Language Policies in Finland and Sweden: Interdisciplinary and Multi-sited Comparisons 9781783092710

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction
1. Diverse Discourses in Time and Space: Historical, Discourse Analytical and Ethnographic Approaches to Multi-sited Language Policy Discourse
Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media
2. Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse: Finnish and Swedish Legislative Processes in the 2000s
3. Building Walls or Bridges? A Language Ideological Debate About Bilingual Schools in Finland
4. Language Rights of the Russian-speaking Minority in Finland: Multi-sited Historical Arguments and Language Ideologies
5. The Art of Societal Ambivalence: A Retrospective View on Swedish Language Policies for Finnish in Sweden
Part 3: Individuals as Constructors and Reflectors of Language Policies
6. National Language Policy at the Local Level: The Realisation of Language Legislation in Late-19th-Century Finland
7. Making the Case for the Mother Tongue: Ethnic Activism and the Emergence of a New Policy Discourse on the Teaching of Non-Swedish Mother Tongues in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s
8. Everyday Language Policies: Embodiment of Language-Related Experiences of Finnish Women in Sweden
9. ‘Listen, There’ll Be a Pause After Each Question’: A Swedish Lesson as a Nexus for Multi-sited Language Education Policies
Part 4: Epilogue
10. Epilogue: Multi-sited Language Policies – Where Have We Come From and Where To From Here in Language Policy?
Index

Citation preview

Language Policies in Finland and Sweden

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Series Editor: John Edwards, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada Multilingual Matters series publishes books on bilingualism, bilingual education, immersion education, second language learning, language policy, multiculturalism. The editor is particularly interested in ‘macro’ level studies of language policies, language maintenance, language shift, language revival and language planning. Books in the series discuss the relationship between language in a broad sense and larger cultural issues, particularly identity related ones. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS: 157

Language Policies in Finland and Sweden Interdisciplinary and Multi-sited Comparisons

Edited by Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Language Policies in Finland and Sweden: Interdisciplinary and Multi-sited Comparisons/ Edited by Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen. Multilingual Matters: 157 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Language policy – Finland. 2.  Language policy – Sweden. 3.  Language planning –  Finland. 4.  Language planning – Sweden. 5.  Sociolinguistics. 6.  Comparative linguistics. I. Halonen, Mia, editor. II. Ihalainen, Pasi, editor. III. Saarinen, Taina- editor. P119.3.L3585 2014 306.44’9485–dc23 2014021892 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-270-3 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2015 Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen, Taina Saarinen and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group (UK Ltd), Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

Contributorsvii Acknowledgementsxi Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction 1

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space: Historical, Discourse Analytical and Ethnographic Approaches to Multi-sited Language Policy Discourse Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen

3

Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media 2

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse: Finnish and Swedish Legislative Processes in the 2000s Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen

29

3

Building Walls or Bridges? A Language Ideological Debate About Bilingual Schools in Finland  Sally Boyd and Åsa Palviainen

57

4

Language Rights of the Russian-speaking Minority in Finland: Multi-sited Historical Arguments and Language Ideologies  Mika Lähteenmäki and Sari Pöyhönen

90

5

The Art of Societal Ambivalence: A Retrospective View on Swedish Language Policies for Finnish in Sweden Jarmo Lainio

v

116

vi Contents

Part 3: Individuals as Constructors and Reflectors of Language Policies 6

National Language Policy at the Local Level: The Realisation of Language Legislation in Late-19th-Century Finland  Sofia Kotilainen

7

Making the Case for the Mother Tongue: Ethnic Activism and the Emergence of a New Policy Discourse on the Teaching of Non-Swedish Mother Tongues in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s  Mats Wickström

8

Everyday Language Policies: Embodiment of Language-Related Experiences of Finnish Women in Sweden Hanna Snellman

9 ‘Listen, There’ll Be a Pause After Each Question’: A Swedish Lesson as a Nexus for Multi-sited Language Education Policies Mia Halonen, Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen and Mirja Tarnanen

147

171

196

220

Part 4: Epilogue 10 Epilogue: Multi-sited Language Policies – Where Have We Come From and Where To From Here in Language Policy?  Muiris Ó Laoire

247

Index260

Contributors

Sally Boyd is Professor of General Linguistics at the Department of Phil­ osophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work on the contribution in this volume was carried out during 2012, when she was guest professor at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä. Her research concerns language contact and multilingualism from a sociolinguistic perspective. She is currently involved in two projects: one studies language policy and practices in multilingual pre-schools in Sweden and Finland; the other studies the possible effects of language contact on ongoing changes in the vowel system of Swedish in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Mia Halonen is Senior Researcher in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She earned her PhD and holds a title of docent in Finnish linguistics in the University of Helsinki. Her areas of expertise include interactional practices from informal, everyday to formal interactions in both speech and writing, resources of performing oneself, sociophonetics and language ideologies and ideologies in general shown in linguistic practices. She has published on these issues from various angles, both nationally and internationally. Pasi Ihalainen, PhD, is Professor in Comparative European History at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published widely on the history of political discourse and especially parliamentary debates in Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden since the 18th century, mostly applying comparative perspectives. He is the author of Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (Brill, 2010) and has edited with Cornelia Ilie and Kari Palonen Parliament and Parliamentarism: A vii

viii Contributors

Comparative History of Disputes about a European Concept (Berghahn, forthcoming). Sofia Kotilainen, PhD, MSSc and docent in Finnish history, is Senior Researcher and Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has studied the long-term cultural, family and gender history of Finnish naming practices, intangible capital in social relations and the history of literacy and education (from the beginning of the 18th to the mid-20th century). Her publications include ‘The genealogy of personal names: Towards a more productive method in historical onomastics’, Scandinavian Journal of History (2011), 36 (1), 44–64. She is also a member of the board in the Genealogical Society of Finland. Mika Lähteenmäki is Professor Russian Language and Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 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 population in Finland and the history of Russian linguistics. His recent publications include a co-edited volume (with Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski), Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (Peter Lang, 2010). Jarmo Lainio is Professor of Finnish at Stockholm University (2008– ). He was the head of the Centre for Finnish Studies of Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna (2003–11), and Guest Professor (2011–14). His research covers socio­linguistics, bilingual studies/education, sociology of language, minority languages, language policy and educational linguistics. He was Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University (1998–2004) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa, Canada (1990–91). He has been a supervisor and board member of a national PhD programme on educational sciences (LIMCUL) since 2007. Since 2006 he has been the Swedish member of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts, which monitors the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. He has supervised PhD works in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Karelia/Russia on various minority languages. Tarja Nikula is Professor in the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include content and language integrated learning (CLIL), classroom inter­ action, pragmatics of foreign language learning and use, and language

Contributors ix

education policies. Currently, she directs an international research project, ‘ConCLIL – Language and content integration: Towards a conceptual framework’, funded by the Academy of Finland. Her papers have appeared in a number of international journals and edited volumes. She has co-edited (with Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Ute Smit) the volume Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms (John Benjamins, 2010). Muiris Ó Laoire is author of several articles, chapters and books and is an expert in language teaching, language policy and multilingualism. He was appointed as Full Professor at the International Centre for Language Revitalization Studies at AUT Auckland New Zealand in 2011. He has now resumed his position in the Department of Social Studies at the Institute of Technology, Tralee, Ireland. Åsa Palviainen is Professor in Swedish at Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She earned her PhD at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has lived in Finland since 2003. Her research interests include L2 teaching and learning (Swedish as a second language in Finland), language policy issues (especially the status of Swedish in the Finnish educational system), and discourse analytical and sociolinguistic approaches to bi- and multilingualism. She is currently leading research projects on bilingual pre-school children and their families, as well as on language practices at pre-schools in Finland. Sari Pöyhönen is Professor at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on language education policies, minorities and language rights, adult second language education, and notions on language and identity. Her recent publications deal with ethnic and linguistic identities of Ingrian Finnish teachers in Russia; migrants in professional communities; discourses on migration and integration; and policies and practices in adult second language teaching. Taina Saarinen holds a PhD in applied language studies from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where she is currently working as Senior Researcher. She is particularly interested in ‘discursive operationalization’ of policy (specifically on language education) and currently works on the theoretical conceptualization of policy as multi-sited and contextualized. Her recent articles deal with the use of textual methodologies in higher education policy studies, the conceptualization of policy change, and the invisibility of language in Finnish internationalization policies for higher education. Her research curiosity is mostly sparkled by multidisciplinary

x Contributors

research settings, which often make visible new issues and unobserved gaps in existing research. Hanna Snellman is Professor of European Ethnology and Vice Dean of Arts at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has carried out several projects and studies on migrant workers in Finland, Sweden and North America, as well as on fieldwork methodology. Her current research combines her interests in the forests, migration and history of Finnish Lapland, which together make Finnish history of Arctic labour migration. She has published two monographs in English: The Road Taken: Narratives from Lapland (Kustannus-Puntsi, 2005) and Khants’ Time (Kikimora Publications, 2001). She is editor of the Journal of Finnish Studies, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published in the USA. Mirja Tarnanen is Professor of Language Education (Finnish as L1 and L2) at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has worked on a range of research and development projects related to literacy and assessment practices in language education, language, education and working-life issues in the integration of migrants into host societies and the development of language expertise of trainee teachers. She has also been an expert member of several working groups and steering committees, such as the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (migrants’ L1) and for Adult Integration Training. Mats Wickström is a PhD candidate in General History at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His research interests include contemporary conceptual history, migration history and ethnic politics after the Second World War. He is currently finishing his dissertation on the history of the political idea of multiculturalism in Sweden, exploring the ideational and actor-driven making of the multicultural moment of Sweden in transnational and comparative perspective. He recently published an edited volume (with Heidi Vad Jønsson, Elizabeth Onasch and Saara Pellander), Migrations and Welfare States: Policies, Discourses and Institutions (Nordic Centre of Excellence NordWel, 2013).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and the Department of History and Ethnology, the Department of Languages and the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, for taking the initiative to support multidisciplinary research within the Faculty. Petri Karonen, Tarja Nikula, Jari Ojala and Anne Pitkänen-Huhta encouraged cooperation between researchers who did not know each other or their joint research interests, and supported our initiatives with concrete funding. Marko Lamberg, Harry Lönnroth and Anna Solin contributed to the early planning stages of the project. Päivi Gynther, Sven-Erik Klinkmann, Kari Palonen, Sari Pietikäinen, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Pasi Saukkonen and Minna Suni participated in our seminars and workshops, giving insightful critique and input to our theoretical and methodological premises. When trying to raise external funding for research we received support from Lars Holm and Ella Johansson. Emma Dafouz Milne, Petteri Laihonen and Ute Smit kindly read parts of the manuscript and gave valuable comments. Helena Mackay efficiently edited the language of the manuscript. Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen Jyväskylä, 28 February 2014

xi

Part 1 Theoretical and methodological introduction

1 Diverse discourses in time and space: Historical, discourse analytical and ethnographic approaches to multi-sited language policy discourse Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen

Politics and policies are essentially multi-sited by nature, taking place, being constructed, contested and reproduced on different horizontally and vertic­ally linked levels simultaneously and in different times and places. The current volume of original studies focuses on language policy discourses analysed at the methodological crossroads of cultural and political history and the history of ideas, ethnology, ethnography, language policy studies and sociolinguistics. It demonstrates how a multidisciplinary approach to multi-sited language policy discourses – and to policy discourses at large – enables us to better analyse and grasp their multiple dimensions and to overcome some current methodological challenges in various disciplines. Policy analyses of the suggested kind can, we argue, bring the various disciplines together in terms of methodology. Motivated by experiences in comparative and transnational historical research and language policy research, this volume addresses the following general questions: Firstly, what kinds of new methodological options are opened for various fields of scholarship by the suggested multidisciplinary analysis of multi-sited language policy discourses from a comparative perspective? This theme is elaborated on in the theoretical and methodo­logical sections of this introduction based on various case studies. Secondly, how have language policies been discursively constructed in Finland and Sweden, 3

4 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

and which factors explain the differences that are discernible? And thirdly, what is the role of transnational interaction in the field of language policy discourses crossing boundaries? As far as language researchers are concerned, among whom discourse analytical approaches to language policies have been long established, this volume is intended to increase awareness of the continuous presence of past experiences, remembrance and constructions of the past – that is, the ideological use of interpretations of the past in political arguments, or history politics – in contemporary language policy debates. This entails awareness of history and language being inseparably linked both through topical continuity and in everyday practices. This also requires a clarification of the concept of ‘context’, which is treated somewhat differently in our disci­ plinary frameworks. In language studies, it has been customary either to understand context in broad terms, as referring to the various features of the societal situation, or more narrowly, as the properties of the immediate linguistic action itself (see for instance Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). For Blommaert (2001), in turn, context is really about normalised power and hegemony. In this volume we understand context as something that is in constant dialogical interchange with the phenomena under scrutiny and thus inseparable from them (van Dijk, 2008). In the field of history, the concept of context is generally understood in even broader terms. For most historians interested in linguistic action, potential contexts outside of an (intentional) speech act or communicative interaction are infinite, and it is seen as the very duty of a historian to determine which ones were in each case most relevant to contemporaries in the creation of meaning. These contexts may consist of linguistic conventions and related debates but also of political, social, cultural, intellectual and generic (etc.) structures and factors (Hyrkkänen, 2002; Skinner, 2002). Among historians, on the other hand, an increased awareness of the multi-sitedness and multilayeredness of past political discourses helps them to appreciate the parallel analysis of a rich variety of sources from the point of view of active uses of language as engagements in discursive processes. It also helps, as we shall demonstrate below, to overcome methodological distinctions between the history of action and events, on the one hand, and that of discourses, on the other, or distinctions between the study of macro-level semantic change at a community level and micro-level ­historical pragmatics at an individual level. Instead of challenging alternative approaches to historical research with postmodern theories, we simply advocate the application of up-to-date approaches to the analysis of policy discourse developed within language research to linguistically oriented historical research as well. Their application should be easy to accept for

