppressed by those who have the power: earlier they were poor peasants who were bound to their landlords and later factory workers whose livelihood depended on the factory owners. With the use of the word masters, Erkki probably means that this kind of language use and the topics these people handle do not touch the lives of the likes of Erkki and Aino. They do see and recognize the words but their meanings are beyond their comprehension. They place themselves in the lower classes of society, the manual workers’ class, and perhaps they feel that they have always been somehow oppressed and there have always been ‘state masters’, whom they do not quite understand, and now this oppression is taking new forms with globalization and the growing multilingualism. Secondly, it shows that they have developed a strategy to cope with the changing language. When one encounters unknown words, one just ignores them and reads on. The individual him/herself might not see that this has any great effect in their lives, but nevertheless they are excluded from these discourses, discourses which might concern their lives as well. And as they do not understand, they cannot have a say either.

Conclusion The couple, Erkki and Aino, two 90-year-olds, living in the Finnish countryside have lived a full life without any skills in foreign languages and they have managed quite well in their everyday activities and their familiar environment. They do not feel that they have been left out of anything even though they know practically no English. They are, however, very well aware of the fact that things are changing in their immediate environment, in Finland, and in the world more generally. They notice that foreign words appear in their linguistic landscape (e.g. in company names),

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in new technologies, in newspapers and in the talk of people in high social positions, but they are not fully aware of what these words mean. When encountering foreign elements in language, they just have to ignore them and try to get a grasp of things without these words. In other words, their own language has changed due to globalization and multilingualism and even their own immediate environment is to an extent becoming alienated. Consequently, some discourses have become inaccessible. They themselves also feel that they are not part of this development any more, as they frequently refer to their low expectations and demands. Aino and Erkki have perhaps always felt that they belong to the lower classes of society and that there have always been rulers controlling their lives: they have been manual workers, they have lived in the countryside (but they have not been farmers), and there have been different kinds of gatekeepers of knowledge. At school, the teachers were the gatekeepers and controlled the knowledge passed on to the pupils. On the whole, there were also fewer opportunities for learning for people living in the countryside. This has led to divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between those who know and have the power and those who do not know and have to ignore. Today, this division has taken new forms due to increasing multilingualism. The language used by ‘them’ has become foreign and strange to the likes of Aino and Erkki, and therefore some discourses in society are beyond their grasp and they are forced to remain bystanders. In the account of Aino and Erkki, there is clear evidence of lack of self-respect, which is a sign of marginality. On a certain level, the elderly may be well aware of globalization and the ensuing multilingualism in their environments, but this awareness is not enough to prevent marginalization. At the level of the individual this might not pose a danger: those marginalized by multilingualism are perfectly capable of carrying out their everyday tasks and fulfilling their daily needs. But at the societal level, there should be concern: the elderly are not the only group in society that is potentially marginalized as a consequence of increasing multilingualism. Thus there is a danger that multilingualism may lead to societal division into those who have the necessary skills and are able to participate and those who lack the skills and are thus excluded at least from some spheres of life and denied access to full participation.

References Baker, R. (1995) Communicative needs and bilingualism in elderly Australians of six ethnic backgrounds. Australian Journal of Ageing, 14(2), pp. 81–8. Baker, R. (1996) Language testing and the assessment of dementia in second language settings: a case study. Language Testing, 13(1), pp. 3–22. Blommaert, J. (2008) Grassroots Literacy. Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. De Bot, K. and S. Makoni (2005) Language and Ageing in Multilingual Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Dörnyei, Z. (2007) Research Methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative, Qualitative and Mixed Methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duff, P.A. (2008) Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Edwards, V. (2004) Multilingualism in the English-Speaking World. Malden: Blackwell. EurActiv Network (2008) Language Use in the EU. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 13 February 2010. EUbusiness (2008) A Guide to Languages in the European Union. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 13 February 2010. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001) Making Social Science Matter. Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Galasin´ski, D. and A. Galasin´ska (2005) Untold stories and the construction of identity in narratives of ethnic conflict on the Polish–German border. Multilingua, 24(4), pp. 101–20. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007) Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Leppänen, S. and T. Nikula (2007) Diverse uses of English in Finnish society: discoursepragmatic insights into media, educational and business contexts. Multilingua, 26(4), pp. 333–80. Leppänen, S., A. Pitkänen-Huhta, T. Nikula, S. Kytölä, T. Törmäkangas, K. Nissinen, L. Kääntä, T. Räisänen, M. Laitinen, P. Pahta, H. Koskela, S. Lähdesmäki and H. Jousmäki (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 6 September 2011. McKay, S.L. and W.D. Bokhorst-Heng (2008) International English in its Sociolinguistic Contexts. Towards Socially Sensitive EIL Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Mullaly, B. (1997) Structural Social Work. Ideology, Theory and Practice, 2nd edn. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press. Nikula, T. and A. Pitkänen-Huhta (2008) Using photographs to access stories of learning English. In P. Kalaja, V. Menezes and A.M.F. Barcelos (eds) Narratives of Learning and Teaching EFL. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–85. Ruusuvuori, J. and L. Tiittula (eds) (2005) Haastattelu. Tutkimus, tilanteet ja vuorovaikutus [Interview. Research, Situations and Interaction]. Tampere: Vastapaino. Scholte, J.A. (2000) Globalization: a Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taavitsainen, I. and P. Pahta (2008) From global language use to local meanings: English in Finnish public discourse. English Today, 24(3), pp. 25–38. Young, M.I. (2000) Five faces of oppression. In M. Adams, W.J. Blumenfeld, R. Castañeda, H.W. Hackman, M.L. Peters and X. Zúñiga (eds) Readings for Diversity and Social Justice. An Anthology on Racism, Antisemitism, Sexism, Heterosexism, Ableism, and Classism. New York: Routledge, pp. 35–49.

13 When One of Your Languages is not Recognized as a Language at all Elina Tapio and Ritva Takkinen

Introduction In the last 100 years attitudes towards deaf people and sign languages have changed drastically. During this time the deaf gradually became more visible in society: from the mid-eighteenth century an interest in sign languages began to develop, and in the middle of the nineteenth century education for the deaf began. In these early days deaf education could be described as bilingual, sign language being the medium of instruction. For the deaf this meant the emergence of a strong national and international network for the Deaf1 community. Deaf culture flourished until the time of oralism, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted to the 1970s. Oralism is an educational system based on the view that the teaching of speech enables deaf people to become normal, thus reflecting the medical view on deafness which sees it as a condition to be cured. Signing was excluded from education because it was considered a form of gesturing that would hinder children from learning speech, thus – it was believed – preventing them from gaining a full human status. However, in the 1970s linguistic research showed that sign languages are natural languages. As a consequence, people who worked with deaf children started to emphasize visuality in communication. Gradually research on sign language produced more information and the status of signed languages improved. Also language education for the deaf underwent a profound change: in Finland, for example, Finnish began to be considered a second language for the deaf. In practice, this meant that the focus in education was on developing reading and writing skills especially, while the Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) was considered the first language of deaf children and was the language of instruction. The 1980s and the 1990s were the best decades for the sign language community: during these decades deaf children were allowed to learn and use sign language, while hearing parents of deaf children were encouraged to learn sign language and entire families started to sign. 284

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Despite these positive developments, oralism and the medical view on deafness are still powerful. The Deaf community continues to be in a permanent state of emergency. For example, the old oralist discourses have once more become widespread since a new hearing aid, the cochlear implant (CI),2 was introduced at the beginning of the 1990s. The implant has frequently been advertised as a ‘miracle cure’ for deafness and often as a reason to do without sign language. Thus, the Deaf community is faced with forms of neo-oralism according to which sign language is taken to be linked to disability and is often seen as even disabling the Deaf and hindering their full participation in society. In practice, Deaf people constantly have to fight for the right to use sign language at school and at work, and to be vigilant to ensure that ‘the others’, that is hearing people, do not make decisions for Deaf people which would deprive them of their right to use their preferred language. These are the issues we will focus on in this chapter. In particular, we will concentrate on the experiences of sign language families and Deaf individuals when they face the ignorance and disparagement of sign language. Firstly, the chapter will discuss how FinSL is still seen as an inferior language that could possibly hinder a deaf child from learning what is considered ‘the real language’, in our case, spoken Finnish, and how sign language is not seen as a valuable language for a hearing child of deaf parent to learn. Secondly, we will discuss the battle Deaf individuals go through when they seek recognition for their linguistic repertoires. In other words, we will discuss the dynamic tension between identities asserted and chosen for the individual by the education system, the hearing majority and the Deaf community. These experiences have a great deal to do with what is considered ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ language, and they effectively foreground how a minority language, its learning and use, is effectively policed and disciplined by scientific and educational discourses. Our goal here is to mediate the voice and the stories of individuals whose preferred language has not been recognized as a language at all, and whose multilingual potential has been seen as linguistic deviance by the majority. For data the chapter draws on interviews which were designed so as to allow conversation, narratives and self-reflection to emerge. Our first set of data3 comprises interviews with hearing parents who have chosen to use FinSL with their deaf children in addition to Finnish, and interviews with Deaf parents of both deaf and hearing children who use FinSL (and some other signed language) and Finnish. These interviews focused on how the languages function in the families’ everyday life and what attitudes towards their language choices they have encountered in the institutions – hospitals (hearing centres), child health clinics, day-care centres, schools – they have dealt with as well as among relatives and friends. The second set of data4 consists of interviews with two Deaf men who are multilingual in several spoken and signed languages. In the interviews with parents a