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  5

the growing number of historians who recognise the constructed nature of political, social and cultural conceptions. We thus wish to encourage ­historians of ideas, politics and culture to proceed to further stages of linguistic turns that have already renewed much of historians’ methodological arsenal since the emergence of the first applications of John Austin’s speech act theory – originally presented in How to do Thing with Words (1962) – in the late 1960s, most notably by Quentin Skinner (1969). Linguistically oriented historical research continues to have a lot to learn from language studies; we just need to move on from the application of and debate on theories that had already been established by the 1970s and to update methodologies with empirically oriented analyses in the applied language studies of the 2010s. For historians this may mean, as we shall show, the adoption of an understanding of politics essentially as a discursive process. In addition to analysing multi-sited policy discourses, this update can mean experimenting in the spirit of detailed textual analyses with carefully contextualised ethnographic data instead of the more conventional study of extensive source corpora. It may also mean exploring the applicability of the concept of the ‘historical body’ to historical research (discussed under ‘Methodological and Empirical Motivation’, below). This volume thus provides language and language policy researchers, historians and ethnologists, among other scholars, with theoretical, methodological and empirical tools for understanding political phenomena that are historically, politically and linguistically diverse. We want to carry further the several linguistic turns in the human sciences that have been following each other since the 1960s, radicalising the methodological implications of the linguistic, discursive, spatial and mobility turns not only for language policy studies but also for historical and ethnological research through a methodologically ambitious multidisciplinary research project. The multiple and interconnected data, foci, theories and methods in this volume illustrate the multi-sited nature of policy discourses. Yet we aim to test, comment on and discuss the initial hypothesis and its methodological implications further. As the national contexts for our empirical studies we have chosen Finland and Sweden and the respective statuses of Finnish and Swedish, and, in relation to these, minority languages – indigenous, migrant and other languages brought to the scene by globalisation, such as English – in the two Scandinavian/Nordic countries since the mid-19th century. These countries have shared a long, entangled history since the Middle Ages but are currently very different as far as language policies are concerned. One of our starting points is that the official majority language of each state has an official (national or minority) language status in the other: Swedish in

6 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

Finland since medieval times and Finnish in Sweden since the 2000s. These two national cases, when analysed through the approaches of language policy studies, comparative and transnational historical research of political discourse, and ethnology – all motivated by an awareness of the essentially multi-sited nature of policy discourse – can contribute to a broader understanding of the nature and formation of language policies. While the focus in most contributions is on contemporary language policy discourses (i.e. since the 1950s), such discourses are consistently situated in the long-term historical language policy trajectories of the two culturally closely related and thus exceptionally comparable countries. While the current volume concentrates on the Nordic welfare nation states of Sweden and Finland, the relevance of focusing on multi-sited language policy discourse is by no means limited to that geographical context: similar policy trends can be seen in all globalising Western countries, as the ‘mobility turn’ brought about by new kinds of flows of ideas and matter and reflexivities (as ‘globalisation’ is defined by Lash & Urry, 1994) calls for new methodological approaches to policy analysis that go beyond the understanding of policy as the relationships between policy structures (see Ball, 2012). This growing awareness of interconnectedness of policy discourses has potential implications for the analysis of past societies as well, though not to the same extent as in an age of accelerating globalisation. The methodological applications and some findings from empirical research will be of interest well beyond the Nordic context, for instance to those concerned with updates of the methodology of the linguistically and culturally oriented ‘new’ political history and the themes of nationalism and minorities.

Sweden and Finland in historical comparison Sweden as a kingdom was formed in the late Middle Ages out of the kingdoms of Svea and Göta and simultaneously incorporated the western provinces of what is now known as Finland. Latin remained dominant in the Catholic Church in Sweden until the Lutheran Reformation of the 16th century and in academic life well into the 18th century. In the days of its Baltic empire, in the 17th century, Sweden was a multicultural and multi­ lingual realm, but one governed mainly in Swedish, something that the honour of a great power demanded. German was used by burghers in towns and especially in the Baltic and German provinces, and the nobility and the court might speak French, but Sweden experienced a gradual vernacularisation of its religious, academic, economic and political life. The bureaucratic use of Swedish was an administrative, political and judicial necessity rather

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  7

than a sign of deliberate linguistic discrimination. It allowed a variety of dialects of Swedish and Finnish to survive, even though the dominance of Finnish among the common people in the eastern half of the realm was sometimes seen as a problem and Swedification as a solution (Junila et al., 2006; Kuvaja et al., 2007; Vilkuna, 2013). By the 19th century, after the loss of the empire, the Swedish language had become dominant on all levels of society; the realm was in fact one of the most uniform ones in Europe, not only in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion but also in terms of language. Minority languages such as Sámi (an indigenous language) and Finnish (in central and northern Sweden and as a migrant language especially in larger cities) remained marginal in the geographic area known as Sweden after 1809. Roma people had entered the Swedish realm from the 17th century onwards, and foreign Protestants and Jews were officially allowed to stay without refraining from the practice of their religion only from the early and late 18th century onwards, respectively. Also, the former Danish provinces were linguistically integrated into Sweden. The considerable size of the Finnish-speaking majority in the eastern half of the realm (up to 22% of the total population of the Swedish realm at the beginning of the 19th century; Kuvaja et al., 2007: 33) had forced the Swedish authorities to facilitate the use of Finnish to some extent in communication with Finnish-speaking subjects in ecclesiastical, legal and administrative matters, but Swedish unquestionably remained the dominant language and the language of administration in the multi-ethnic early modern Swedish realm. The loss of Finland and its inclusion in the Russian empire as an autonomous Grand Duchy in 1809 as well as the loss of the German provinces made Sweden proper all the more uniform in terms of language. Basic education was conducted mono­ lingually in Swedish. Well into the 20th century, Sweden was a country of emigration; modest numbers of immigrants to Sweden and historical linguistic minorities were effectively assimilated. Only from the 1940s onwards, when increasing immigration of Finns, linked with the creation of a Nordic labour market in the 1950s, began to transform the language realities in Sweden, were there any pressures in the field of language policies, and they were subsequently changed only very gradually. Finland as an administrative and cultural entity took shape as a consequence of the Swedish domination of the western provinces of the country from the 12th century on. Swedish rule involved the immigration of Swedes to the western and southern coasts of the country and to the south-western archipelago. Finnish western provinces were closely integrated into Sweden proper ecclesiastically, politically, economically and culturally, but the

8 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

eastern provinces to a lesser extent, from the 17th century onwards. The elites in all areas of society in Finland were Swedish-speakers throughout the early modern period, having moved from Sweden, or having come from Swedish-speaking families living in Finland, or having changed language from Finnish to Swedish in the public sphere as a consequence of participation in higher education (mainly in the case of the clergy). The Lutheran Reformation replaced Latin with the vernacular in religious life, and as this aspect of the Reformation was imposed on the Swedish realm the use of the Finnish language was extended to religious texts and church services from the 1540s onwards. While Finnish, despite being the language of over 80% of the population in Finland, remained entirely marginal in education and administration, it was used by the clergy, who took care not only of the spiritual but also the political education of Finnish-speakers by reading aloud official announcements of the Swedish Crown in the pulpit, for instance. In Finnish historiography centred on the nation-state, the 17th and 18th centuries have traditionally been viewed as ones of uniformity policies under­mining the status of the Finnish language. On the other hand, the Finns were probably integrated into the (political) culture of the Swedish realm more efficiently than any corresponding linguistic minority into a dominant culture in early modern Europe, with the Swedish Church teaching the same values in Finnish in Finland, Finnish-speaking peasantry having their representatives at the Swedish diets in Stockholm, and the loyalty of the common people to the Swedish King being almost un­ conditional in times of Russian occupation during the 18th century. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809 and Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy, the Swedish constitution, laws, privileges and the Lutheran religion were continuously in force. The country continued in practice to be administered by Swedish-speaking bureaucrats. The early 19th century, however, saw the rise of the German-type national romanti­cism in Finland, which increased interest in the Finnish language also among the Swedish-speaking intellectuals. These Fennomans wished to record, construct and demonstrate the great cultural past of the Finnish nation to the world, with projects such as the publication of the Finnish epic The Kalevala (1835), and sought to recruit the Finnish-speaking masses to the defence of the Swedish inheritance in Finland against any changes in Finnish autonomy that might have been introduced by Imperial Russia (including the possible use and teaching of the Russian language). The Russian authorities, for their part, welcomed this strengthening of the status of Finnish in education and administration as a guard against any possible Swedish attempts to regain Finland, as well as against the Swedenoriented (Svecoman) opinion of the Swedish-speaking old elite. From the

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  9

early 1860s onwards, language legislation gradually began to improve the status of the majority language, for instance through the introduction of Finnish-language teacher education, by making Finnish for the first time a language used by the authorities outside the church, and by allowing a regulated degree of public debate in the language. The written language was also consciously developed by academics to better fulfil the criteria of a ‘civilised’ language. The rise of Finnish was rapid and led to the growth of the Fennoman movement as well as to the formation of a Svecoman party. Language strife ensued in various sectors of society, including at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki. In the meantime, the popularity of the Russian language suffered from so-called Russification measures, including the introduction of obligatory Russian studies in grammar schools at the beginning of the 20th century. By the time of Finnish independence, in 1917, the proportion of Swedish-speakers was about 13% and in decline, as a consequence of members of the elite shifting their language and names to Finnish. The very small Russian-speaking minority either left the country after the declaration of independence or was largely assimilated within the other two language groups. The republican constitution and the Language Act of 1922 aimed to solve the confrontation between Finnish and Swedish language groups by declaring the country officially bilingual, with two ‘national’ languages, as stated in the republican Constitution of 1919. This, according to Lindgren and Huss (2007: 211–213), was not necessarily a compromise but a win– win situation for both, as the Fennomans gained the political and social emancipation of Finnish, and the Svecomans reached their goal of Swedish becoming a national instead of a minority language. While the Swedish-speakers have retained their legal right to services in Swedish in the era of independence, in practice the Finnish language has become increasingly dominant in all areas of life, and the proportion of Swedish-speakers has dropped to around 5.4% of the total population (see Chapter 3 in this volume for details). Language disputes have occurred every now and then: the representatives of the Swedish-speakers tend to appeal to the constitutional principle of equality when defending the status quo; much of the political elite defends the adopted language policy line; and some Finnish nationalists and populists call for the removal of the equality between the languages and the teaching of Swedish as an obligatory language. Swedish is seen either as an essential link to Scandinavia, with which most Finns wish to identify themselves, or as a historical relic which enjoys undeserved privileges and steals time from the study of other languages such as English at school (Ihalainen et al., 2011a). For popular

10 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

constructions of Finnish national identity, contrasts with Sweden and the rejection of the Swedish historical dominance of the country continue to be self-evident, despite the obvious centrality of the Swedish legacy in Finnish culture in most areas of life (see Paunonen, 2006: 20–22). These intertwined histories are also reflected in shared stereotypes of and attitudes towards ‘us’ and ‘them’: Finland Finns, Finland Swedes, Sweden Swedes and Sweden Finns seem to perceive themselves and each other in many ways simultaneously as both similar and different (Liebkind et al., 2006). This mixture of nation building and historical struggles for the linguistic and social rights of the majority on the one hand and language ideologies on the other – including historical contrasts with Swedish and Russian cultures – is one of the reasons for the complicated nature of language policy questions in Finland (Huumo et al., 2004; Similä, 2006). In the European context, Sweden and Finland (and to some extent Russia), with their highly entangled histories in various areas but especially in the field of languages (see Junila et al., 2006: 472), constitute a case deserving attention. Equally comparable cases in the rest of Europe are not many, the Netherlands and Belgium providing an example of a different kind. But there are also many developments that are shared by language policy trends in these Nordic countries and elsewhere. A great deal of the discourse on globalisation is focused on the increasingly dominant role of English(es) in various contexts. While this volume does not allow an in-depth treatment of the dominance of English as a language policy motivator, there is no denying the centrality of English also in the Nordic language policy scene. Studying the two related yet different national cases side by side, and contrasting them with the Russian case, makes visible some noteworthy diversities in language policy discourses.

Language policies and language ideologies in a Nordic context Recent sociological studies on cultural and social diversification emphasise the role of language in post-industrial networked societies, character­ised by (super)diversified (Vertovec, 2007) forms of immigration as well as new communication and information technologies (Castells, 2000). In the linguistic context, ‘superdiversity’ refers to the kind of sociolinguistic makeover seen in globalisation processes, in terms of both quantity (an increasing number of immigrant languages present in the Western world) and quality (languages being used in various ways) (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Blommaert et al., 2012; Creese & Blackledge, 2010). The diversity in

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  11

the societies of the 21st century has complicated even more both the understanding of the complex relation between languages and the study of the policies and ideologies involved. The ‘old’ practices of doing language policy do not seem to function anymore. However, in the light of the chapters in this volume, it is possible to argue that diversity has always been there but our awareness of it has increased with the introduction of the concept of superdiversity. Globalisation, with its implications of intercultural linguistic contact and communication, and the knowledge economy and knowledge society composed of the informational and cultural contents of immaterial labour (Williams, 2010) are highly language-intensive phenomena, although ‘language’ as such often appears invisible in the analysis of them (see for instance Saarinen, 2012, on the invisibility of language in the international­ is­ation of higher education). However, separate languages are invariably grouped and hierarchised in an effort to cope better with the super­diverse realities of modern societies. In fact, our focus on two legislatively controlled languages, Finnish and Swedish, is one indication of this. The European Union provides an exemplary case of this hierarchisation, in its official division of languages into ‘official’, ‘indigenous regional and minority languages’ and ‘other’ languages spoken in the Union. In addition to this official stratification, an unofficial ordering of European Union languages into ‘our’, ‘national’, ‘foreign’, ‘additional’ and dozens of other categories exemplifies the need to organise languages in hierarchical categories, indicating not only a need to understand their variety but also a need to control and govern the increasing linguistic diversity, implying ultimately that some categories of multilingualism are more valuable than others (Nikula et al., 2012). Language policies are intertwined with language ideologies (see Shohamy, 2006). They meet in the interest in the boundaries between languages and the mechanisms giving rise to and maintaining them. As Gal and Woolard put (1995: 130) it: ‘Language ideologies are cultural conceptions of the nature, form and purpose of language, and of communicative behaviour as an enactment of a collective order’. Language policies and ideologies have been extensively studied and reported on, for example in volumes edited by Blommaert (1999), Duchêne and Heller (2007), Heller (2007) and Kroskrity (2000). In these studies, language political debates, often characterised by struggle (e.g. Pujolar, 2007; Stroud, 2007), have been examined in a broader European context, for example in Corsica with a focus on Corsican and French (Jaffe, 1999), in Catalonia with a focus on Catalan and Spanish (DiGiacomo, 1999) and in Switzerland with a focus on Rhaeto-Romantsch, French, German and Italian (Watts, 1999). In Europe, language ideologies

12 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

have also been studied in Hungary and Romania and the Banat, focusing on Hungarian, German and Romanian (Gal, 2011; Laihonen, 2009). In Nordic contexts, minorities have been much studied in terms of the complex language political situation of the whole North Calotte, with struggles between and within languages such as Norwegian, Kven, Swedish, Meänkieli, Finnish, Russian and Sámi (e.g. Laihiala-Kankainen & Pietikäinen, 2010; Pietikäinen et al., 2010). Language planning and policies in Finland and Sweden have also occasionally been compared to those in Hungary (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2005). One interesting point of comparison with the situation in Finland can be found in Belgium, where French continued to be the dominant language of the upper classes till the late 19th century, but Dutch has since been increasingly used in various areas of life. The proportions of the speakers of the two languages have always been more equal and bilingualism may be a more practical reality in Brussels than in Helsinki, but the two linguistic areas are at the same time separate to a higher degree than is the case with the Swedish-speakers in most local communities in Finland (Witte & Van Velthoven, 2010). The Swiss case is less comparable, in that different cantons tend to be rather more monolingual in their use of German, French or Italian. Outside of Europe, much attention has been paid to the situation in Canada and the struggle between French and English (e.g. Heller, 1999). The case of Quebec is more regional than the others, though it does resemble the case of Finland Swedish in that the French-speaking population emerged as a consequence of early modern colonisation and the loss of the colony to Britain in 1763. While the Finnish case has often been presented as a model one in guaran­teeing the rights of the minority language, the approaches adopted in this volume may actually deconstruct such a belief, by bringing up problems related to discourses of nation-state building. In the same way, our analysis may show how the Swedish monolingual discourse on democracy has not always considered the linguistic rights of minorities and that the increasing awareness of the multilingual nature of Sweden is actually a very recent develop­ment. An extremely important predecessor to this volume is provided by the project Kahden puolen Pohjanlahtea (Interaction across the Gulf of Bothnia), which resulted in an extensive anthology covering the entire joint history of Finland and Sweden (for an overview, see Junila & Westin, 2006). The main difference, in addition to the size of the project, is that the focus of this volume is more on novel theoretical, empirical and methodological attempts to inspire various disciplines to enter into more explicit dialogue with each other.

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  13

Theoretical motivation This volume is interdisciplinary in the sense that its authors have come out of their comfort zones in various scholarly fields and joined forces to develop language policy research and the analysis of political discourse in general on a comparative and multidisciplinary basis. The very novelty of the volume is in challenging historians, ethnologists and language (policy) researchers to rethink their premises and methodological approaches. These fields also share an inherent interest in policy, though from quite different perspectives, having previously focused either on macro-level or on microlevel cases only or having avoided addressing political questions explicitly in their analyses of the micro-level situations of everyday life – even though these situations can in fact be highly political and interconnected with other levels of multi-sited policy discourse. We are confident, on the one hand, that such an interdisciplinary venture encourages updates to the methodologies of political history and the history of ideas, so that the most recent linguistic approaches to the analysis of policy discourses are seen as directly applicable to the analysis of past political discourses as well – in addition to the methodologies of the historical semantics and historical pragmatics of the 1960s and 1970s, which have long and successfully been applied in the field of conceptual history (see for instance the work of Michael Freeden, Jörn Leonhard, Bo Lindberg, Kari Palonen, Willibald Steinmetz and Wyger Velema, among others). On the other hand, we wish to (re)introduce language studies to a historically sensitive view of time and an awareness of larger and long-term social contexts. The challenge of multi-sitedness may, furthermore, mean for all the involved disciplines the application of a more multidimensional view of traditional micro and macro scales. While ethnographically oriented language research (linguistic anthropology) has adopted this multidimensional view (see for instance the work of Monica Heller, Jan Blommaert, Susan Gal and Angela Creese, among others), and while the work of the above-mentioned researchers has important language policy implications, ethnographic approaches with an explicit focus on language policy are still only just emerging (see e.g. McCarty, 2011) and lack methodological robustness. Additionally, while we have seen a growing interest in the phenomenon of multi-sitedness in ethnography (see Coleman & von Hellermann, 2011; Marcus, 1995), we have not witnessed a similar development within language policy studies. Also, historical research would benefit from the adoption of the notion of multi-sitedness of past policy discourses, as it would eliminate unnecessary

14 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

hierarchies of research topics and disagreements on whether macro- or micro-level phenomena should be analysed. This is not to say that we would be pioneers in introducing historical perspectives to language policy studies nor in using for example the concept of discourse in historical studies. This has long been done in sociolinguists and critical discourse analysis (see Blommaert, 1999: 5), and more recently for example by Fairclough (2006) and Blommaert (1999, 2010), and in the history of ideas by representatives of the Cambridge school of contextual­ist history of political thought, such as Skinner (1969, 2002) and Pocock (1973, 2009), as well as Koselleck (1972, 2006) as the formulator of the German Begriffsgeschichte. Sociolinguists such as Blommaert (1999: 6–8) and Heller (2011: 40) have applied especially historian Braudel’s notion of longue durée (1980 [1958]), the varying length (in time) of phenomena, and argue that this is intrinsic to all observations made about language. However, despite these innovations applied in sociolinguistics, ethnography and linguistic anthropology, language policy studies have largely remained focused on policy structures (see e.g. Kaplan & Baldauf, 2005). In historical research as well, especially in the Nordic countries, structural explanations and the application of social scientific theories have been prominent for quite some time, and linguistic approaches to the past have until recently remained rather marginal (see, however, the above-mentioned conceptual historians and Ihalainen et al., 2011b). In the sometimes unhelpfully confrontational methodological debate between mainstream political and social historians on the one hand and historians of ideas and political cultures on the other, the former have frequently accused the latter of giving up the proper analysis of events and structures or the application of social scientific theories to history and going for ‘postmodernist’ or outright ‘Marxist’ theories of social constructivism, where ‘a mere discourse’ and not action is analysed (for an extreme case, see Marwick, 2001). In this volume, we draw a clear distinction between the frequently non-empirical, historically uninformed and purely theorising applications of postmodernist theories and the empirical use of the productive analytical tools provided by present-day language studies to historians of all fields but especially to those of political thought, discourse and cultures. We propose ways to overcome the gap between the study of political action and political discourse in historical research. Methodological impulses for a renewal in historical research do not need to originate merely from social sciences; they can also originate from language research. History is, after all, a discipline that initially emerged as a branch of philology rather than of social sciences.

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  15

We approach multi-sitedness by starting from globalisation, which, while not a new phenomenon as such, has since the 1980s led to an increasing awareness of other phenomena that may have implications for the study of both past and present political discourse. Not only linguistics but also political history and the history of ideas have been affected by a transnational turn (Haupt & Kocka, 2004) and the related concept of super­diversity. These turns have led to a growing interest in phenomena that have not been limited to nation-states in the traditional sense but that have clearly crossed national boundaries through transfers and interaction, and that have evolved not only as increased mobility but also as diversified modes and means of interaction. Drawing again on Blommaert (2007, 2010) and his concept of ‘sociolinguistics of globalisation’, we can say that all the different chapters in this volume are about globalisation, whether the focus is on clergymen in the 19th-century Finnish countryside creating new spelling practices for names and at the same time developing the ­orthography of the Finnish language, on the activism for language rights in Sweden in the 1960s or on a Swedish-language classroom interaction in a Finnish city in the 2010s: all these examples are characterised by the existence of long and short trajectories in time and in place, tracing both backwards and forwards in time – and, in addition, to simultaneous events in other places. Conceptualisations of globalisation have been characterised by network theories, as in Blommaert’s (2010: 1) argument that globalisation does not mean that the world has become a village but rather a network of villages. Pennycook (2010) radicalised this idea further with the premise that everything is, in the end, happening locally, in some place, at some time. While the points made by Blommaert and Pennycook expand our understanding of language policy not merely as a macro-level phenomenon, applying their notions uncritically runs the risk of merely replacing macro-level (or structural) explanations with micro-level (or actor) ones, while missing the interconnected, networked and fluid contacts (or ‘friction’; Tsing, 2005) producing and produced by these actors and structures. Our case studies rather demonstrate the essentially multi-sited nature of all political discourse in that it characteristically takes place simultaneously at different but interconnected fora and that both macro-level structures and micro-level actors play a role in the discursive processes of politics. Therefore, every scholar, even when focusing on political discourse as action in a particular context, needs to be aware of and pay attention to other networked discourses that move in time and space (for an example of connections between parlia­ mentary and media debates since the 18th century, see Ihalainen, 2010, 2013). A historian might also call this ‘contextualisation’.

16 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

In the fields of the history of ideas and political discourse, historians have, since the 1960s, been increasingly ‘language researchers’ of a selfeducated kind. After all, the most that remains for reconstructing and analysing the concepts, conceptions, opinions and attitudes of past actors is the language they used, as recorded in historical sources. Historians of ideas are language researchers of a very practical kind, in that their research interests have selectively focused on such past language uses that appear politically and socially relevant. The methodologies of such scholars may have been motivated by Austin’s speech act theory or by traditional ­historical semantics rather than by the more recent linguistic strategies of policy analysis applied in this volume. It is important to make these linguistically oriented approaches adopted by a considerable number of historians of political culture and discourse explicit to language researchers, and also to update these methodologies through an increased awareness of the implications of the later stages of linguistic turns for the analysis of past political discourse. Such a cross-fertilisation between historical and language research is facilitated by the radically increased interest in politics among language researchers – rather than in the ‘mere’ questions of philology, autonomous linguistics, literature and textual analysis – which has brought them closer to what the ‘new’ political history (after the linguistic and cultural turns) finds interesting. Likewise, ethnologists often discuss such themes of everyday life and remembrance that appear to be highly political to the ‘new’ political history – interested in politics as a phenomenon reaching well beyond international relations, governments and parliaments, to the level of the everyday experiences of individuals. A shared interest in language policy discourse, in particular, can bring these three fields of research together methodologically. Language policy is, after all, often history politics where the remembrance of past experiences by communities and individuals (historical bodies) play a fundamental role. Selected language policy lines are often legitimated by communities and individuals with selected interpretations of the (language policy) past as one form of discursive operationalisation (Saarinen, 2008). Recognising this central historical and remembrance-related feature of language policy discourse makes cooperation between language policy researchers, historical researchers and ethnological researchers not only easier but actually essential for the understanding of language policies.

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  17

Methodological and empirical motivation Language studies, ethnology, and historical research (especially new political history, i.e. the history of political cultures, discourses and concepts) are all currently experiencing a spatial turn. Research is expanding from the linguistic, rhetorical and communicative turns towards combining the concepts of time, space and movement (Hult, 2010). Our conception of multi-sitedness has its roots in this spatial turn. It means not only that the various occasions of discourses on policies are happening ‘at the same time, in various places’ but also that various historical trajectories are coming together, merging as a nexus, at some space and time. The concept of ‘nexus’ is adopted from Scollon and Scollon (2004); we are, however, not doing nexus analysis but are inspired by the idea of a ‘point of coming together’. In the cases presented in the volume, the nexus points vary from official gala banquet speeches and a newspaper debate to onomastic histories as instantiations of language policy. The concept of ‘historical body’ is especially applicable to capturing the impact and the possible motivations of the various agents in our empirical cases: ethno-activists, parliamentarians, commuting politicians, clergymen, newspaper editors, teachers and pupils, or Finnish immigrants in Sweden in their everyday activities. We believe that the concept of historical body will be of interest to historians as well, especially for those working on transnational history, as it focuses on the role of individuals as agents, by taking into account the simultaneity and reflexivity of all of their psycho-physical experiences and ongoing actions. These agents have often created very concrete links between two or more national discourses. Some of the chapters focus more on the upper-level or macro-level structures of society, while others focus on more carefully contextualised micro-level situations. All the contributions do, however, address to some extent the vertical interaction between the macro and micro levels, and/ or the horizontal interaction between different policy sectors. This is one of the motivations for the term ‘multi-sited’ in the subtitle of this volume. These levels are not exclusive but overlapping and multi-scalar: what is a macro-level question or analytical concept in one situation might be a micro-level concept in another – and vice versa (cf. Blommaert & Rampton, 2011.) This is also captured well in the metaphor of ‘rhizomes’ by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), where ‘happenings’ or ‘occasions’ are seen as simul­ taneous, multi-sited and interconnected. Just like in nexus analysis, also in rhizo-analysis there is some point in the large picture through which all the occasions go or in which they come together.

18 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

Both nexus analysis and rhizo-analysis are essentially ethnographic, like Marcus’s (1995) multi-sited ethnography, which shares the same main idea of tracking and mapping as many possible explaining facts as possible. We share the idea of these frameworks but we are not applying any of the methods of analysis as such, because we include themes and foci in history in which, for example, ‘engaging the activity’ (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 153–154) is simply impossible. For example, analysing the bodily experiences of migrants not speaking the majority language could be seen not only as a micro-level analysis concerning an individual but also as a macro-level embodiment of migration policy. What brings the different levels together is Massey’s concept of space-time (e.g. 1992, 1999, 2005), where the global, local and the various times are brought together into interaction with each other: time and space create, maintain and are dependent on each other. In fact, a central methodological challenge for all the disciplines involved has been to include in the analysis the integration and critique of dichotomies such as the analysis of macro and micro, discourses and practices, structures and agents, ideals and realities, and so on. We argue that these relationships are not either top-down or bottom-up, or rhizomatically networked, but a combination of different kinds of dynamics, consisting of ‘historically specific geographies of social relations’ (Jessop et al., 2008: 392). This means that the applications and outcomes of legislation on the national level affect everyday life, which in turn affects the discourses and legislation processes, shown for example in classroom interaction. Policy is formulated through the use of language and involvement in discourse at all levels. Language users are, in other words, agents of change rather than merely implementers of the decision on the normative level. The data used in this volume are various and multiple, and come from various sources and instances in history. With this combination of varied data we aim to address the issue of multi-sitedness, simultaneousness and rhizomaticity of historical-linguistic events and their relations. This also means that we do not view our data as hierarchical; rather, we focus on what Stephen Ball (2012) has named ‘heterarchies’, or the dynamic contacts and changes in policies. Rather than presenting a particular kind of normative data-set on language policies (such as official policy documentation or macro-level decision-maker opinions), we present our data in the different cases as illustrative of the multiple and multi-sited nature of our topic.