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semi-structured interview was used (see Hirsjärvi and Hurme, 2004), while the interviews with the two Deaf men can be described as active interviews.5 The language of the interviews was Finnish for the hearing parents and FinSL for the rest of the interviewees. All the interviews were video-recorded. This was done in order to make sure that we were able to come back to what was said, as we are both late learners of FinSL.6 These data make it possible to investigate the individual voices of the Deaf: how the interviewees experience their lives as multilingual persons when one of their languages is a signed one, and how they reflect on their identity processes by looking at the past and to the future. The next section will set the scene by briefly introducing the cultural and linguistic background typical of the kinds of persons we have interviewed. We then move on to show how, from the viewpoint of signing families, there is a conflict between the Deaf view and paternalistic and medical viewpoints on deafness. The section after that represents the experiences of two young adults who have already gone through what the Deaf families discussed in the preceding section are now experiencing. Our chapter will close with a discussion of how both the experiences of Deaf families and individuals emphasize the existence of strongly polarized views of what is seen as normal/abnormal language and the way in which such polarization makes their lives full of tensions and conflict.

The Deaf as a cultural and linguistic minority This section will describe the prevailing sociocultural view of Deaf people and the way in which most of the Deaf learn sign language and become multilingual. It will also discuss some aspects of the Deaf community which are different from other linguistic and cultural minorities. The most important of these is how the medical view on deafness conflicts with the sociocultural viewpoint, the way the Deaf see themselves. In English-speaking countries deaf native signers call themselves Deaf with a capital D, by which they imply that they identify themselves as culturally Deaf (see Woodward, 1972; Ladd, 2003). The Deaf form a group in which their language and culture are based on visual modality. The Deaf also emphasize that they are seeing people (Bahan, 1989), in contrast to hearing people whose language and to an extent culture are auditory. The Deaf community also includes the hard of hearing people who share a common language, experiences and values with the deaf, and a common way of interacting with each other and with hearing people. The current definition of the Deaf is thus sociocultural, or sociolinguistic or culturo-linguistic (Ladd, 2003; see also Baker and Padden, 1978; Lane et al., 1996; Jokinen, 2000). With the improvement of the status of sign languages in Western countries, in Finland Deaf people started to see themselves as a linguistic minority. Also a new term ‘sign language person’ (viittomakielinen) was established

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(Jokinen, 2000, 2001). As a term sign language person highlights, not the lack of hearing, but the language used by a particular group, in the same way as for example the terms Finnish speaker or Swedish speaker do (cf. the term native signer in e.g. Lane et al., 1996; Ladd, 2003). As a minority, sign language people are different from all other linguistic minorities. This is due to several factors which have to do with the modality of the sign language, the way it is acquired by most of its users, the process of socialization into this linguistic minority and its link to disability. For the hearing majority it is natural to assume that language and speech are synonyms, while embodied communication is seen as subordinate to auditory communication. In fact, the modality of sign languages most likely is a significant factor contributing to why hearing people generally do not consider sign languages as natural languages but associate them with gestures and mime. The transmission of language and culture from one generation to another differs in most cases from that of other ethnic groups. The children of Deaf parents naturally become native signers and have the possibility to adopt Deaf culture, no matter whether the children are deaf, hard of hearing or hearing. However, over 90 per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents who do not know sign language, Deaf people or culture. These children have the opportunity to learn sign language if their parents study it and sign with their deaf children. In addition to having a signing family environment, it is important that deaf children can socialize with other Deaf persons in the Deaf community. The unique way of the transmission of language and culture for the majority of the members of the Deaf community leads to another fundamental characteristic of the community that we want to highlight. This is that when membership is not acquired through birth, it can be considered, desired, achieved, but also rejected. The stories of individuals finding the Deaf community, their fellow signers, are often stories of literally coming and going to places where sign language flourishes: to Deaf schools, Deaf clubs or other meetings of Deaf people. The Deaf community is a strong global community with millions of people who share similar experiences, culture and visual languages with their place among majority spoken languages (Breivik, 2005; Jokinen, 2000, p. 100; Salmi and Laakso, 2005). Recently, transnational identity among the Deaf has been getting even stronger, thanks to the possibilities given by new communication technologies (Breivik, 2005; Luukkainen, 2008). Yet another significant feature of the Deaf linguistic minority is its link to disability. For centuries Deaf people have been seen as disabled people. The cultural–linguistic model of deafness, suggested by the Deaf themselves, has mostly been ignored. Instead, the link between this particular language and deafness seems to justify attempts at wiping out a linguistic minority in the name of curing a disability.7 As a comparison: with no other

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linguistic minority are the representatives of the medical profession given the authority to guide families in their linguistic choices. For a member of a linguistic minority it is also essential to know the majority language, because it enables them to fully participate in society. For those who acquire a signed language early, the learning of other languages (at least in the written form) is easier than for those who do not have access to sign language (Prinz and Strong, 1998; Singleton et al., 1998; Shantie and Hoffmeister, 2000; Padden and Ramsey, 2000; Niederberger, 2008). In many countries bilingual and bicultural education has yielded positive results (e.g. Hansen, 1989, 2002; Svartholm, 1996, 2005; Lane et al., 1996; Hoffmeister, 2000; Ardito et al., 2008; Krausneker, 2008; Yang, 2008). Most of the Deaf learn the majority language in a written form, but some also learn a spoken form. It is only recently that the Deaf have begun to be considered multilinguals. There has been a shift from seeing them as individuals who are struggling to learn one real (i.e. spoken) language to seeing them as ‘a new generation of Deaf multilinguals’ ( Jokinen, 2005). This shift now shows in for example how bilingualism is promoted in education (Malm and Östman, 2000, p. 10; Salmi and Laakso, 2005, p. 43). Many Deaf students use foreign languages in and outside school and are proficient in several sign languages, thus making the transnational nature of the Deaf community explicit in their linguistic practices (cf. Luukkainen, 2008, pp. 152–60; Tapio, in progress). Despite many positive changes, the members of the Deaf community are still in a permanent state of emergency which is caused by a backlash in institutional attitudes by which doctors, psychologists and even speech therapists in hearing centres have returned to the medical and disability view on deafness prevalent in the nineteenth century. The reason for the changed attitudes is the introduction of the cochlear implant in the mid-1990s, leading to a renewed emphasis on oral communication instead of signing. As a result, there has been a shift from signing to oralism, not only in Finland, but also elsewhere in Europe and America, even though there the use of sign language among hearing families of deaf children has not been as common as in Scandinavia (e.g. Johnson, 2006, pp. 331–2). For hearing parents of deaf children, who had since the late 1970s learnt and used sign language to communicate with their children, the introduction of the implant also meant a radical change. Now the general feeling is again that sign languages are not as good as spoken languages for children’s cognitive and linguistic development (Wallvik, 1997; Lane et al., 1996; Johnson, 2006). At this point it is important to note that this backlash in attitudes and practices undermines what is now known of signed languages. While in the nineteenth century there was no research on sign language as a natural language, there now is a substantial body of knowledge of the structure, function and acquisition of signed languages internationally and in Finland

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(e.g. Rissanen, 1985, 1998; Pimiä and Rissanen, 1987; Takkinen, 1994, 2002, 2003; Jantunen, 2003, 2008; Malm, 2000; Malm et al., 1998; Fuchs, 2004; Rainò, 2004). Against this background, one can only wonder at the persistence of oralism, and the inability to listen to Deaf discourse and the vast research on language acquisition by the Deaf. One explanation of the stubbornness of the agenda towards the Deaf is suggested by Ladd (2003) and Johnson (2006) who have come to the conclusion that it is not due to sheer ignorance, but to some ‘deep level of “folk mythos”’ (Ladd, 2003, p. 172). Johnson (2006, p. 29) argues, for instance, that speech-based educational practices actually rest on philosophical principles that are not supported by logical argumentation and scientific evidence, but actually ‘resemble systems of belief and practice that encourage the denial of observable facts’.