Overview of the chapters in the volume The volume consists of three parts. Part 1, Theoretical and Methodo­ logical Introduction, presents historical and contemporary background

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  19

to language policies as interdisciplinary, multi-sited and layered. Part 2, Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media, contains four chapters, which take a top-down perspective on policy. The chapters address larger (macro-level) national political issues, but also show how these questions are brought into public debate by policy actors varying from parliamentary representatives to the discussants on internet forums. Part 3, Individuals as Constructors and Reflectors of Language Policies, takes a bottom-up approach to the exploration of the relations of policies, starting from individual actors and micro-level situations, discussing how larger policy constructions and discourses are construed by these actors and in these situations. The volume is concluded by an epilogue which ties together the various theoretical, methodological and empirical themes into a synthesis of the volume’s contribution to language policy research. In the first chapter of Part 2, Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen focus comparatively on the contemporary situations in Finland and Sweden by analysing multi-sited discursive processes related to the preparation of language legislation in the two countries in the period 1998–2009, on the basis of parliamentary debates, legislation and government programmes. In addition to contemporary national debates, they consider historical trajectories and transnational interaction in the formation of language policies. The authors analyse the nature of policy discourse constructing ‘language’, ‘national’ and ‘minority’, through the analytical empirical concept of ‘discursive operationalizations’ (Saarinen, 2008: 725), focusing also on how the roles of the various political actors are discursively constructed. The empirical analysis demonstrates how policies typically consist of multisited and interconnected historical trajectories in which the language policy actors reinforce and reformulate policies in interaction with each other and the political process. The authors show, for instance, that while the Finnish language policy discourse on the level of legislation and parliamentary debates focuses on attempts to construct a discursive consensus on the premises of constitutional bilingualism, the Swedish debate demonstrates a need to promote Sweden as a champion of democracy and societal access. Immigration and integration policies do not seem to have significantly challenged established language policies. However, these policies continue to be gradually reformulated discursively, especially through the use of history in political argumentation. Sally Boyd and Åsa Palviainen continue the topic (Chapter 3) by discussing the discrepancies between the political and legislative legitimation of bilingualism on the one hand and the reality of monolingual schooling on the other in the recent Finnish debate about bilingual schools. The debate has as its backdrop the historical practice of separating education for the

20 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

two language groups in a bilingual country. They analyse the newly revived newspaper discussions on the possibility of (Finnish–Swedish) bilingual schools in Finland, contrasting the common macro-political goal of Finland being a bilingual country with the micro-level debates on how this goal should be achieved for Finnish schoolchildren. It seems that while the different discourses concerning bilingual schools – which tend to recycle and modify arguments and concepts in previous discussions – might remain intact in the future, Boyd and Palviainen predict that the goals concerning Swedish language education among Finnish-speakers will diversify. They suggest that the separate ideological discourses of preservationism and idealism tended to converge during the debate and have led to some new visions for education. The chapter makes a particular contribution to the methodology of analysing historically evolving political discourses, their historical trajectories, and the role of individual participants as historical bodies and political actors in them. In Chapter 4, Mika Lähteenmäki and Sari Pöyhönen reflect on the paradoxical position of Russian in Finnish language policy discourses and legislation, suggesting an analogy with the status of Finnish in Sweden and contrasting it with that of Swedish in Finland. This leads them to address the political use of history in language policy discourse, more particularly concerning the ‘grand narrative’ of Finnishness in relation to the Swedish and Russian languages. As a result of the entangled history and the strong position of the Swedish language in Finnish legislation, Swedish appears as the measure of all discourses concerning languages in Finland. The Russian linguistic minority in Finland, in contrast, has been denied all special linguistic rights – mainly for historical reasons that have rarely been explicated. Based on their analysis of Finnish and European legislation, policy documentation and statistics, Lähteenmäki and Pöyhönen foresee a growing polarisation and increasing tensions in the language policy discourses concerning Russian in Finland. Furthermore, they show how radically different can be the political and ideological agendas and the conception of the relationship between language, individual and society of the different participants in the multi-sited language policy discourse representing and conceptualising Russian in Finland within the Council of Europe, the Finnish government and the Russian Federation. At the same time, they provide an up-to-date analysis of present-day official language policy and its implications for domestic and foreign policy in the Russian Federation. In Chapter 5, Jarmo Lainio discusses the prestige and position of Sweden Finnish in the potentially ambivalent situation of Sweden, which is on the one hand understood as monolingually Swedish, and on the other as a champion of societal access and tolerance. He first analyses the ­historical

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  21

position of Finnish as a minority language, spoken both by a historical minority and by more recent migrants in Sweden. He then takes up the legislation from the 1960s and the values and attitudes towards Sweden Finnish. Based on Lainio’s analysis of the historical trajectories of Finnish in Sweden, it seems that Sweden is at a crossroads when it comes to societal multilingualism and its implications for different policy sectors. The egalitarian ideals of the ‘people’s home’ and the welfare state, the traditionally hegemonic position of Swedish, and the recent challenges brought about by waves of immigration meet in educational contexts where, as Lainio suggests, the earlier overt assimilation has turned covert. Part 3 begins with Sofia Kotilainen’s contribution (Chapter 6), which investigates the roles of individuals as micro-level policy actors. She analyses the practical implementation of language legislation at the local level in the context of late-19th-century Finland – a country where positions on language policy frequently became ideological dividers. As an empirically oriented historian, she makes use of the notions of multi-sited policy discourse, language ideologies, and the nexus of linguistic interaction. She also discusses the significance of the concept of historical body for the historical analysis of social action. She investigates the extent to which rural people themselves were activated to speak for their linguistic rights and how the clergy responsible for local administration took care of this on their behalf. She examines how the change in the administrative language and at the same time in the literacy skills of the common people affected the spelling of Finnish personal names, and discovers how the political views of individual actors in a power position at the local level directly affected the pace of language policy change and linguistic practices. Various language political agents are studied by Mats Wickström (Chapter 7), who, as a historian, applies the notion of multi-sited language policy discourse and the analytical concept of historical body to a more conventional type of analysis of past political speech acts and connected meanings within the contextualist history of political thought. He analyses the agency, active role and perspective of minority speakers as policy actors in the process of obtaining legal rights for education in their mother tongue. He shows how language education can become politicised in public discourse, especially as concerns the question of collective identity, and demonstrates how these debates still affect language policy discourses in both Sweden and Finland. Simultaneously, he shows how concepts originating from scientific discourse, such as, in his case, the concept of semilingualism, are introduced and rooted in political debates. Hanna Snellman (Chapter 8) offers a view on post-war female migrants in Europe analysed by means of European ethnology. She brings together the

22 Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

general policies and practices of Swedish society and everyday experiences of migrant Finnish women in Sweden, showing how profoundly language competence, and especially lack of it, is embodied in the life of migrant linguistic minorities. Starting from an in-depth ethnological ethnography of very concrete and physical experiences of interviewees, she discusses them in relation to the education policies, labour markets and general ideals of Swedish society, thus depicting the policy implications and reflections of the individuals’ experiences. She also discusses how these experiences have formed the historical bodies of the migrant women and how they became political activists, at least at grassroots level, in their respective ethnic groups and in their own lives. Mia Halonen, Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen and Mirja Tarnanen conclude Part 3 (Chapter 9) by analysing interactions in a language (Swedish) teaching classroom in Finland today as the nexus of various policies and their historical trajectories. They suggest that there is an inherent interconnectedness of policies at state level and grassroots practices, each being constitutive of the other, and they explore the extent to which different policies-in-action converge or diverge in their directions when enacted in and through classroom activities. A particularly interesting construction in their data is that of bypassing the common history of the two countries, thus de­familiarising Swedish and constructing it as ‘foreign’ in the Finnish context by using Sweden as the point of reference and also discursively construing the Åland Islands as ‘foreign’. The authors offer an empirical alternative view to the dominant top-down/bottom-up and micro–macro discourses by demonstrating the simultaneous and rhizomatic nature of policies at various levels. A methodological innovation is their showing how various policies materialise in a single micro-level situation, thus making the multi-sited nature of policy empirically and physically visible. Muiris Ó Laoire’s epilogue concludes the volume with a contextual­ isation of the volume’s contribution to language policy research and its challenges. Ó Laoire stresses the significance of taking into account historical trajectories as well as contemporary contexts, with carefully designed multi-sited methodologies, in order to make visible ideologies and policies which may otherwise remain unseen. He concludes by stressing the value of ethnographic methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches in constructing and deconstructing language policies in the 21st century.

Acknowledgement Part of this chapter is based on Academy of Finland project no. 138287.

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  23

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Huumo, K., Laitinen, L. and Paloposki, O. (eds) (2004) Yhteistä kieltä tekemässä. Näkökulmia suomen kirjakielen kehitykseen 1800-luvulla. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hyrkkänen, M. (2002) Aatehistorian mieli. Tampere: Vastapaino. Ihalainen, P. (2010) Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800. Leiden: Brill Academic. Ihalainen, P. (2013) Parlamentsdebatten und der Aufstieg ausserparlamentarischer Medien im späten 18. Jahrhundert: Schweden, Grossbritannien und die Niederlande. In J. Feuchter and J. Helmrath (eds) Parlamentarische Versammlungen und Öffentlichkeiten vom Mittelater bis in die Moderne: Räume – Reden – Bilder (pp. 97–113). Berlin: Kom­ mission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus. Ihalainen, P., Saarinen, T., Nikula, T. and Pöyhönen, S. (2011a) Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi, Kasvatus & Aika 3/2011. Online at http://www.kasvatus-ja-aika.fi/dokumentit/aika_​kieli​politiikas​ sapaivalehtien_​nettikeskustelujen_​historiakasitysten_analyysi_​1809111021.pdf. Ihalainen, P., Bregnsbo, M., Sennefelt, K. and Winton, P. (eds) (2011b) Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820. Farnham: Ashgate. Jaffe, A. (1999) Locating power: Corsican translators and their critics. In J. Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates (pp. 39–66). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jessop, B., Brennan, N. and Jones, M. (2008) Theorizing sociospatial relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, 389–401. Junila, M. and Westin, C. (eds) (2006) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Junila, M., Sandlund, T. and Westin, C. (2006) Epilog. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 471–488). Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Kaplan, R.B. and Baldauf, R.B., Jr (eds) (2005) Language Planning and Policy in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Koselleck, R. (1972) Einleitung. In R. Koselleck, W. Conze and O. Brunner (eds) Geschicht­liche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 1: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (pp. xvi–xvii). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Koselleck, R. (2006) Begriffsgeschichten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kroskrity, P.V. (ed.) (2000) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Kuvaja, C., Rantanen, A. and Villstrand, N.E. (2007) Språk, självbild och kommunikation i Finland 1750–1850. In O. Kangas and H. Kangasharju (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 4: Ordens makt och maktens ord (pp. 33–114). Helsinki: Svenska litteratur­ sällskapet i Finland. Laihiala-Kankainen, S. and Pietikäinen, S. (2010) Contexts and consequences of language ideologies: The case of indigenous Sámi languages in Inari and Lovozero. In M. Lähteenmäki and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski (eds) Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (pp. 57–78). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Laihonen, P. (2009) Language Ideologies in the Romanian Banat. Analysis of Interviews and Academic Writings among the Hungarians and Germans. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Spaces. London: Sage. Liebkind, K., Nyström, S., Honkanummi, E. and Lange, A. (2006) Svenskt och finskt som minoritet och majoritet. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 359–379). Helsinki: Svenska litteratur­sällskapet i Finland.

Diverse Discourses in Time and Space  25

Lindgren, A.-R. and Huss, L. (2007) Antingen – eller eller både – och? Språklig emancipation i Finland och Sverige. In O. Kangas and H. Kangasharju (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 4: Ordens makt och maktens ord (pp. 187–216). Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Marcus, G. (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95–117. Marwick, A. (2001) The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Massey, D. (1992) Politics and space-time. New Left Review 196, 65–84. Massey, D. (1999) Imagining globalisation: Power-geometries of time-space. In A. Brah, M.J. Hickman and M. Mac an Ghaill (eds) Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization (pp. 27–44). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. McCarty, T. (ed.) (2011) Ethnography and Language Policy. London: Routledge. Nikula, T., Saarinen, T., Pöyhönen, S. and Kangasvieri, T. (2012) Linguistic diversity as a problem and a resource – Multilingualism in European and Finnish policy documents. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta and T. Räisänen (eds) Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality (pp. 41–66). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Paunonen, H. (1980) Finskan i Helsingfors. Helsingfors två språk. Rapport 1. Helsinki: Helsing­fors universitet. Paunonen, H. (2006) Vähemmistökielestä varioivaksi valtakieleksi. In K. Juusela and K. Nisula (eds) Helsinki kieliyhteisönä (pp. 13–99). Helsinki: Helsingin yliopiston suomen kielen ja kotimaisen kirjallisuuden laitos. Pennycook, A. (2010) Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Pietikäinen, S., Huss, L., Laihiala-Kankainen, S., Aikio-Puoskari, U. and Lane, P. (2010) Regulating multilingualism in the North Calotte: The case of Kven, Meänkieli and Sámi languages. Acta Borealia 27 (1), 1–23. Pocock, J.G.A. (1973) Verbalizing a political act: Towards a politics of speech. Political Theory 1 (1), 27–45. Pocock, J.G.A. (2009) Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pujolar, J. (2007) Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 71–95). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Saarinen, T. (2008) Position of text and discourse analysis in higher education policy research. Studies in Higher Education 33 (6), 719–728. Saarinen, T. (2012) Internationalization of Finnish higher education – Is language an issue? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 216, 157–173. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge. Similä, M. (2006) Att ‘glömma’ och att minnas: finskt och svenskt i finska och svenska historieböcker. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 189–211). Helsinki: Svenska litteratur­ sällskapet i Finland. Skinner, Q. (1969) Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas. History and Theory 8 (1), 3–53. Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics. Vol. I: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stroud, C. (2007) Bilingualism: Colonialism and postcolonialism. In M. Heller (ed.) Bi­ lingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 25–49). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, MA: Princeton University Press. van Dijk, T. (2008) Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vertovec, S. (2007) Superdiversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Vilkuna, K.H.J. (2013) Die schwedische Reichskultur und Finnland 1500–1800. In A. Halmesvirta (ed.) Land unter dem Nordlicht – Eine Kulturgeschichte Finnlands. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Watts, R.J. (1999) The ideology of dialect in Switzerland. In J. Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates (pp. 67–104). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Williams, G. (2010) Knowledge Economy, Language and Culture. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Witte, E. and Van Velthoven, H. (2010) Strijden om taal: De Belgische taalkwestie in historisch perspectief. Kapellen: Uitgeverij Pelckmans.