‘They do not respect my language’ In this section we give hearing families with deaf children and Deaf families with deaf and/or hearing children the opportunity to voice their experiences in the current situation described in the previous section. We will describe how they perceive and interpret the current attitudes towards bi- and multilingualism when one of the languages in their family is a signed one. Deaf children using a cochlear implant (CI) in hearing families The data discussed here come from five interviews with hearing parents of deaf children who have a CI. The ages of the deaf children were at the time of the interview 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 years. The signing skills of the parents had developed over a long time, although their signing was still to an extent influenced by the grammar of Finnish. However, their intention was to offer a visual language to their deaf children who could not acquire a spoken language without special teaching. All the parents had a positive attitude towards sign language and Deaf culture. They also hoped that their children would preserve their signing skill and even develop it further. A typical comment by them was, ‘bilingualism is, of course, enrichment, no matter what languages they are [in a bilingual setting]’ (Parent 6).8 The parents considered it to be very important that their child could use sign language in case the hearing aid is not in use. In their opinion, the ability to sign would give a feeling of safety to the child, since s/he would always have a way to communicate. The following interview excerpts illustrate this view: […] she can then communicate with the implant and without it. Anyway, there would always be some channel [for communication]. (Parent 6) […] Almost all the parents of CI children are in a sense aware that the child should also have some other [way to communicate] because the

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implant can get broken and [the child needs] a new operation and it takes time […] but maybe everyday life is so draining that not everybody has the capacity [to study sign language]. (Parent 5) Nevertheless, most parents of children with an implant do not choose to learn sign language because it is laborious and the professionals of hearing centres do not recommend it. However, if the parents were encouraged to learn and use sign language more of them would definitely do so. This was seen in the 1980s and 1990s when almost every Finnish parent of deaf children started to learn sign language and use it with their deaf child. Children who are diagnosed as deaf or who need a more accurate diagnosis are sent to hearing centres which treat hearing problems. The first people the parents meet there (a doctor, a speech therapist, a psychologist, a nurse who tests hearing ability, a technician and other staff members) are people who are interested in the hearing ability of the child. Nowadays the centres suggest a CI for most deaf children and emphasize speech a great deal. According to the parents interviewed, hearing centres recommend that before implantation the signs are used to support speech, but that after the implantation signs should be used only when necessary. Their preferred advice on how parents should communicate with their children when they have started to recognize sounds is speak–speak–sign–speak. The idea is that the child is pushed to listen to spoken language, and if s/he does not get the word or the idea, then the parent can sign (the word) but return to speaking again after that. The aim is to eventually leave out the signs when they are not needed any more. Signs are thus regarded as an aid and sign language is considered to be a hindrance to learning to speak and thus the bilingual acquisition of a signed and spoken language is not successful. One of the parents interviewed confirmed this as follows: […] They say that if you put in two languages, especially if one is a visual and the other an auditory language, the visual message is so strong that it takes over the auditory one. It would be so much easier by the visual modality that the child would be too lazy to listen to the auditory message […]. (Parent 5) This medicalized argument to downgrade the significance of signing is exactly the same one which was used at the turn of the twentieth century; consider for example the following extract: […] When they heard in the hearing centre that she has sign language instruction at school for one hour a week they were a little bit like, h’m […] you should feed only spoken language into her [instead of sign language]. (Parent 5)

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Signing is also regarded as problematic by speech therapists who are concerned about the influence of FinSL on Finnish word order if the families use real sign language instead of separate signs or signed Finnish.9 If the parents are determined to sign with their children and especially if the child’s speech is improving, the staff only do the control check on the CI and check speech development but do not ask anything about the development of sign language. This is a way to undervalue sign language. Although the parents hoped that sign language or some signing skill would be preserved along with speech, they still did not work to strengthen sign language input, for example by trying to find signing contacts or signing fairytales for the children. It may be that in this respect at least the parents do not have a realistic understanding of how to support bilingualism, that they do not value sign language, or that they do not have the energy for arranging more support for sign language development. In any case, when they agreed to have a CI for their children they simultaneously made a commitment to provide them with speech stimuli as much as possible (see also Johnson, 2006). In sum, these parents sought information about sign language on their own, because they did not get it from the hearing centres. They were also determined to use sign language, although they were warned not to do so because it would disturb the grammatical development of Finnish. On the other hand, the parents did not invest enough time and effort in strengthening their children’s sign language skills although they had chosen to use sign language with their children. One reason for that is that the parents are uncertain of how much they can use sign language with their children so that it would not disturb the development of Finnish. Deaf and hard of hearing children in Deaf families In two interviews we talked with Deaf parents who had deaf or hard of hearing children. These children did not have the CI. The first family has two deaf children, aged nine and six, and one hearing child aged three, while the second family has one deaf child aged eight and one hard of hearing child aged six. These Deaf parents had used sign language since their childhood, although three of them were born to hearing parents. Thus, the language of interaction in the families is FinSL, and the children have acquired FinSL from birth. The written language of the families is Finnish. All the children, whether hearing, deaf or hard of hearing, have FinSL as their native language. These parents also regularly visited hearing centres with their children. The children used acoustic hearing aids. Both families had refused the CI, although it had been offered and even pushed at both families. Both families felt that it was the mothers who had discussed and argued more than the fathers with the doctors and speech therapists about the children’s language choices. In their view this was because they had more knowledge

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and courage to do so than the fathers. These confrontations had been very stressful for the mothers, but they had been successful in resisting the pressure to accept the CI for their children and the disregard of sign language. The mothers’ resistance is apparent in the following examples: I went to the hearing centre for the first time when the child was one year old. The doctor asked why I had come so late if I knew the child was deaf. I said, ‘it’s fine to come now,’ but the doctor answered, ‘no, it’s too late now. Your child can’t learn to read and write any more.’ I said, ‘how come? Why shouldn’t he learn to read and write? I use sign language and I am studying at university.’ The doctor’s answer to that was, ‘you’re an exceptionally talented deaf person.’ (Parent 11) At the hearing centre they do not understand that sign language can be a child’s native language. When our hearing child has been there with us, the staff have been worried because she only signs. One of them said, ‘the child doesn’t speak. Can she speak at all?’ I think their values are different from ours. They think that there is something wrong if the child doesn’t speak in an unfamiliar situation but uses her mother tongue, sign language, instead […]. (Parent 11) From the medical viewpoint sign language is considered a hindrance to learning to speak, read and write, and to learning other languages. If a sign language user is studying at university level, s/he is considered exceptionally talented. For example, according to one parent a hearing centre psychologist stated: ‘If one cannot hear, one cannot learn to read and write.’ How have I learnt to read and write then … and my home was full of books. Do you think they were there for decoration? ‘No, you are an exception.’ (Parent 12) The parents told how frustrating it is to try to talk about deafness and the experiences of a Deaf multilingual adult. At some point they just stop explaining and say, ‘Oh, I see’. The parents feel that their opinions are of no value. They are not heard, even when they are Deaf themselves. The frustrating experiences of the parents are also apparent in the following comment: A member of the staff said that it is important to speak and have the hearing aids on. The parents sign in vain at home because there is a hearing sibling. You can all talk together. I insisted, ‘no, the first language in our family is FinSL, even the hearing sibling signs first.’ They don’t understand anything! (Parent 11) According to one parent, even a speech therapist in a hearing centre, who should be a language specialist, underestimated sign language and did not