Part 2 Language policies in parliaments, legislation and the media

2 Constructing ‘Language’ in language policy discourse: Finnish and Swedish legislative processes in the 2000s Pasi Ihalainen and Taina Saarinen

Language legislation can become a topic of heated debate in parliaments, the media and on the streets. Open violence broke out in the Ukrainian parliament, for instance, in May 2012, during a debate on a bill that made Russian a ‘regional’ language (Telegraph, 2012). The Ukrainian example represents one end in the continuum of emotions that language, and ultimately the legislation linked to it, evokes in national contexts. In other situations, language legislation may be viewed merely as an administrative measure and it may receive relatively little interest from parliamentarians and even less from the public at large. Parliamentary debates are, nevertheless, some of the most important sites in parliamentary democracies where macrolevel language policies are debated and reformulated. They lead to enacted laws and their application in government programmes, and in principle also to micro-level implementation. In this chapter, we conduct a comparative analysis of language policy discourses in two historically, culturally, legally and linguistically inter­ connected national cases, those of Finland and Sweden, with reference to legislation and parliamentary debate on language legislation reforms, as well as related government programmes in a longer time perspective. The comparability of language policy discourses in Finland and Sweden is unique, due to the common linguistic and legislative history of the two countries since the Middle Ages, and yet their separate national experiences 29

30 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

since 1809 (see Chapter 1). Some noteworthy differences are also discernible in the language history, ideologies, discourses and policies of the two countries: Finland has a longer history of official bilingualism, with legislation in place since 1919 (Finnish Constitution, 1919), while in Sweden the degree of multiculturalism has been considerably higher since the late 20th century, but without formal language legislation until 2009 (Swedish National Minorities and Minority Languages Act, 2009). Quite extensive literature exists on language planning in the Nordic countries (e.g. the yearbook Språk i Norden, published since the 1970s by the Network for the Nordic Language Council and Language Board, http:// sprogkoordinationen.org/), language policies (e.g. Boyd, 2011; Hult, 2004; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996) and on the use of English in Scandinavia (e.g. Leppänen et al., 2011; Preisler, 1999). Research on the history of the relationship between Finnish and Swedish majorities and minorities also exists, but these studies have usually explored the cases of individual language groups in one country or have examined Finnish and Swedish linguistic attitudes rather than analysing contemporary language policy issues from the perspective of their comparative and historical trajectories (Helander, 2006; Junila et al., 2006; Virta, 2006). Furthermore, parliament­ary debates and planning documents have mostly been neglected in these studies. Our analysis, motivated by comparative historical research on parliamentary debates, aims to discern the dominant features of language policy discourses in the two countries. We aim to identify attitudes, meanings and developments that might be overlooked if the focus was merely on language planning activities, or on one country only, and also to look for causal explanations for any similarities and differences (see Baldwin, 2004; Green, 2004; Haupt & Kocka, 2009; Kocka, 2003). With our background in the history of political discourse and in language policy research, we here carry out contextual analyses of the discursive processes of macro-level parliamentary decision-making on language policy in Finland and Sweden during the 2000s. In our analysis of the vast amount of document material, we focus especially on debates on the status of Finnish and Swedish as national and/or minority languages in both countries. Other languages, such as English and minority languages (including Russian both as an ‘old’ as a ‘new’ language in Finland – see Chapter 4), are discussed only as they relate to Swedish and Finnish. Our analysis considers the long-term historical and contemporary political contexts of recent language political debates and the ‘historical trajectories’ as they are formed by the people, places and discourses as the elements of social action (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). After briefly discussing our sources of data, we first analyse how ‘national’ and ‘minority’ have been conceptually constructed in Finnish and

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  31

Swedish language legislation, in parliamentary debates on proposed new legislation in the 2000s and in govern­ment programmes formulating more concrete policy measures. Second, we discuss the divergent argumentative strategies, and their historical origins, used in Sweden and Finland in the construction of a language policy consensus. Third, we demonstrate who are constructed as language policy actors at national and transnational levels. With this comparative analysis, we aim to decipher the central macro-level language policy discursive constructions in both countries.

Language legislation, parliamentary debates and government programmes as data on multi-sited language policy construction We have used as data a set of constitutions, proposed and approved language legislation, parliamentary plenary debates on such proposals and government programmes from both Finland and Sweden, dating mainly from the period 1998–2009. In the Finnish case, we focus on references to language in the updated Constitution of 2000, the three plenary sessions of the Finnish parliament in which the Language Act of 2004 was discussed, and government programmes. The Language Act of 2004 concerned Finnish and Swedish as national languages but was advocated especially by the centre-right Swedish People’s Party (which typically receives approximately 4–5% of the electoral vote) and hence was seen by some contemporaries as a project for the protection of the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority (for the language political status of Swedish in Finland, see Chapter 3). The Swedish People’s Party participated in the second coalition government of Paavo Lipponen, which consisted additionally of the Social Democrats, Conservatives (National Coalition), Leftists and Greens, and which was opposed by the Centre, Christian Union, Alkio Group and True Finns. All groups were officially in favour of bilingualism. The historical context for the debates was provided by the principle of bilingualism included in the first republican Constitution of 1919 and the Language Act of 1922, which was being updated in 2002–03. The debates had also been preceded by the recognition of Sámi and sign language as national minority languages in the Constitution of 2000, which was expected to be followed by legislation on these and the Romani chib and Karelian languages, while excluding, for instance, the historical Russian, Tatar and Yiddish minorities (Finnish Constitution, 1919; Finnish Constitution, 2000; Finnish Language Act, 1922; Finnish Language Act, 2004).

32 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

In the Swedish case, relevant sources include the Constitution of 1974 and selected government statements and parliamentary debates related to the Language Act of 2009 and a connected Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages (2009). The first ministry of Fredrik Reinfeldt (2006– 10), which introduced the bill, was based on an alliance of the centre-right Conservatives (Moderates), Centre, People’s Party (Liberals) and Christian Democrats, and was opposed by the Social Democrats, the Leftists and the Greens. For the first time in history at the level of legislation, the Language Act defined Swedish as the main language of Swedish society, as well as the language of administration. Much attention was paid to securing the development of this language, its constant use in international contexts and the right of every inhabitant to have access to learning in Swedish. The status of several national minority languages (Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, the Romani chib, Sámi, sign language) was likewise officially recognised for the first time, as the speakers of these languages were given the right to learn and use their language side by side with Swedish. Still, it was primarily the Swedish language, especially in relation to English, and secondarily societal multilingualism, as represented by the minority languages, that was being safeguarded with the new Swedish legislation (see Boyd, 2011; Swedish Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages, 2009; Swedish Constitution, 1974; Swedish Government Statements; Swedish Language Act, 2009). Parliamentary debates represent a genre within which argumentation for and against a government proposal can be expected to be dominant and where differences in language policy views between and within political parties are openly expressed. We have made use of written verbatim records of the plenary debates as available on the websites of the Finnish and Swedish parliaments – two institutions that have a common history in the early modern Swedish diets. The Finnish Parliamentary Debates (henceforth FPD) are available from http://www.eduskunta.fi and the Swedish Parliamentary Debates (henceforth SPD) from http://www.riksdagen.se/sv; in the Swedish case, podcasts were also used. Most speakers in the plenary sessions were presenting the views of their party, being either officially nominated group speakers or representatives of each party in a parlia­ mentary select committee. We aim to reconstruct the language policy lines of the debating parties and take up details on individual politicians only when it has evident contextual relevance for their language policy views. Most debate arguments have been paraphrased and citations in the original language are provided when nuances might be lost in translation. Our third set of data, the government programmes, are quite different in nature in Finland and Sweden. Finnish government programmes function as expressions of the government’s political will for the duration of its term

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  33

of office, while the Swedish ones are statements read aloud annually at the opening of the parliamentary season by the Prime Minister, similarly declaring the government’s intent, but in a speech genre. The first Finnish government programmes of the independent republic were brief statements of will, often less than one page, but by the 2000s these had expanded to 500-page detailed documents. Those from 1917 on are available at http:// valtioneuvosto.fi/tietoa-valtioneuvostosta/hallitukset/hallitusohjelmat/ fi.jsp. The Swedish statements, in turn, are shorter and more general, consisting usually of no more than 10–15 pages; they are available at http:// www.riksdagen.se/sv.

Policy as a discursive process: Analysis of policy documents Our use of parliamentary debates, legislation and government programmes as policy research data is based on the following methodological premises: While these documents represent policy formation in a very physical sense, they cannot be taken as describing policies that ‘really’ exist ‘in the world’. Nevertheless, neither should textual policy documents be dismissed as ‘mere rhetoric’, with very little to do with ‘real life’ policy actions (Saarinen, 2008). Taking a social constructivist view on reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1979), our starting point is that language is not merely used to describe social processes and structures but is actually used to construct, maintain and challenge them. The social constructivist nature of discourse reflects several linguistic turns that have taken place in human sciences, both in the historical study of political discourse (Ihalainen, 2006; Skinner, 2002; Spiegel, 2005) and in language studies (see Fairclough, 1992; van Dijk, 1985). The view of policy as an essentially discursive process brings to the forefront and makes visible frictions between competing views on and under­standings of the policy in question (Ball, 1994). The construction of a particular piece of language legislation – as maintenance of the status quo, as reform of the legislative system, as intervention in people’s linguistic rights or as a natural evolution of the language system – signifies different views on the particular law and its political contexts (cf. Saarinen & Välimaa, 2012). Analysing policy change is thus not only a question of analysing the causes and consequences of policy planning and implementation, but essentially of the discursive processes that create the different and ideologically contested views on those policies. In order to overcome the dichotomous division of ‘policy words’ and ‘policy deeds’, we need methodologies in which phenomena that are

34 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

currently understood as textual, such as policy debates and parliamentary processes, are operationalised into action. In order to achieve this, we suggest the notion of discursive operationalisations (Saarinen, 2008). As discourses form the way we conceptualise and construct policy action, the uses of policy texts lead to a chain of discursive operationalisations of those actions. As actions and links between them are discursively constructed, the policies and ideologies which are embedded in those discourses also become visible (Ball, 1993). An example of this is the construction of a ‘national’ language in our data, as the seemingly self-evident term ‘national language’ – as presented for instance in the Finnish Constitution – is constructed in different ways as it is debated at different levels and at different policy-making sites. Thus, the operationalisation of a general understanding of ‘national’ as practical proposals for policy actions makes visible the ideological and political underpinnings of the concept. Simultaneously, looking into textual operationalisations of policy ideas as action makes visible the multi-sited historical and contemporary links from where ‘national’ ultimately derives its political strength. The focus on discursive operationalisations, we argue, makes the different policy actors more visible, thus also making visible the multi-sited and often contradictory nature of policy. Most importantly, it bridges the gap between ‘policy words’ and ‘policy deeds’ described above. Thus, we follow Hornberger and Johnson (2007) in understanding policy as a multilayered, multi-spatial and locally informed process as people produce and reproduce policies in interaction with each other and with the (formal) policy process.

Constructions of ‘national’ and ‘minority’ In this section we present the ways in which ‘national’ and ‘minority’ have been constructed in our data from Finland and Sweden. We begin by looking into how ‘language’ has been more generally defined in the legislation in both countries. We then continue to a discussion of parliamentary debates, and take a look into the specific motivations of the role of language in the two national contexts as either signifying individual identity or promoting societal democracy. Next, the government programmes are analysed from the point of view of how ‘language’ appears in the programmes in both countries. We conclude this first section with a synthesis of ‘national’ and ‘minority’ in our data.