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appreciate the child’s reading and writing skills either because the speech skill was not as good. If the child does not want to speak s/he gets poor evaluation although s/he can read and write. A parent reports on this as follows: A speech therapist wrote in the statement that the child’s language skills are at the level of a two-year-old. I said, ‘you cannot write that. He is in the first grade and can already read and write. You need to state that his sign language skills are at his own age level, and the skills in speech [Finnish] are at the level of a two-year-old, but the reading and writing skills are almost at his age level. You cannot underestimate his language skills!’ […] We do not have any problems with the speech therapist who is visiting regularly at home. She knows sign language and has a good attitude towards it. They study Finnish but she does not force him to speak if he doesn’t want to […]. (Parent 11) In general, relatives and people in the neighbourhood seem to accept and understand the children’s bilingualism and the use of sign language, at least after the parents have explained to them the issues involved in these practices. Also the young nurses in the child health clinics seem to understand the use of sign language and bilingualism, whereas the medical staff in hearing centres are generally taken as the most serious problem in the life of these families. One of the parents argued that their only problem is the medical sector and the doctors: But if you are active and have an open mind you get along everywhere. One needs to explain things over and over again. Sometimes I get tired of explaining […]. (Parent 11) The Deaf parents would prefer a school in which the teachers are native signers with a teaching qualification and where the quality of instruction is high. However, such schools are difficult to find. Therefore Deaf parents try to find the best possible school even if it does not offer a signing environment for their children. As a consequence, the parents are sometimes criticized by other Deaf people. In sum, the parents who are native users of FinSL have experienced a lot of disrespect towards their native language and towards the language proficiency of their signing (bilingual) children especially in hearing centres. They have also faced criticism from the Deaf community, when they have chosen for their children a school which does not offer a sign language environment. Hearing children in Deaf families In two interviews we talked with Deaf parents of hearing children. The ages of the children in one of the families ranged from 10 to 17, and the age of

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the child in the second family was five. The multilingual development of the teenage children of the first family was advanced compared to the other family whose child had only reached the age when children, in general, have learnt the basic structure of their mother tongue. The languages of the children in the first-mentioned family were FinSL, Finnish and English. The child of the second family knew FinSL, ASL (American Sign Language), Finnish and English. In both families one of the parents was a user of FinSL and the other a user of ASL. The grandparents were users of FinSL and English respectively. Both families were living in a Finnish-speaking environment. In both families the first hearing child seemed to have learnt most slowly the spoken language of the environment. In the first family, unlike the oldest child, the younger children already had a model of spoken Finnish close to them. One of the parents explained the situation as follows: […] We have deaf friends whose hearing children have adopted sign language from their parents in a normal way. They told us that the child learns FinSL first and then learns to speak Finnish. At first the signing is ahead, but then spoken language catches up with it. Also the next child acquires the signed language first but s/he acquires spoken language quicker than the first child because his/her older sibling can already speak. When I knew this in advance, I wasn’t worried when the doctor in the hospital was concerned about how our hearing child would acquire spoken Finnish […]. (Parent 14) The parents said that it is important also for the staff members of hospitals, child health clinics, and day-care centres to know that they should not be too hasty in sending a child to tests or speech therapy. In the hospital the personnel asked if we could teach the child to speak. It seemed to us that they have no respect for my language, sign language. Their way of talking is a bit insulting. Why aren’t they interested in sign language? […] They are more worried about speech: how does he speak, how does he speak […]. (Parent 13) […] We tried to tell the doctor that he would later become bilingual, multilingual. I noticed that in Finland they immediately intervene when it comes to speech. He tried to arrange speech therapy but I said no. I want the family to be allowed to sign in peace. Communication is working well, he already understands many signs. I suggested to the doctor that he should test it, but he was not interested in that, only suggested speech therapy. (Parent 13) Sometimes the relatives want to give advice on how to raise hearing children and to make sure that they learn to speak. This also happened in the first

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family where the hearing grandmother tried to interfere in the language choices of the family. She had never signed to her deaf child so she still had the opinion that spoken language is crucial. However, the Deaf parents were firm, and did not let the grandmother control their family life. Later she was very happy that her grandchildren knew many languages and could communicate with their parents. In contrast, those relatives who knew Deaf people did not strive to give any advice on how to communicate with hearing children. For the Deaf community it has always been a surprise if a hearing child can sign fluently. One of the Deaf parents talked about such differences in the ways people think about the multilingualism of the Deaf: […] One view is that of younger Deaf people who have studied and travelled a lot. They are very international and understand multilingualism well. The other view is that of older Deaf people or Deaf people who haven’t got much education and who go to work and back home but do not travel much. It is a surprise for them how hearing children can sign so well and know so many languages. Some have even expressed the opinion that parents should speak to their hearing children […]. (Parent 14) […] When I sign with my children others [Deaf people] look surprised and comment that the children sign very well, they sign like Deaf people […] I am not always sure if that is a positive or a negative comment […]. (Parent 16) These comments reflect the power of hearing doctors and teachers who in the oralistic period told deaf parents to speak to their hearing children. Consequently, not every Deaf family gives their hearing children the opportunity to acquire sign language and become bilingual. Both of the families interviewed knew Deaf parents who speak to their hearing children, resulting in poor communication: ‘They lacked contact with their children’ (Parent 15). The hearing children of the first family had attended CODA10 courses, and had learnt that sign language is not self-evident for every CODA. The parents told how their children had been confused, and […] defended the children’s right to sign language as if they themselves were Deaf […] and one of them said that it is nice that we can talk about anything: ‘It is good that I can communicate with my father.’ (Parent 16) Many Deaf people think that it is easy to have and raise hearing children, even easier than to raise deaf children. However, to raise children to be bilingual and bicultural is not a simple task. For example, one of the parents said that […] we’ve worked hard to raise the children to be bilingual and bicultural. It would be easy to give up – many people have done so – we need to give

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information and stimuli even more to hearing children [because there] is no sign language for them at school or elsewhere. […] I am happy to see that our work over the years has not been in vain […]. (Parent 16) In short, these Deaf parents of hearing children had experienced prejudice among medical staff against bimodal and bilingual language acquisition. However, the Deaf parents had experienced more surprise at or suspicion of bilingualism (using sign language with hearing children) by the Deaf community than by hearing people. In sum, all the interviewed families had encountered disrespect for sign language especially at hearing centres, in which the ability to speak was taken to be the goal for everyone. The kind of bilingualism which includes as one of the languages a sign language is not respected or supported by those having the medical viewpoint, no matter whether the children are hearing, hard of hearing or deaf. If the children are deaf, the CI and technology overcome linguistic diversity and sociocultural viewpoints. On the other hand, Deaf parents had also encountered suspicion, especially on the part of older Deaf members of the Deaf community, in connection with bimodal multilingualism of hearing children. These parents were advised only to speak to their hearing children.

Every Deaf person is a fighter for linguistic rights In this section we will consider interviews with two Deaf men, Kristian and Will, who are both multilingual in spoken and signed languages. Here we present another view of the situation of deaf children in signing families, but this time the stories are told by these two young adults who are actively trying to make sense of what it has been like to grow up in the middle of conflicting views on deafness and signed language – two things that are at the core of their identity. Kristian. Getting lost in the hearing world – coming back to the Deaf world As was discussed earlier, one feature that makes the Deaf community different from other language minorities is the way in which its members are brought into it: only a fraction of them are born to Deaf parents. Thus, their socialization is strongly motivated by finding one’s place, ‘the true self’. This came up in the interviews with Kristian whose process could be called a journey from the outskirts of the Deaf community to the very core of it. Two interviews with Kristian formed a narrative of his life consisting of five phases: early childhood, ‘the oralist era’, the time in Helsinki, the present time as a full, active member of the Deaf community, and the future.