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  35

Definitions of language(s) in legislation Definitions of language put forward during legislative processes can reveal the dominant language ideologies, that is, the sets of beliefs about the position (moral, political, cultural etc.) of a language and its speakers in a society (see Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). The debates and documents we examine both reflect and reproduce societal language ideologies (see Chapter 3 for a more extensive discussion of language ideologies). In Finland, the Constitution (2000) plays a fundamental role in language policy arguments. Building on the extreme forms of legalism and constitutionalism which developed in Finland in the early-20th-century period of Russification and which were based on strict observance of the inherited 18th-century Swedish Constitution, all political groups tend to appeal to the Constitution as the ultimate authority, the principles of which must not be questioned. Under Russian rule until 1917, this constitutionalism included the guaranteed status of first Swedish and since 1863 Finnish as the official languages of Finland, as opposed to Russian (see Chapter 4). Revealingly, the Language Act of 2004 was prepared in the Finnish parliament by the Constitutional Committee. When constitutional reform was debated in the Finnish parliament in 1998, questions of language were seen as having already been solved with the introduction of legislation on basic rights in 1995 and the inclusion of these rights in the new Constitution (FPD, 10 February 1998, Minister of Justice Kari Häkämies (Conservatives), speech 70). Rights concerning language were mainly emphasised in the same debate by the MPs of the Swedish People’s Party, who were highly aware of the significance for the Swedish minority of these formulations in the Constitution. In the Finnish Constitution of 2000, language is first and foremost defined as ‘the national languages’, Finnish and Swedish. This updated the position presented in the Constitution of 1919, including the notion of Finland as a country constituted by two national groups and with two national languages. The new Constitution stipulated that a Language Act was to be passed to guarantee the ‘right of everyone to use his or her own language, either Finnish or Swedish, before courts of law and other ­authorities, and to receive official documents in that language’ (jokaisen oikeus käyttää tuomioistuimessa ja muussa viranomaisessa asiassaan omaa kieltään, joko suomea tai ruotsia, sekä saada toimituskirjansa tällä kielellä turvataan lailla) (Finnish Constitution, 2000: paragraph 17). This implies that there are no other ‘languages of one’s own’ (implying mother tongues) in Finland. Speakers of three other languages, Sámi, the Romani chib and sign language, are given particular rights in the Constitution, although these are not explicitly

36 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

named as minority languages. The Finnish Language Act of 2004 sets out from the same premises and sees language as a tool for societal participation mainly in a juridical and administrative or bureaucratic sense. In Sweden, language policy issues were hardly seen as ones concerning the Constitution. After all, since Swedish became officially used by Church and state, Sweden has appeared to legislators as an unproblematically monolingual country (see Boyd, 2011). The Swedish Constitution of 1974 makes very few explicit references to language, referring originally only to the need of the authorities to attempt to prevent discrimination on linguistic grounds. Only in 2010, in connection with the introduction of the language legislation analysed below, was a sentence added to the Constitution on the right of the Sámi people and other ‘ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities to maintain and develop their own cultural and societal life’ (Samiska folkets och etniska, språkliga och religiösa minoriteters möjligheter att behålla och utveckla ett eget kultur- och samfundsliv) and on state support for such activities (Swedish Constitution, 1974: paragraph 2, revised in 2010). No further norms for language policies have been set in the Constitution itself. This change occurred after Swedish policies towards minority languages had become the object of fierce criticisms from the Committee of Experts of the Council of Europe, and in the parliamentary debates these pressures came into the open. In the 2009 Language Act, Swedish is defined for the first time as the ‘main language’ (huvudspråk) in Sweden. It is not mentioned in a mothertongue context, but as a language that everyone living in Sweden should have access to and be able to use. This may be related to the tradition of seeing Swedish as the norm and all other languages as ‘mother tongues’ (modersmål); in the Swedish school context, modersmål refers to first languages other than Swedish (Boyd, 2011: 55). Indeed, a separate law on the national minority languages side by side with the Language Act was seen as necessary. The adoption of these laws established for the first time a strong legal basis for language policy arguments, which differs greatly from the much longer Finnish legalist tradition. Sweden, too, thus distanced itself from the ‘French’ one-language model, at least at the level of legislation.

Language and identity, language and democracy: Parliamentary debates and the construction of ‘language’ Explicit definitions of language were rare in the parliamentary debates on the new language acts in both countries. In Finland, in the introductory debate on the language bill, Minister of Justice Johannes Koskinen (Social Democrats) presented language as essential for the identity of

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  37

individuals, including ‘new citizens of foreign origin’ (muunmaalaisten uusien ­kansalaisten) so that they would receive sufficient teaching in their ‘home language’ (kotikieli) (FPD, 11 September 2002: 3–4). For Irina Krohn (Greens), a member of the Constitutional Committee and the preparatory committee, language was ‘the mental skin’ (henkinen iho) of each individual, through which feelings and communication with the surrounding world were transmitted (6). Representatives of the Swedish People’s Party emphasised likewise the function of language in the construction of identity (Pehr Löv: 10; Gunnar Jansson: 26). In the Swedish debate, a different approach to language as a political issue was taken, reflecting the dominance of the concept of democracy in Swedish political discourse, to the extent that democracy and the Swedish political system appear synonymous. But the implications differed between the parties: Esabelle Dingizian (Greens) emphasised the knowledge of one’s original language as well as that of the majority language as ‘a decisive question of democracy’ (en avgörande fråga för demokratin), both languages enabling political participation (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 134). Dan Kihlström (Christian Democrat), going back to an older discourse which considered Sweden essentially Swedish-speaking, saw Swedish skills as making participation in democracy possible (speech 149). Also Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn (Conservatives) argued (speech 135) that ‘without a common language democracy is at risk of being weakened’ (Utan ett gemensamt språk riskerar demokratin att försvagas), that is, democracy would be safe when all the country’s inhabitants learned Swedish, which made the issue of immigrant languages appear secondary to the greater question of democracy. The Finnish debate, in contrast, lacked language policy arguments derived from the normative concept of democracy. The Swedish debates also included an oppositional discourse challenging previous language policies, with occasional reference to the role of language in the speaker’s identity. Marianne Berg (Leftists) presented language emphatically as the decisive factor in the construction of individual identity and criticised the still continuing Swedish education policy in which children of minority groups were expected to have a certain knowledge of the language before teaching would be provided to them (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 156). All in all, however, Boyd’s (2011: 48) conclusion that the Act was written and implemented for a ‘nation of predominantly Swedish-speaking people’ seems accurate.

38 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

Government programmes and ‘language’ in the operationalisation of policy In Finnish government programmes, ‘language’ has, since 1919, been linked with the formal, constitutional bilingualism of the state rather than with any questions concerning an individual’s linguistic identity. This clashes interestingly with the linking of language and identity in Finnish parliamentary debates where particularly those supporting the continued existence of official bilingualism have used arguments based on the individual’s identity and right to it. This, again, suggests different constructions of ‘language’, depending on the context. In government programmes in Finland, languages other than Finnish and Swedish have rarely been mentioned, although languages have appeared more consistently at points in history when bilingualism has become a source of controversy. Four such periods emerge when language appears more densely in the Finnish government programmes: first, the early years after independence, when the relations of the Finnish- and Swedish-­speakers were being defined; second, the early 1930s, when there were disputes about the linguistic status of the University of Helsinki; third, when the resettlement of people evacuated from Finnish- and Swedish-speaking areas in Karelia, Lapland and the Southern Porkkala in the post-war years; and fourth, in the 1970s, when the discussion of whether Swedish should be made an obligatory language in comprehensive school became an issue with school reform. In the Swedish government statements, given the presumed un­ problematically monolingual nature of the country, language has been rarely mentioned, despite growing immigration and practical encounters with minority languages since the 1940s. Only in the 2000s has ‘language’ been seen in these documents either as a societal question, enabling participation in the labour market and elsewhere in society, or as a means for self-expression (uttrycksmedel), as in the Swedish government statement of 2002. Language policy issues thus became explicitly problematised at the governmental level only as a consequence of the legislative process analysed below. Awareness of the significance of language policy issues would thus seem to have been rising. Thus, the government programmes reproduce the motivations presented in the legislation and parliamentary debates in both countries: in Finland, language as reflecting the formal bilingual status of the country, and in Sweden, the Swedish language promoting access in society.

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  39

Constructing ‘national’ and ‘minority’ languages in legislation, debates and government programmes In Finland, the status of a language depends to a great extent on the definition of its relationship with the idea of ‘national’, in a 19th-century sense. In the Constitution of 2000, as in the Constitution of 1919, Finnish and Swedish are defined as ‘the national languages of Finland’, which places the two languages in an equal position. The linguistic rights of the Sámi, in contrast, are based on their status as an indigenous people; the rights of the Romani and ‘other groups … to maintain and develop their language and culture’ (muilla ryhmillä on oikeus ylläpitää ja kehittää omaa kieltään ja kulttuuriaan) are recognised, but these ‘other groups’ are not specified (Finnish Constitution, 2000: paragraph 17). It is notable that while Swedish is not, according to the Finnish Constitution, a minority language but one of the two national languages, it has nevertheless often been framed in a minority position in government programmes. This becomes particularly visible after World War Two, in the Fagerholm Finnish government programme of 1948, which declared that the rights of the linguistic minority (kielellisen vähemmistön oikeudet) have to be taken care of in the constitutional order. In other words, Swedish was construed not only as a minority language, but the only one. This discourse of ‘securing’ the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority has become more prevalent since the 1980s. The Lipponen programme of 1999, which started the preparation for the Language Act of 2004, states: ‘The language legis­ lation will be renewed in a manner which secures the rights of the [our emphasis] linguistic minority’ (Kielilainsäädäntö uudistetaan ­kielivähemmistön edut turvaavalla tavalla). This formulation refers very d ­istinctly to the Swedish language only, whereas other languages are omitted (notably those mentioned in the Constitution, namely Sámi, the Romani chib and sign language). Swedish thus becomes representative of all minority languages at the national level, regardless of its official non-minority status. Finnish language policy remains dominated by the question of the status of the Swedish language, something that populist anti-Swedish statements confirm. Finnish parliamentary debates on the language bill highlighted a broad variety of understandings of ‘national’ and ‘minority’, however. The minority position of Swedish was discursively denied, in contrast to the government programmes. Minister of Justice Johannes Koskinen (Social Democrats) emphasised the existence of two national languages, the bill being ‘language neutral’ (kielineutraali) and by no means ‘a law to protect the Swedish language’ (Kysymys ei siis ole ruotsin kielen suojelulaista; FPD, 11

40 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

September 2002: 3). Such a need to explicitly deny the allegation that the law was one-sided is revealing of the attitudes of some Finnish-speaking parliamentarians and the larger public. Irina Krohn (Greens) pointed likewise at the definition of both Finnish and Swedish as ‘national’ not ‘foreign languages’ (ei … vieras kieli, vaan … toinen kansalliskieli), in school education (6) (but see Chapter 9 for a construction of Swedish as ‘foreign’ in language education). Even the critics of the bill and current language teaching policies viewed both Finnish and Swedish as national languages and rejected suggestions that Swedish would be a minority language (FPD, 4 February 2003, Mikko Elo (Social Democrat): 6; and Lauri Oinonen (Centre): 17). Yet during the final reading, Sulo Aittoniemi (Independent Alkio Group) made a non-consensual and politically incorrect intervention condemning the bill as unjustly favouring the small Swedish-language minority and causing unnecessary costs to the majority. In the final vote, nevertheless, only three MPs voted against the proposal, which was supported by the overwhelming majority (179 out of 199) (FPD, 11 February 2003: 5, 15). Swedish-speaking MPs viewed Finland in the parliamentary debates discursively as a bilingual country simply because the Constitution stated so, because the majority of the people were assumed to think so, and because societal bilingualism was presented as beneficial for the competitiveness of the country (FPD, 11 September 2002, Pehr Löv: 10–11; and Ola Rosendahl: 27–28). In the final version of the 2004 Finnish Language Act, the explicit assump­tion is that a person’s language is one of the national languages in Finland. In the Swedish Language Act of 2009, on the other hand, Swedish is not assumed necessarily to be the individual’s language, but nevertheless that of the Swedish society. In Sweden, Swedish is discursively oper­ ational­ised as the common language in Sweden rather than everyone’s mother tongue. Swedish is not explicitly defined as the national language (to avoid ‘nationalistic’ discourse) but implicitly remains very much so. Despite their presumed openness to multilingualism, both language laws eventually tend to conserve the established (monolingual or bilingual) order and preserve societal cohesion rather than risk the emergence of linguistic disorder and discord by introducing explicitly multilingual goals (see Nikula et al., 2012: 63). Growing immigration, or rising awareness of the existence of older language groups, has led in both Finland and Sweden to some debate on minority languages. As opposed to the Finnish government programmes, the Swedish government statements have explicitly brought up minority languages, specifically the so-called national minorities since 2001, as a reaction to criticism from the Council of Europe concerning Swedish language policies. Before this, minority languages were no theme for high

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  41

politics in Sweden. In 2001, eight years before a law on the issue was actually passed, the government statement explicitly named five national minorities (Sámi, Sweden Finns, inhabitants of Tornedalen, Romani and Jews) and their cultures and languages (Swedish government statements for 2001). While the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe, 1995) did not explicate which languages were to be defined as minority languages, the inquiry which preceded Sweden’s ratification of the Framework Convention interpreted ‘minority’ as one of Sweden’s traditional, historical minorities (Boyd, 2011: 43; SOU, 1997: 193). This therefore led to the exclusion of many more recent (migrant) groups. Even if the issue of minorities had not been extensively debated during the preparation of the Finnish language bill, it could not be entirely bypassed. Despite the preceding repeated denials of the minority language status of Swedish, Margareta Pietikäinen (Swedish People’s Party) actually came to recognise the role of Swedish as a ‘minority language’ (ett minoritetsspråk) that needed special support and protection against the majority language (FPD, 11 September 2002: 16). This reflects the changeable use of the ­categories of national and minority language even among the Swedishspeakers, depending on the argument. This view has been present in Finnish government programmes as well, where Swedish is construed either as a national language (with specific rights for its speakers) or as a minority language (in need of ‘protection’). During the committee stage, the discussion on the Finnish language bill was extended to include the rights of users of the Romani chib and sign language, the Constitutional Committee urging the government to take measures to advance their cause. As far as ‘other languages’ (muita kieliä) were concerned, only Jews and Tatars were seen by the Committee as national and ethnic minorities, in accordance with the definition of the Council of Europe, but were nonetheless excluded from the Act, unlike similar ­minorities in Sweden. Russians were recognised as the largest linguistic minority, originating (partly) from the 18th century, but they were not seen as a ‘national’ minority (see Chapter 4). The Committee merely urged the government to consider whether legislative measures concerning these minorities might be needed in the future (FPD, 4 February 2003, Paula Kokkonen (Conservatives): 5) . In the final Finnish Language Act, the word ‘minority’ appears only in the paragraphs stating the principles that define a municipality as Finnishor Swedish-speaking or bilingual (Finnish Language Act, 2004: paragraph 5). In this context, the word refers exclusively to either Finnish or Swedish, not to other languages. Sámi, the Romani chib and sign language are mentioned

42 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

as requiring separate legislation. The use of languages other than Finnish, Swedish and Sámi is also mentioned, but in the context of sector legislation concerning, for instance, the judicial system, administration, education and the social welfare system (Finnish Language Act, 2004: paragraph 9). The Finnish legislation thus focuses on the national languages and leaves the issue of the minority languages to be settled with separate laws, thereby postponing other language policy measures to the indefinite future. In the debate on the Swedish language bill, the status of the minority languages is explicitly redefined. The Conservative Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn stated – disregarding historical experiences and emphasising the improvement that was expected – that ‘the status of minority languages in today’s Sweden is strong’ (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 135: Minoritetsspråkens ställning är stark i Sverige i dag). Anders Åkesson (Centre) argued that the Sámi, Jewish, the Romani chib, Meänkieli and Finnish minorities had successfully defended their languages and were about to receive legal protection for them, in accordance with a parliamentary recommendation in 2002; there was thus an extremely positive development going on (speech 148). The related law on minority languages seemed to be easier for the majority and especially the bourgeois parties to accept once Swedish had first (on the same day) been confirmed as the main language of Sweden (see Dan Kihlstöm (Christian Democrat), speech 149). The demands from the Council of Europe since the late 1990s may actually have prompted the Swedish authorities to prepare a law on the primary language in the first place. Whether the legislation on minority languages reflected or led to a real change in the attitudes of the Swedish-speaking majority was less clear. According to the official definition of ‘national minorities’ provided by the responsible minister and applying the guidelines of the Council of Europe, these minorities had existed for as long as Sweden had existed as a state – the introduction of the first general law, the accession of Gustavus Vasa (1523) and the separation of Finland (1809) being presented as defining moments. The argument of the government was that the minorities which the bill concerned possessed at least the same right of residence as the majority population of Sweden, which distinguished them from new immigrant groups (SPD, 20 May 2009, Nyamko Sabuni (People’s Party), speech 161). Minority languages other than those defined as national were not explicitly discussed during the Swedish parliamentary debate on new language legislation, though implicitly they were certainly present in the case of two MPs of immigrant background, including the minister herself. Both ends of the political spectrum were able to view the proposal in a positive light. It reflects a recent redefinition of Sweden as a multilingual and multicultural national community that the Conservatives were ready

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  43

to recognise that ‘the language and culture of the national minorities are a part of our shared Swedish cultural heritage’ and that the protection of the ‘national minorities’ was part of the duty of Sweden to advance human rights (SPD, 20 May 2009, Anna Telje, speech 158: De nationella m ­ inoriteternas språk och kultur är en del av vårt gemensamma svenska kulturarv). This was a statement probably addressed to those party colleagues who remained sceptical about the new law, but it also shows the readiness of the Swedish Conservatives to join the international human rights discourse of the early 21st century. In its approved form, the Swedish Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages (2009) refers to five national minority languages: Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, the Romani chib and Sámi, with a mention of the Swedish sign language as well. In order not to differentiate ex­cessively between various minority groups, those with a mother tongue other than those mentioned are stated as having the right to develop and use that language. Nevertheless, many minorities remained excluded, as demonstrated by Lainio in Chapter 5. Despite the marginal role of the immigrant languages in the Finnish new legislation, there was no denying their existence. For Swedish-speakers, it seemed important to distinguish between Swedish and the various new, ‘small languages’ (små språk, paradoxically including Russian; see Chapter 4), which should be appreciated as expressions of multiculturalism but not given any ‘official, judicial’ (officiell, rättslig) status (FPD, 11 September 2002, Pehr Löv: 10–11), on a par with Swedish. In Finnish government programmes, migrant languages entered the picture only implicitly, in the euphemistic coinage ‘functioning bilingualism’ (toimiva kaksikielisyys), in the Jäätteenmäki government programme of 2003, during which the Language Act was to come into force. As we saw, language legislation in Finland still does not explicitly mention migrant minorities, except in a minor, implicit way, when discussing ‘everybody’s’ right to use and develop their language. Legislation in Sweden, in contrast, mentions both minorities and minority languages explicitly.

Constructing a language policy consensus The comparative consensus on the status of various languages in both countries leads us to consider how language policy consensus was constructed through discourse in Finnish and Swedish political cultures. Next, we examine more closely the various available strategies of calling for, maintaining and challenging that consensus, particularly in the debates.

44 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

The debates on the new Finnish Constitution made visible the strategy of the Swedish-speaking MPs in Finland to gather strong national support (indeed majority support) for societal bilingualism. Gunnar Jansson (Swedish People’s Party, representative of the monolingually Swedishspeaking Åland Islands) claimed that the Finnish constitutional reform was likely to succeed, unlike simultaneous reforms in Poland, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, thanks to the proposal concerning (and the people in general recognising) the rights of linguistic minorities (FPD, 10 February 1998, speech 24). In contrast to the strong participation of members of the Swedish People’s Party in the parliamentary debates on languages in the Constitution, Finnish-speakers did not really become engaged in the debates, ultimately leaving language policy-making for the Swedish People’s Party. The Finnish Constitution was customarily used as a source for consensualised argument for the status quo. Legalistic arguments derived from the Constitution were at their strongest in the speeches of the spokesmen of the Swedish-speaking community. Henrik Lax, Chairman of the Law Committee in 1995 and an active speaker in the constitutional debates of 1998, said that the basic rights reform had been ongoing since 1995 and that these decisions and the Constitution stipulated that it was the ­authorities’ duty to provide equal services in both national languages (FPD, 11 September 2002: 9). At the same time, assurance was given that the law did not signify innovation from the principles of the former law (Christina Gestrin, Swedish People’s Party: 18). The tendency to favour constitutionalist arguments was, interestingly, also shared by the critics of some aspects of the proposition. The new law could be seen to strengthen consensus: Maria Kaisa Aula (Centre), a Finnish-speaking member of the preparatory committee, was highly optimistic about the law increasing public awareness of the bilingual nature of Finland, as well as readiness to recognise pluralism; the law would educate the people rather than express the current will of the majority (FPD, 11 September 2002: 19). The same way of taking Finnish bilingualism as self-evident can be seen in government programmes in which Swedish is, on occasion, discursively construed to represent multilingualism in Finland, as other languages (other mother tongues) have implicitly been left invisible, when official state bilingualism has been stressed (Finnish government programmes: Sunila 1927; Fagerholm 1948; Aho 1991). Some representatives of the Swedish People’s Party went further and interpreted the bill as an expression of a positive change in the ‘language climate’ (språkklimat/­kieliilmasto), that is, in the attitudes of the majority to the smaller language group (FPD, 11 September 2002, Henrik Lax: 8; Bjarne Kallis: 25). They thus construed a consensus the existence of which was impossible to prove.

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  45

For the Swedish People’s Party, willing to avoid a reactivation of potentially pernicious language controversies, a major argument was the previous consensus both in the preparatory committee and in government: every MP should rejoice that a counterproductive language controversy had been avoided and should join this consensus. Examples of Finnish-speaking party leaders not opposing demands from Swedish-speaking organisations for new language legislation were presented (FPD, 11 September 2002, Henrik Lax: 9, Margareta Pietikäinen: 15; Ulla-Maj Wideroos: 24). Christina Gestrin ex­plicitly constructed the bill as ‘a joint expression of will’ by which ‘the language majority supports the full use of the language of the minority’ (Kielilaki on yhteinen tahdonilmaus … kielienemmistö tukee kielivähemmistön oikeutta oman kielen täysimittaiseen käyttämiseen) (FPD, 11 September 2002: 18). Such a rhetorical redescription bypassed claims about the unbalanced membership of the preparatory committee and its experts, as well as possible critical views on the law within the Finnish-speaking majority, which had not been urged to discuss the bill. Marjatta Vehkaoja (Social Democrats) was the only MP (in addition to the final protest of Sulo ­Aittoniemi) to implicitly question the existence of a language policy consensus when suggesting that the preparatory committee had on purpose left out of its plans language education and thus avoided any confrontation (FPD, 11 September 2002: 6–8). The government programmes (for instance, the Katainen programme of 2011) for their part contribute to the consensus building with their discourse on bilingualism ‘as a richness and resource’. In Sweden, a consensus discourse was employed by the parties of the government coalition, but it is typical of Swedish parliamentary discourse more generally as well (Ilie, 2004). In the case of the language legislation of 2009, consensus was constructed around the need to restore the good international reputation of Sweden rather than around internal arguments about minority rights. In fact, the concept of consensus was in Sweden a favourite of those who did not speak out against the law but were nevertheless unwilling to go very far with reforms. Anna Telje and Stefan Tornberg (Centre), as nominated spokespersons for the bill, emphasised consensus in the parliamentary committee to counter amendments that might seek to extend minority rights (speech 159). It would in all likelihood have been politically incorrect to oppose the proposal, but the implicit point was that this reform was realisable and that nothing more should be requested. Talk of consensus was thus used in both parliaments by the more conservative parties of the governing coalition to play down opposition criticism and to counter more far-reaching policy changes. The appeal for consensus was used in the Swedish parliament most forcefully by the responsible minister, who presented the bill as an inevitable consequence of decisions

46 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

on the status of minority languages made 10 years previously – an argument reminiscent of the Finnish references to the Constitution. According to Nyamko Sabuni (People’s Party), the Swedish parliament and all parties had clearly expected further steps in minority policy, never mind that the media and the general public had not realised what the consensual parliamentary decision had implied in practice but presumed there would now be a similar consensus (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 161). This recognition of parliament acting on an agenda of its own, not necessarily with the support of public opinion, is noteworthy, as it presumed no public debate over parliamentary legislation, something that has long been recognised as a self-evident part of parliamentary democracy (Ihalainen, 2013). No one questioned the justi­ fication of the bill as such, regardless of the lack of evidence of a broader public support. Both the Finnish and Swedish language policy debates in parliament thus demonstrate how a representative democracy is – with appeals to expert preparation and an existing cross-party consensus among the members of a better-informed political elite – capable of passing legislation that might very well have been voted down in a referendum.

National and transnational language policy actors As we have in the previous sections already covered references by the MPs to explicit actors such the government, opposition and parties at the national level, we concentrate here on how the MPs were themselves involved or discussed the role of other national and transnational actors. Typical of the Finnish debates was the dominance of Swedish-speaking MPs and the involvement of only those Finnish-speaking MPs who were members of the Constitutions Committee. Such inactivity among the Finnish-speaking majority may have been a symptom of an existing genuine language policy consensus (or the lack of it), beliefs that the issue was predetermined, willingness to avoid confrontation in an issue that would make its opponents appear to be intolerant populists and make the achievement of more important political goals (with support from the Swedish People’s Party) more difficult, or the lack of true commitment to the bill. The bill was, in any case, not being actively supported by much of the Finnishspeaking political elite. In Sweden as well, MPs who had already committed themselves to the bill at the committee stage were involved. In the final vote on the bill, the proposal was approved, with only the Leftists and two Social Democrats voting for extra financing for the extension of the administrative areas in

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  47

which minority languages could be used, and the entire opposition voting for a more extensive teaching of minority languages at school. It is noteworthy that there were two MPs with a Finnish background in the Social Democratic group (Raimo Pärssinen and Sinikka Bohlin) who voted against the proposition but refrained from debating it. These two members had apparently fulfilled the expectations of their Finnish-speaking voters with separate motions while avoiding openly challenging the language policy line of the Social Democratic Party in the plenary. The public and media as actors might normally be constructed as a resource for representative democracy (Ihalainen, 2013) but were constructed in the Finnish debate mainly as a problem. The help of the (Swedish-language) media was called for in observing how the new law would be implemented (FPD, 11 September 2002, Pehr Löv: 11). Most MPs preferred to keep the debate within parliament. Klaus Hellberg (Social Democrat) thanked parliament for being able to discuss the issue in a moderate manner, which implied that the extra-parliamentary public might have been unable to do so (FPD, 4 February 2003: 14). By the final debates, a wider critical public discussion had, however, started to emerge. Paula Kokkonen (Conservatives), as chairman of the Constitutional Committee, had received passionate messages on the issue and consequently presented the bill as leading to no changes (4). Mikko Elo (Social Democrats) lamented the lack of discussion on the bill in the Finnish-language press compared with the leading Swedish-language organ, Hufvudstadsbladet (5). Typical of the dominant – even patronising – consensus discourse was that Johannes Leppänen (Centre) warned MPs against expressing extreme views that might win the interest of the media but that would overlook the importance of language for identity and culture (16). Klaus Hellberg recognised that MPs had been increasingly directly contacted by voters regarding the issue, but rejected their opinions and concluded that the status quo could still be upheld (14). Hellberg thus bypassed the arguments of the extra-parliamentary opponents to the law on the basis that the established policies were commendable. In Sweden, minister Sabuni merely pointed out that the general public might not really understand what the legislative process actually meant (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 161) – probably because the Swedish media were not interested in the issue. Processes in both countries proceeded independently of media attention or the lack of it. The state, municipalities and society at large, and to a more limited extent the media, should be active in language policy issues, but how about individual language users? In both countries, the expectations of the speakers of the majority language were modest; ideas about what individual

48 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

representatives of the minorities themselves should do were much more abundant. In the Finnish parliament, some Finnish-speakers suggested that the majority should do more to study the minority language, but there were also complaints about the bill imposing new duties on the majority language speakers and about the one-sided focus on Swedish-language services (FPD, 11 September 2002, Marjatta Vehkaoja (Social Democrats): 7). Irina Krohn (Greens) advised ‘the Swedish-speaking part of Finnish society’ (den svenskspråkiga delen av finska samhället) to support the language learning processes of Finnish-speakers, as only through communication could two national languages be kept alive (5). MPs of the Swedish People’s Party welcomed the responsibility of Swedish-speakers to teach their language to Finnish-speakers (Henrik Lax: 10, Pehr Löv: 11; Christina Gestrin: 18). Vehkaoja dissented, advising Swedish-speakers to study for professions in which there was demand for services in Swedish instead of merely appealing to the responsibility of the authorities to ensure services were provided as formulated in the Constitution (7–8). The constitutionalist arguments of the Swedish People’s Party did not thus go entirely without criticism. Transnational actors also emerged within parliamentary debates in both countries. Some of the transnational references were bilateral. In the Finnish parliament MPs discussed Sweden’s language policies on its Finnish minority, and Swedish MPs, in turn, motivated by the bicentennial of the division of the early modern Swedish realm, made references to Finland and Finnish. Wider European influences emerged in at least two ways. Many of the MPs actively engaging in the language policy debates in the Finnish parliament also belonged to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a major international language policy agent. In the Swedish Language Act (2009), the mere mention of linguistic heterogeneity (den språkliga mångfalden) and the individual’s right to language implies concern for minorities (see also Boyd, 2011: 48), and essentially reflects ideas presented in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe, 1992). Some references to another country or a transnational organisation as a language policy actor were quite explicit. Maria Kaisa Aula (Centre) presented the future Finnish Language Act as a model that might encourage decision-makers in Sweden to improve the status of Finnish in that country (FPD, 11 September 2002: 21). This issue was later politicised due to the approaching parliamentary elections in which over 100,000 Finnish citizens living in Sweden would be eligible to vote. Mikko Elo (Social Democrats), who was also a member of the PACE, complained about Sweden’s delayed ratification of the European Charter and about the constantly weakening status of Finnish in Swedish schools and the media. He saw the parallel