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Early childhood Kristian was born to a hearing family. From very early on his parents learned FinSL and, consequently, it became Kristian’s first language. Having studied language learning and reflecting on his own linguistic background, Kristian emphasized that sign language was his first language: ‘Nonetheless, when I was small, it was my first language, I acquired FinSL, and I also went to deaf school.’ This emphasis is done for a reason; there are many late learners of sign language in the Deaf community, mainly hard of hearing people who, for example, get in touch with the Deaf through sports or secondary education. It seems to be of crucial importance for Kristian to recognize that he is not a typical late learner of a sign language but for him FinSL came before Finnish. This seems to give him one more reason to call himself Deaf and a sign language person (viittomakielinen), to use terms that are heavily scrutinized in a community where membership comes through birth only to a fraction. The oralist era Despite the early exposure to FinSL, before entering primary school, a county school for the deaf and hard of hearing, Kristian oriented towards speech; he felt that sign language was embarrassing and he wanted to use speech instead with his hearing peers whom he had got to know in kindergarten and the neighbourhood. He did not feel he belonged or even wanted to belong to the group of deaf peers. He described that time in the following way: […] Nevertheless, when I was small, it was my first language, I acquired FinSL, and I also went to deaf school, but it feels there is this irony in all this: I had the opportunity as a child already, but I didn’t use it. I kind of wanted, and it was my own attitude, to orient to the hearing world as I said before. My mum encouraged me to sign at home, but I refused, or told her not to sign. Interestingly, he emphasizes that it was his own choice to prefer spoken language, hearing peers and the hearing world in general over sign language, although he recognizes many factors that guided him to take that path: hearing peers in the neighbourhood and later a school with a rather indifferent attitude towards Deaf culture. He often referred to the negative attitudes he had had towards sign language, using signs such as ‘despised’, and mentioning that he had had ‘this attitude’ towards sign language and the Deaf community. This strong expression referring to his past gets an explanation later on in the interviews when he refers to what happened as ‘a trauma’ which could also be described as a source of guilt and regret that seems to be necessary for him to address with somewhat harsh words. During the interview, Kristian sometimes referred to his early childhood as ‘the time I spoke’, occasionally using the sign ‘oralism’, a sign that is

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generally used only when referring to the oralist era in Deaf history. This unconscious, yet very emotionally loaded choice of word links that time in his life metaphorically to the darkest era of oppression in Deaf history. The time in Helsinki With his mother’s encouragement, Kristian enrolled in an upper secondary school in Helsinki instead of the local mainstream one. In Helsinki, there was a well-established system for integrating a group of deaf students in a hearing school using a team of sign language interpreters. The beginning of his Helsinki years he experienced as a shy observer. He was not able to understand the young signers’ slang and also felt unwelcome in the group. The process of becoming a member of the Deaf community took years, during which he got close to the group a few times and also backed off: ‘When analysing myself later on, I realised that I fled. I didn’t have the courage yet. I wasn’t ready to meet the Deaf community, so I concentrated on studying.’ However, at the same time Kristian saw for the first time that the Deaf world is a strong global community, rich in culture and language, instead of a small minority, as a ‘national and international community of people with their own beautiful languages, their own organisations, history, arts and humour, their own lifelong friends whom otherwise we would not have met’ (Ladd, 2003, p. 37). Kristian stated that his bad signing skills were the main reason for his struggle to become a member of the community: Because my signing was bad, signed Finnish, I missed words and finger spelled them. My signing was small and I wasn’t expressing myself freely – andit disturbed them, because I am a Deaf person. They, like […] the Deaf community, are used to the fact that a Deaf person has to sign well, but I was, one can say that I was like a hearing person. I was hard of hearing, I had hearing aids, and I hear a bit too, but now I think, I don’t use hearing aids but I hear a bit if I use them. So, in principle I’m deaf and my identity is based on that a lot. Back then they saw me more as a hard of hearing person.11 My skills were bad, I used hearing aids. Some of them were the same age as me and had seen my attitude at the deaf school, how I despised sign language and didn’t want to sign. […] That could be one thing that bothered them; they had seen my attitude how I wasn’t interested in their group or activities. This rejection, coming from the Deaf élite12 especially, was not explicitly expressed. Rather, subtle innuendoes and withdrawn eye contact made Kristian feel that he was treated as an invisible individual. As Kristian stated, a Deaf person is not supposed to sign and act like a hearing person. A person signing ‘sopa-sopa’ (a sign with clear mouthing /sopasopa/ with

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a simultaneous rhythm with the movement of the hands representing glossing spoken Finnish with signs) is abnormal in the eyes of both the majority and the Deaf community: for some he is this ‘hand-waving person’, whose communicative abilities can easily be questioned, while at the same time for the Deaf he is a deaf person who cannot sign properly, an abnormal Deaf person. A full member of the community – ‘in the inner circle’ After three to four years he finally ‘got in’. He not only made friends with the Deaf and became fluent in sign language, but also became very active in Deaf organisations. At the time of the interviews he was studying FinSL at university to become a subject teacher of the language. Although Kristian is a fully fledged member of the community now, the process of ‘coming back’ is still ongoing. This is seen, according to him, in his need to now reflect on what happened earlier, and in his need to show himself and the Deaf community that he is now putting FinSL first instead of Finnish. As we discussed the rapid changes in his life and the polarizations that are rather visible in his story – sign language versus spoken language, being outside the Deaf community versus the role of a Deaf fighter – he explained the motivation behind his current way of life. For his active role in voluntary work, he notes: ‘I have to show [the élite] that I’m doing a lot, that I really mean it! I need to pay back, correct the loss and ask them to accept me as a member.’ When the interviewer asked him about his Finnish language skills and attitude towards Finnish, he explained how it is now time to settle an old score: ‘With good Finnish skills one gets appreciated because it is a majority language. I myself want to emphasise and promote Finnish Sign Language, instead of Finnish. This is because of my childhood trauma.’ However, his motivation to raise FinSL above Finnish, especially the spoken form of Finnish, does not merely stem from his personal choice to live through a strong sign language era after the ‘oralist’ one, it is also a response to the resurrection of the old oralist discourses. Kristian reflects this with an example from his work with CI children who are very curious to know whether Kristian can speak or not: ‘Speaking is once again emphasised, just like back in the oralist era.’ A strong Deaf person When discussing the prevalent polarized view of signing versus speaking, the interviewer wanted Kristian to explain his desire to ‘lift up the Finnish Sign Language’ and also to reflect whether he actually sees the situation as a battle between two languages. He explained how he is aware that many of his feelings and attitudes toward languages are still very much a sign that ‘the childhood trauma is still there – the process is not finished yet’. He himself recognized the polarized views around and in him, yet reckoned that

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in the future, when he is ‘a strong Deaf person’ there would be more balance in his life allowing for more openness in himself towards Finnish. Will. From a speech- and language-impaired child to a successful multilingual person The two discussions with Will concentrated on his schooling, languages at school and his own understanding of himself as a multilingual Deaf person. Will comes from a Deaf family (Deaf parents and an older Deaf sibling) from a European country, and learned sign language from his parents. During his school years, Will changed schools many times.13 He started in a nursery for hearing children, but during his first school years he attended a special education school in both the group for deaf children (oralist method) and in the group for children with speech and language disorders. Very soon he was transferred to mainstream education in the same town. However, the evenings and nights he spent in the deaf school premises together with deaf peers. In the mainstream school, he used an FM-hearing aid, sat at the front of the classroom, and tried to listen to and lip-read the teacher. However, this was very tiring and in his teens he stopped using his hearing aid, moved to the back of the classroom and copied the notes from his classmates in order to follow the classes. For five years, Will did not hear what was said in the classroom and was basically idle at school and studied for the exams from the books at home. After his basic education, Will started business studies and also national sign language at university level. After graduation he moved to Finland to study sign language at university and has lived there ever since. A lot of attention during his education right from the beginning had been devoted to his spoken language skills, and his time at school was very much coloured by incidents where his ability to speak or lip-read was tested. He said that he did not even know what it would have been like, if people had seen him as he was – a native signer, a multilingual individual – and not as a deaf kid struggling to learn the majority language. In the interview, he talked about an incident where he and his friend had had a chance to discuss the way the school had ignored his linguistic background with their former teacher: I met my old teacher four, five years ago. A friend of mine asked him, ‘By the way, do you know how many languages Will knows?’ The teacher didn’t know, and my friend told him I knew around eight or nine languages. The teacher was surprised. My friend then wondered, ‘why then was Will sent to a class of speech- and language-impaired children? Isn’t it a bit ironic?’ The teacher answered, ‘you are right. At the time people didn’t know sign language is a language at all. The only thing that caught my attention was that his spoken language was a bit so so.’ I told him that I understood that back then signed languages were pushed

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aside, they were not counted in and spoken language was what mattered. That’s the way it is […]. Will’s mother tongue was not seen as a language at all. All the effort was invested in the learning of the majority language and the compulsory foreign languages. Will did not fight for the recognition of sign language until the last year of secondary school. The teacher had noticed that suddenly Will’s home essays had improved, and asked Will for the explanation for this: I answered that it had been my tutor that had given me extra help with the essays. The teacher then reminded me, ‘I hope you understand that in the exam you have to sit alone, with no extra help.’ I answered back, ‘no can do. I hope you understand that the language is the second language for me. It is sign language that is my mother tongue.’ That was the very first time I announced that. The teacher gave me a look […] ‘what did I just say?!’ went through my head. My friends were laughing and cheered, but the teacher just said, ‘well, that’s OK.’ Once again I failed the exam but the teacher let me pass the course. Every single year I would have failed in the language but the teachers let me pass. Constantly failing in languages (although his term reports show high scores in languages) frustrated Will. At university he was given permission to study languages on his own or with private lessons given by the lecturers and professors. In this way he felt he actually learned well. He started to see himself differently as a language learner partly through questioning the position the education system had taken with him. ‘Is my success good or bad for the Deaf community?’ Will himself thought that his ability to quickly pick up both spoken and signed languages is due to his background: well-supported sign language acquisition has created a solid basis for other languages to build on. Yet, he often has doubts about this: She [a teacher of Will’s] was the first one to tell me that I am gifted in languages. I was really surprised. But I’ve never known why people say that I’m talented in languages. Is it because I can talk, or why? Just as Will has been doubtful about his idea of himself as a linguistically talented person, he has also been questioning the reasons for his linguistic abilities. What if the reason lies in the fact that he hears a bit? The following discussion that took place in a workshop on Deaf children’s education and Will’s reflection on it, gives a good example of how a deaf individual

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is both confronted and many times perplexed by the oralist views on deaf education that undervalue the status of sign language: I asked, ‘Where in the curriculum is the mention of sign language teaching?’ My question was followed by a heated discussion. I said that I strongly believe that when a child gets a strong basis, a linguistic foundation, it is easy to learn other languages too. One hearing man, a very famous figure in the field of deaf education and an orthopedagogue, talked with me in person during the break. He said that it is important to learn the majority spoken language because that is the way to be involved in society, to get a job. I said that I’m a good example; I know many languages because my parents are Deaf and I’ve got a strong foundation in sign language. He replied immediately, ‘that is not the reason. The reason is that you can hear a bit. You can hear a little, you speak well, and that’s why you learn languages well.’ I was taken aback. I have to say that even today I’m uncertain. Do I learn languages because I’m good at sign language or because I can hear a little and speak well? I actually said to my first Deaf teacher, ‘Sometimes I doubt whether I’m a good example after all. I can hear a little, I speak well, I really do, and I know many languages.’ […] When I think about these two possibilities, the theory, my feelings and my wish goes for [my strong basis in] sign language. But has it been proved to be so yet? The answer to Will’s last question is ‘yes’, as we have seen earlier on in this chapter. Will himself is also aware of the research that supports bi- and multilingualism for deaf children, yet, as we see here, it is not easy to state the facts and believe them when people with authority in education and medicine are constantly questioning them. By devoting this last section to the narratives of two young Deaf adults, we have shown how Deaf individuals experience the clash between medical/oralist discourses and sociocultural discourses on deafness at different times of their lives. The interviews also show how Kristian and Will have processed the tension between the paradigms, how they have coped in the past with the pressure to disregard their first language. The interviews also show how they experience and fight back against the old discourses of the nineteenth century that are back after a few decades of truce.

Conclusions and discussion The history of the Deaf and sign languages has progressed from the time when deaf people did not get any education, to bilingual education in the mid-nineteenth century, to oralist education with poor success, to a new

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rise of sign language with research into sign languages as well as Deaf history and culture. As a result of giving sign language the status of the first or preferred language of deaf children and providing them with bilingual education, proficiency in Finnish and foreign languages among the Deaf has improved. As an outcome of these decades we now see many young Deaf people studying in secondary and higher education. In general, the self-esteem of the Deaf as a linguistic and cultural group has grown stronger. However, oralism has now gained ground again with a new hearing aid, the CI. With it, the old discourses and arguments of the oralist era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have also returned. The interviews with the parents gave a clear picture of the conflict between the parents and the personnel of the hearing centres. The hearing centres focus on the development of hearing and speaking, and consider sign language only as a temporary aid when developing ‘the real language’, while the parents themselves would like to see all languages, signed and spoken, recognized and supported. On the contrary, the parents told how sign language was totally ignored by the medical staff who only asked questions related to the spoken language. The use of sign language in the families was also openly criticized by the medical staff. The criticism had been justified with arguments that echo the oralist discourse, such as that signing can hinder a child from learning spoken languages. However, there are new features in the discourses of neo-oralism: it is believed that the technology has come to cure humanity of deafness. The pressure to accept a CI for deaf and hard of hearing children is strong, and it is seen as a miracle device that transforms deaf people into hearing people. The media present the success stories of the CI, causing the relatives and neighbours of signing families to have unrealistic expectations of the hearing aid. The interviews with the parents as well as the two Deaf men, Kristian and Will, revealed several polarized views in relation to deafness: signing is juxtaposed with speech, visual with auditory and the deaf with the hearing. There seemed to be very little room for pluralistic views that do not see the one excluding the other. The polarization was the most explicit in several cases where the parents were made to choose between sign language and spoken language. However, the polarized views also seemed to feature strongly in the interviews with Kristian and Will. Kristian used polarization in his description of his identity process. In addition, at the time of the interview, he insisted on placing FinSL above Finnish in order to deal with the regret of having a time in his life when FinSL was put aside. Will, on the other hand, was experiencing an inner battle when trying to decide whether his academic success was a result of his strong foundation in sign language or of the fact that he can hear a bit. Thus, the interviews with both Kristian and Will foreground the narratives identified by Luukkainen

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(2008) in her work on Deaf identity: the reductive narrative of deafness as an abnormality and the counter-narrative which is used to fight back against oralism. How is the Deaf community coping with a situation of renewed ‘warfare’ after being empowered by a few decades of the Deaf awareness movement and the strength of the global community of Deaf people? The situation is complex: the community and its members have to stay alert to the threats coming from outside, but, at the same time, the individuals are in the process of constructing identities not based on these polarized views. The Deaf also have several different opponents they have to face when fighting for their rights: the medical view on deafness, oralism, myths and ignorance. All of these rely on the same conviction: deafness is a deviation from the normal. At present, it is rarely explicitly stated how deafness is seen as an abnormal state of being, but despite the politically correct wordings, the actions aim to cure and hide deafness. It is enough if deaf people appear to be cured, people who have ‘overcome their abnormality’ are presented to the media, while the competent, signing, non-speaking Deaf are considered an exception among other Deaf people, as was also shown in our interviews (see also Ladd, 2003, p. 163). After contemplating the narratives on the interviewees we were concerned that possibly the more the community or an individual is attacked by questions concerning their potential to be normal communicating people, the less room there is to see and present diversity – multiple languages and modes in use. Thus we are looking forward to a time when the identity and linguistic resources of sign language people will be seen from a wider perspective, entailing that neither a Deaf person as an individual nor the community of Deaf people no longer have to concentrate on self-defence, but can define themselves on their own terms.

Notes 1. We will here follow the convention of the Deaf community and Deaf studies and capitalise Deaf when it signifies people who identify with a specific Deaf cultural and linguistic group, i.e. the sign language people. The uncapitalized word ‘deaf’ will be used when we refer to a person’s audiological status. 2. A cochlear implant is a device that provides direct electrical stimulation to the auditory nerve. In sensorineural hearing loss where there is damage to the tiny hair cells in the cochlea, sounds cannot reach the auditory nerve. With a cochlear implant, the damaged hair cells are bypassed and the auditory nerve is stimulated directly. The cochlear implant does not result in ‘restored’ or ‘cured’ hearing. It does, however, allow for the perception of sound ‘sensation’. Cochlear implants have external (outside) parts and internal (surgically implanted) parts. (See , date accessed 15 March 2009.) 3. Ritva Takkinen is responsible for collecting and analysing the first set of data. 4. Elina Tapio collected and analysed the second set of data.

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5. In the active interview both the interviewer and interviewee play an active role in interaction (Holstein and Gubrium, 1997). The methods of interviewing here strongly resemble narrative interviewing. However, narrative interviewing usually aims at collecting biographical material and relies heavily on long narratives told by the interviewee. 6. Ethical questions concerning anonymity, data collection and linguistic choices in the interviews have been considered carefully. Because of our awareness of the issues of power surrounding the Deaf community (see e.g. Harris et al., 2009), the participants were given access to the process of analysis of the interview data especially with respect to controversial issues. 7. This paternalistic, hearing-centred endeavour is called audism. Lane (1999, p. 43) defines it as the way the hearing dominate, restructure and exercise authority over the Deaf community. 8. The interviews of the hearing parents were in Finnish, and those of the deaf parents in FinSL. The quotes in the text are translated into English. 9. The term ‘signed Finnish’ means that Finnish speech is coded with signs in the same order as the words of the Finnish sentence (see e.g. Kuulokynnys, 2011; VIIVI, 2008). In America there are also similar systems (about signed English see e.g. Johnson, 2006). 10. CODA is an abbreviation of the words child of d/Deaf adults. 11. The medical profession has also been responsible for identifying subgroups in the sign language community, yet this categorization can be seen as reflecting the way ‘the others’ have categorized the Deaf from the outside. 12. Kristian referred to Ladd’s (2003) concept of the élite in the Deaf community, i.e. the Deaf children of Deaf parents, the ‘core’ of the community. 13. In Will’s home country the situation for deaf education is slightly different from that in Finland. Firstly, the education provided is remarkably more oralist and secondly, in terms of rights and possibilities, for example getting interpreting for further studies, the country is way behind Finland.

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VIIVI – Viittomakielisen opetuksen portti (2008) Viitottu puhe [The gate to signed teaching. Signed Speech]. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 13 September 2011. Wallvik, B. (1997) ...ett folk utan land... [a People without a Country…]. Karleby: Österbottningen, Döva och hörselskadade barns stödförening r.f. Woodward, J. (1972) Implications for sociolinguistic research among the Deaf. Sign Language Studies, 1, pp. 1–7. Yang, J.H. (2008) Sign language and oral/written language in deaf education in China. In C. Plaza-Pust and E. Morales-López (eds) Sign Bilingualism: Language Development, Interaction, and Maintenance in Sign Language Contact Situations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 297–331.

Index abnormality, 1, 5–7, 9, 11, 15–17, 34, 42, 64, 190, 202, 208, 210–12, 214, 217, 219, 224, 229, 230, 235, 244, 255, 256, 263, 285, 286, 299, 304 assessment, 68, 69, 75, 77, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 100, 105, 106, 129, 263 attitudes, 14, 17, 33, 58, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 82, 86, 91, 92, 93, 102, 113, 122, 123, 125, 126, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 146, 147, 154, 155, 159, 169, 177, 178, 181, 182, 187, 188, 210, 224, 281, 284, 285, 288, 289, 297, 299 beliefs, 76, 78, 123, 143 bilingualism discourses of, 42, 59, 288, 289, 296 functional, 14, 68, 90, 99, 103, 104, 107, 108, 116, 121, 138, 291, 293 official, 13, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 41, 44, 55, 59, 62, 185, 189 societal, 26, 36 biography, 16, 207, 211, 215, 220 case study, 126, 229, 261 classroom, 28, 33, 68, 71, 80, 87, 91, 96, 97, 100, 214, 300 code alternation, 242 crossing, 253 mixing, 199 switching, 7, 153, 154, 162, 190 cohesion cultural, 189 social, 42, 43, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 62 Common European Frame of Reference (CEFR), 2, 75, 191 competitiveness, 46, 47, 48, 53, 60, 62 computer-mediated communication (CMC), 229, 233, 258, 259 computer-mediated discourse (CMD), 228, 241, 257

content-and-language-integrated learning (CLIL), 150, 160, 164, 168, 169 core curriculum, 25, 32, 72, 73, 74, 75, 89, 98, 99, 102, 110, 116, 208 crossing, 2, 15, 190, 202, 248, 253 Danish, 130, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188 deaf education, 284, 302, 305 deafness, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 292, 296, 302, 303, 304 discourse analysis, 223 discourses, 13, 15, 16, 17, 44, 48, 53–6, 60, 62, 63, 122, 126, 138, 142, 144, 149, 163, 200, 207–12, 215, 217, 218, 222–4, 228, 229, 235, 254, 256, 264, 281, 282, 285, 299, 302, 303 disorder, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 25, 34, 43, 61, 62, 67, 190, 194 diversity cultural, 1, 4, 48 ethnic, 43, 46, 47 linguistic, 14, 41, 43, 46–9, 51–62, 67–9, 97, 124, 129, 135, 139, 144, 146, 151, 176, 187 societal, 8, 48 sociolinguistic, 7, 231 dominance, 151, 160, 162, 178, 195 education, 2, 4, 7–10, 25–7, 32–4, 37, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56–63, 67–74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87–92, 96–100, 103, 112–16, 123, 127, 129, 138, 143–7, 149, 150, 159, 164, 179, 181–4, 207–11, 223, 262, 284, 285, 288, 289, 297, 302, 303 elderly people, 16, 17, 30, 261–4, 280, 282 empowerment, 4, 67 endangered language, 4, 18, 30 English, 11, 32, 33, 37, 53–7, 60, 83, 96, 129, 130, 133, 142–67, 177–80, 182, 184–91, 195, 196, 198–200, 207–23, 228–56, 262, 264–81 309

310

Index

equality, 1, 52, 54, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 78, 81, 88, 90, 91, 92, 144, 159, 163, 184, 189, 198, 228 ethnography, 231 ethnolinguistic assumption, 2–5, 106 exclusion, 2, 16, 43, 52, 125, 159, 230, 245, 250, 255, 261, 276 Faroese, 179 Finland Swedish, 35, 162, 183, 232 Finnish, 11–13, 25–9, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 55–60, 67, 68, 70–86, 89, 93, 96, 101–3, 105, 107, 115, 116, 122, 124–6, 129, 132–4, 142, 143, 146, 147, 156, 157, 161–3, 165, 177–82, 184, 187, 189, 191, 196, 200, 232, 235, 254 football, 16, 228–36, 239, 241, 244–6, 254–7 French, 56, 57, 130, 145, 147, 182, 190 genre, 135, 201, 229, 230 CMC genres, 233, 241, 243, 248 editorial, 147 innovation, 199 letter to the editor, 147 mixing, 9 rap, 200 German, 26, 56, 57, 80, 96, 130, 145, 147, 182 Germanic languages, 12, 178, 179, 182 globalization, 2, 8, 10, 14, 17, 41, 47, 55, 60, 63, 138, 143, 148, 166, 177, 211, 254, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 269, 281, 282 governmentality, 3, 5, 43, 49, 61 history of bilingualism in Finland, 26, 91 Deaf history, 298, 302, 303 of Finland, 10, 13, 14, 69, 70, 122–4, 164, 178 of language teaching in Finland, 57 humour, 234, 236, 238, 239, 241, 243, 248, 249, 255, 257, 298 hybridity, 2, 5, 13, 15, 51, 63, 91, 181, 190, 198, 202, 228, 229 Icelandic, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 188 identity (1)

classed, 246, 247 cultural, 3, 4, 8, 56, 68, 99, 125, 134, 136, 144, 200 Deaf, 304 double, 251 ethnic, 2, 3, 4, 125, 139, 189 ‘fake’, 241, 246, 248, 249, 251 linguistic, 6, 113, 122, 125, 138, 144, 150 national, 12, 27, 42, 124, 125, 127, 129, 133, 136, 138, 143, 144, 149, 152, 158, 162, 167 Nordic, 158, 190 Northern, 184 professional, 196 ‘real’, 231, 234, 235, 245, 246, 251 self-identity, 127, 128, 137, 164, 286, 296, 299, 303 social, 215 transnational, 287 virtual, 241 identity construction, 125, 128, 225, 304 identity negotiation, 209, 251–2 identity play, 228, 251, 252 ideology ethnolinguistic, 12 language, 2–4, 6, 15, 34, 42, 43, 142–7, 154, 163–7, 199, 219, 228–30 modernist, 90 of multilingualism, 62 nationalist, 12, 28 of social cohesion, 62 immigration, 2, 8, 10, 11, 14, 41, 58, 62, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 83, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 115, 121, 139, 146, 184 immigrant students, 14, 59, 67–9, 71, 72, 75–8, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88–93, 96–100, 102, 103, 105, 108–10, 112–15, 116 impurity, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 34, 190, 202 inclusion, 2, 52, 125, 185 indexicality, 9, 134, 143, 163, 200, 223, 230, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251 indigenous languages, 7, 50, 149, 151, 178, 179, 202 indigenous peoples, 4, 41, 179, 184 inequality, 15, 54, 78, 159, 176, 255, 263, 264

Index integration, 9, 57, 92, 146 integration policy, 2, 3, 9, 58, 59 interview, 68, 82, 97, 101–4, 106, 107, 109, 111–16, 123, 196, 197, 207, 210–16, 225, 264–6, 269, 271, 274, 276, 277, 279, 285, 286, 289–91, 293, 295–7, 299, 300, 302–4, 305 Irish, 165, 195–202 Kven, 178 language acquisition, 288–90, 296, 301 L2/FL acquisition, 88, 191, 197, 234 contact, 8, 16, 231, 261, 265, 269, 273 education, 44–6, 55, 57, 59, 61–3, 70, 76, 87, 98, 99, 115, 284 education policy, 14, 43, 44, 46, 55, 57, 67–9, 71, 73, 90–2, 97, 197 hierarchies, 42, 43, 55, 58, 81, 82, 194 ideology, 2–4, 6, 34, 42, 43, 62, 142–7, 154, 163–7, 199, 219, 228–30 labelling, 43, 49, 51, 125 planning, 201 language instruction Finnish as a second language (FSL), 74, 75, 82, 84, 85, 86, 96, 99, 102, 108, 189 first language (L1), 68, 71, 73, 74, 77, 80–3, 86, 93, 96, 98–101, 103, 109, 116, 150 foreign language (FL), 32–4, 44, 53, 56–62, 74, 75, 96, 144, 145, 207, 208, 234, 270, 301, 303 mother tongue, 72, 74, 94 second language (L2), 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 73, 86 sign language, 302 language policy covert, 194 European, 43, 262 Finnish, 28, 36, 71, 146 institutional, 209 modernist language policies, 6–8 Nordic, 34, 176, 177, 180, 190 Norwegian, 182 overt, 194 school, 80

311

societal, 211 studies, 6 Swedish, 62 late modernity, 2, 4, 8–10, 13, 18, 61, 70, 85, 90, 92, 142, 148, 167, 177, 202, 228–30, 252, 254, 256, 257 Latin, 7, 26, 33, 201 linguistic rights, 4, 7, 11, 13, 25, 28, 30–2, 34, 36–8, 41, 42, 57, 79, 115, 138, 146, 153, 161, 163, 164, 184, 188, 198, 201, 202, 285, 295, 296, 304, 305 Liverpool, 231, 245–9, 251–4, 257, 258 marginalization, 9, 16, 75, 90, 144, 159, 163, 177, 198, 261, 262, 264, 274 media, 2, 9, 15, 132, 143–54, 163, 164, 182, 186, 194–8, 215, 278, 303, 304 metaphor, 161 minorities, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 28, 29, 35–7, 42, 56, 67, 73, 98, 121, 123, 129, 138, 139, 184, 194, 202, 286–8, 296, 298 minority language media, 194–202 minority languages, 3, 11, 25, 28, 49, 73, 121, 178, 179, 194–202, 285 mobility of people, 14, 51, 67, 145, 146, 179, 201, 211, 223, 262, 263 social, 8, 17 of texts, 245 mockery, 213, 230, 231, 235–45, 247–50, 253–5, 257, 258 modernity, 1, 2, 4–10, 17, 18, 34, 67, 70, 90, 92, 125, 127, 135, 136, 142, 148, 167, 194–6, 202, 228, 229, 240 monolingualism, 3, 7, 8, 12, 33, 36, 41, 42, 48, 53, 54, 58, 61, 67, 69, 96, 101, 102, 114, 115, 133, 135, 144, 163, 182, 195 multiculturalism, 3, 41, 48, 69, 70, 78, 92, 105, 112, 114, 159 narrative, 12–13, 124, 137, 164, 165, 265, 285, 296, 302, 304, 305 national curriculum, 68, 73, 77, 79, 89 national language, 11, 12, 25, 27–30, 32–4, 36, 37, 41, 49, 51, 54–62, 67, 124, 142, 148, 154, 157, 158, 163–5, 167, 177, 184, 186, 189, 191

312

Index

nation state, 2–5, 8, 10–12, 14, 15, 35, 42–4, 58, 60, 62, 67, 93, 123, 125, 142–4, 148, 158, 163, 165–7, 195, 198, 201, 202, 263 new media, 9, 202, 228, 229, 233, 241 newspaper, 72, 78, 116, 132, 142–4, 147, 232, 273, 282 Nordic cooperation, 158, 163, 176, 177, 179–82, 184–90 Nordic languages, 178–80, 185–7, 190, 191 normality, 3, 5–7, 9, 13, 16, 34, 190, 195, 201, 208, 210–12, 214, 215, 217, 219, 224, 263, 284–6, 294, 304 normativity, 2, 5–7, 9, 15, 16, 34, 36, 46, 58, 90, 144, 181, 190, 194–200, 201, 202, 208, 209, 212, 214–17, 219–21, 223, 224, 226, 228–30, 255 oralism, 284, 285, 288, 289, 295–300, 302–5 order, 2, 4–10, 13, 25, 33–7, 42–4, 49, 61, 67, 68, 70, 78, 91, 96, 97, 100, 112, 113, 115, 124, 139, 190, 194, 217, 222, 228, 229, 247, 254 participation, 147, 208, 218, 231, 242, 264 patriotism, 27, 28, 149, 151, 162, 246, 254 plurilingualism, 79, 82, 85, 97, 102, 103, 105, 113, 114, 115, 116 policy documents, 13, 41, 43, 44, 47, 55, 61, 62 postcolonial, 4, 7 power, 42–4, 46, 52, 81, 84, 88, 91, 112, 143, 150, 154, 177, 189, 194, 198, 199, 201, 203, 209–12, 216, 217, 224, 228, 230, 242, 266, 271, 274, 281, 282, 295, 305 proficiency, 16, 31, 54, 106–8, 114, 128, 129, 154, 159–61, 163, 181, 207, 208, 210–15, 217, 218, 221–4, 233, 293, 303 purism, 34, 116, 186, 190, 195–8, 201 purity, 4–6, 9, 34, 35, 115, 122, 124, 138, 142, 156, 163, 176, 181, 186, 190, 195–200, 228

questionnaire, 76, 93, 126, 270 radio, 194–9, 273 repertoire communicative, 135, 241, 255 language, 55, 57, 59 linguistic, 37, 90, 91, 126, 132, 134, 194, 198, 199, 201, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216, 220, 222, 223, 230, 241, 285 multilingual, 52, 147, 196, 230 truncated, 63, 212, 222, 223, 241 resources discursive, 210, 216, 217 language, 8, 41, 60, 97 linguistic, 8, 63, 115, 134, 189, 190, 196, 202, 208–12, 220, 222–5, 228, 230, 234, 235, 247, 253–5, 304 multilingual, 16, 58, 97, 102, 114, 115, 245, 247, 250, 255, 256 multisemiotic, 250 semiotic, 228, 230, 234, 245, 247, 250 Roma, 11, 37, 41, 56, 73, 79, 98, 179 Russia, 10, 12, 14, 15, 27, 70, 121–9, 131, 164 Russian, 11, 14, 15, 27, 36, 52, 55, 56, 57, 74, 101, 104, 106–8, 116, 121–38, 145, 147 Sámi, 3, 4, 11, 26, 37, 41, 42, 56, 73, 98, 179, 180, 195–200, 202 Scandinavian/skandinaviska, 15, 158, 176, 181–90 school, 6, 8, 36, 62, 67–93, 96–116, 132, 145, 181, 271, 282, 287, 293 Scouse, 231, 245–56 sign language, 11, 37, 42, 73, 179, 255, 284–305 socialization, 62, 208, 209, 219, 221, 223, 224 sociolinguistics, 1–3, 6–10, 17, 18, 207, 212, 223, 224, 229, 231, 254 standardization, 17, 82, 124, 194–6, 199, 201 stay abroad, 207, 211 super-diversity, 8–10, 41, 43, 55, 60, 63, 177, 189, 229

Index survey, 33, 42, 68, 69, 75, 76–93, 96, 98, 146, 159, 262, 265 Sweden, 10, 26, 35, 37, 58, 69, 70, 93, 112, 123, 124, 164, 178, 179, 181, 183, 186, 187, 190, 191, 269 Swedish, 11–13, 25–37, 41, 55–60, 62, 67, 68, 73, 80, 83, 89, 93, 96, 100, 105, 116, 124, 129, 133, 147, 152, 157, 162, 164, 177–91, 232, 244, 270, 272

313

teacher, 14, 28, 33, 52, 68, 75–92, 96–116, 271, 282, 293, 295, 300, 301 technology, 198, 268, 296, 303 Turkey, 233–7, 240, 244 university student, 126–39 web forum, 228, 229, 231, 257, 258 working life, 16, 34, 56, 102, 103, 133, 207, 208, 211