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  49

drawn between the considerable Finnish-speaking minority and Sámi, Yiddish and the Romani chib languages in Sweden as leading to a mere marginalisation of Finnish. As Elo urged Finnish MPs to work harder for the linguistic rights of the Finns in Sweden (FPD, 4 February 2003: 7), the Conservative chair of the Constitutional Committee, Paula Kokkonen (7), pointed out that ‘unfortunately we cannot now discuss the internal affairs of Sweden in the Finnish parliament’ (Emmekä me voi nyt Ruotsin asioita valitettavasti Suomen parlamentissa tällä hetkellä käsitellä). Jouko Skinnari (Social Democrats) carried on the polemic, urging the responsible Finnish minister (chair of the Swedish People’s Party, Jan-Erik Enestam) to take up the language issue more strongly in discussions with Sweden, which was to suggest to voters that the said party was not to be counted on over this issue. Minister Johannes Koskinen (Social Democrats) and PACE member Martti Tiuri (Conservatives) agreed that pressure should be put on Sweden to change its policy towards the Finnish language (8, 11). Jaakko Laakso (Leftists, PACE) and Kalevi Olin (Social Democrats) rejected such comparisons, the latter returning to the constitutional argument that in Sweden Finnish was a ‘minority language’ (vähemmistökielestä), while in Finland Swedish was a ‘national language’ (kansalliskielestä) (8). The Swedish law on minority languages was debated during the bi­ centennial year of the separation of Sweden and Finland; this was observed with a series of events in both countries – including the first ever joint session of the two governments in spring 2009. In this context the bill could be seen as a means of communicating a diplomatic message to Finland. The bi­centennial of the ‘divorce’ (skilsmässan) between Finland and Sweden became a resource for history politics in redefining languages in Sweden: the Minister of Integration and Equality, Nyamko Sabuni, presented 1809 as a formative moment for Sweden and its minorities, while describing the linguistic circumstances of the early modern Swedish realm in (excessively) pluralistic terms (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 161). Mikael Johansson of the Greens – the mouthpiece of which, Maria Wetterstrand, was married to a leading Finnish Green politician (see Chapter 3), belonged to the bicentennial committee and functioned as a historical body connecting the two national discourses – referred to the long common history of the two countries and their linguistic minorities, and presented 2009 as ‘a natural occasion to recognise the Sweden Finnish minority, the Finnish-speakers in Sweden and our joint history with Finland’ (ett naturligt tillfälle att uppmärksamma den sverigefinska minoriteten, de finskspråkiga i Sverige och vår gemensamma historia med Finland). The Act was expected to remove the validity of the arguments used by the Finnish opponents of the strong status of Finland Swedish based on ‘the poor treatment of the Finnish language and culture

50 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

in Sweden’ (Sveriges dåliga hantering av finska språket och kulturen i Sverige) (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 157). Not only the impact of the common history but also that of European integration and globalisation was felt in both countries, which had joined the European Union simultaneously in 1995. But this impact differed in noteworthy ways between Finland and Sweden and also among various linguistic groups. In Finland, European integration provided a source of arguments both for and against maintaining the status of Swedish. For the Swedish-speakers, the bill would make Finland a model country in terms of language policies (FPD, 11 September 2002: 9; 4 February 2003: 14). The activities of the Council of Europe, whose reports had given encouraging feedback on the handling of minority issues in Finland, were viewed positively across the language divide (FPD, 11 September 2002: 27; 4 February 2003: 7). From the point of view of Finnish-speakers, however, integration could also be seen as justifying a change in the current language policy. Martti Tiuri (Conservatives, PACE) pointed out that the Finnish model, awarding extensive rights for one linguistic minority, was a consequence of historical traditions and differed from most European countries, where conventionally only the main language of each area was used. Furthermore, European integration called for the strengthening of knowledge of languages other than Swedish (FPD, 4 February 2003: 6, 11). The influence of European integration on the rethinking of domestic language policies was much stronger in Sweden due to long-lasting and increasingly recognised pressures posed by the charters of the Council of Europe. No speaker in the Swedish parliament played down the relevance of external pressures in renewing Swedish policies on minority languages: much still needed to be done to fulfil the requirements of the charters. Marianne Berg (Leftists) tried to increase these pressures by presenting the current state of affairs in the teaching of minority languages as harmful to the global image of Sweden as a democracy fighting for human rights (SPD, 20 May 2009, speech 156). Elina Linna (Leftists) cited a recent report of the Council of Europe which lamented the failure of the Swedish authorities to offer access to and sufficient quality of teaching in minority languages as a mother tongue (speech 170). The responsible minister recognised that it had taken a long time to respond to the recommendations and demands of the Council of Europe on language policy issues and that the international conventions and inspections now forced Sweden to proceed. The most serious repeated criticism had pointed at ‘how insufficiently the already decided minority policy had been carried out in municipalities, in everyday life’ (hur bristfälligt den redan beslutade minoritetspolitiken genomförts i kommunerna, i vardagen). Given a general awareness of the international image of Sweden

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  51

as a model country in societal progress, the feedback from the Council of Europe left little room for counter-arguments or alternative policies: this human rights issue simply had to be removed from the agenda by approving the bill. Yet the ratification of the charter of the Council of Europe in 1999 had already meant a recognition and redress for minorities that had for so long been renounced and oppressed (Nyamko Sabuni (People’s Party), speech 161).

Conclusion We have scrutinised the discursive operationalisations of ‘national’ and ‘minority’ in Finland and Sweden in the language legislative processes since the late 1990s, considering historical trajectories as well. We have done so by analysing meanings attached to the concepts of ‘national’ and ‘minority’; by analysing how language policy consensus around these terms has been negotiated in the legislative processes; and by analysing the main actors and their roles in the discursive construction of ‘national’ and ‘minority’ in Finland and Sweden. In Finland, ‘national’ and consequently ‘minority’ are constructed and acted upon in the context of a strong constitutional argumentation. The legislation – originating from the Constitution – supports and constructs the official bilingualism of the state and nation based on historical experience, and this state of affairs is constructed as static and, if not unchangeable, at least slow to change. As the Finnish Language Act was changed after the new Constitution of 2000, language legislation was constructed as something that had already been discussed and debated, and thus could not (or should not) be altered no matter what media debates and expressions of public opinion suggested. The strong, constitutionally argued position of Finnish and Swedish as national languages in Finland was also reflected in the positioning of minority languages in the Finnish language debate. Firstly, Finnish and Swedish implicitly appear as the only mother tongues (although termed as ‘languages of one’s own’ rather than ‘mother tongues’), while other languages are referred to in the Constitution on the basis of their speakers’ standing as indigenous people (Sámi) or representatives of a particular ethnic group (‘Romani or other’) rather than the actual languages explicitly with the status of minority languages. When minorities are actually mentioned in the legislation or in government programmes, it is the Swedish-speaking population that is discursively operationalised as the minority, either in ‘need of protection’ (as in government programmes; see also Chapter 3) or as Finland being constructed as a model multilingual country, where

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‘minorities’ are given a strong constitutional position. Thus, Swedish tends to occupy the discursive domain of Finnish multilingualism, while Sámi, the Romani chib and ‘other languages’ are treated solely in relation to groups of people rather than as languages in their own right, and where the ‘old Russian’ minority is not acknowledged as a traditional minority as defined in the international agreements within the Council of Europe, apparently to avoid giving speakers of Russian a minority position in Finland (see Chapter 4). Especially the representatives of the Swedish People’s Party, as they were discursively constructing the majority support and consensus for the official position on bilingualism, took the Constitution as a source of strong arguments. Most other parties were also officially, although not so actively, supportive of the bill in this constitutionalist spirit. Only a minor populist group openly challenged it. While Finnish societal bilingualism has its roots in constitutional bilingualism, the Swedish language debates operationalise the fundamental arguments for language legislation from the needs of democracy. The notion of Swedish as the language required to guarantee democracy in society, and the possibilities for societal and political participation for the individual, constituted the fundamental operationalisation. While the position of Swedish was not formally defined by legislation in Sweden until the Act of 2009, its position as the de facto national language was undisputed until Sweden’s entry into the European Union and the debates on language legislation. As the Swedish legislation has the premise of guaranteeing the individual’s access to society, languages are not presented foremost as the individual’s property, but that of society. Indeed, a selection of minority languages have been defined as ‘national’ and constructed in a new manner, as parts of national history, only after lengthy pressure from the Council of Europe to do so since the 1990s. As Boyd (2011) points out, the domestic pressure for promoting Swedish (rather than the individual minority languages) as the language of Swedish society clashes with the Swedish criticism of using a lingua franca in European contexts. In other words, the Swedish language policies on the national and European level do not appear comparable, except for the strong preference for Swedish on both policy levels. An obvious contradiction remains between the positive discourse of democracy, human rights and multiculturalism on the one hand and the unpreparedness of all the larger parties to rethink the status quo in which Swedish is the only common language. While Finland seems to be following a tradition of constitutionalism in its official form of societal bilingualism, Sweden reacts to the demands of the Council of Europe, attempting to cherish its reputation as a champion

Constructing ‘Language’ in Language Policy Discourse  53

of democracy and human rights. Some evidence for this was also found in the introduction of transnational arguments in the debate, which was interestingly different in the two countries. While in Finland European integration was seen as opening possibilities for language policy reforms that would strengthen the ‘model’ status of the country and possibly influence the situation in Sweden as well, in Sweden the same integration forced the national parliament to undertake major revisions of national legislation and to consider the views of Finns more seriously than previously. Particularly in Finland, consensus is built by constructing an apparently shared understanding of the need for a particular kind of language policy. This can partly be explained by parliamentary strategies of the government or by an inherent willingness to avoid excessively polarised debates in this field. In Sweden, the parliamentary opposition presented its alternatives in a stronger language, but there, too, the need to achieve consensus remained overwhelming. While the Social Democrats bypassed their responsibility for previous language policies and focused on criticising the current government, the Leftists and Greens openly challenged the past language policies of the Swedish state – partly because the representatives of these opposition groups were connected to Finnish activists. Though somewhat un­enthusiastic about minority rights, the Conservatives, Centre and Christian Democrats in Sweden nevertheless conceded that the new law was needed – under foreign pressure – but underlined consensus to stop further reform. The history-political reinterpretation of the linguistic past of Sweden by the minister representing the People’s Party, which went unquestioned in the debate, opened visions for a major turn in language policies in the future. Noteworthy in the constructing of consensus in both countries is the notion of one’s own country as a model case: in Finland the new Language Act was seen as one that other European countries should follow in terms of language policies; in Sweden the Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages (2009) was needed to repair damage that might have been caused to the image of Sweden as the model country for societal progress. In both countries, leading politicians implied that the national parliament needed to pass the law independently of public opinion and rather in order to educate that opinion. We have in this chapter covered the relatively short historical period of 10–15 years (though considering longer-term trajectories as well), taken a sample of data from parliamentary debates, legislation and executive documents, and put an analytical focus on two topical terms, ‘national’ and ‘minority’, as the sites of discursive operationalisation of language policy. Even with this kind of data on Finnish and Swedish parliamentary

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language policy debates, we have been able to provide examples of policies consisting of multi-sited and interconnected historical trajectories in which the language policy actors reinforce and potentially reformulate policies in interaction with each other and the political process. Focusing on a relatively limited historical situation allows for an in-depth analysis of loaded concepts such as ‘national’ or ‘minority’, while at the same time allowing us to draw more general conclusions on language ideological and policy trends in two culturally and judicially interconnected societies experiencing the effects of integration and globalisation.

Acknowledgements Part of this chapter is based on Academy of Finland project no. 138287.

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García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. Chichester: Wiley. Green, N.L. (2004) Forms of comparison. In D. Cohen and M. O’Connor (eds) Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-national Perspective (pp. 41–56). New York: Routledge. Haupt H.-G. and Kocka, J. (eds) (2009) Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books. Helander, M. (2006) Den andra rikshalvan i nutid. In Junila, M. and Westin, C. (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 212–228). Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Hornberger, N. and Johnson, D.C. (2007) Slicing the onion ethnographically: Layers and spaces in multilingual language education policy and practice. Tesol Quarterly 41 (3), 509–532. Hult, F.M. (2004) Planning for multilingualism and minority language rights in Sweden. Language Policy 3, 181–201. Ihalainen, P. (2006) Between historical semantics and pragmatics: Reconstructing past political thought through conceptual history. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7 (1), 115–143. Ihalainen, P. (2013) Parlamentsdebatten und der Aufstieg ausserparlamentarischer Medien im späten 18. Jahrhundert: Schweden, Grossbritannien und die Niederlande. In J. Feuchter and J. Helmrath (eds) Parlamentarische Versammlungen und Öffentlichkeiten vom Mittelater bis in die Moderne: Räume – Reden – Bilder (pp. 97–113). Berlin: Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus. Ilie, C. (2004) British ‘consensus’ vs. Swedish ‘samförstånd’ in parliamentary debates. In P. Bayley (ed.) Cross-cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse (pp. 45–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Junila, M., Sandlund, T. and Westin, C. (2006) Epilog. In Junila, M. and Westin, C. (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 471–488). Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Kocka, J. (2003) Comparisons and beyond. History and Theory 42, 39–44. Leppänen, S., Pitkänen-Huhta, A., Nikula, T., Kytölä, S., Törmäkangas, T., Nissinen, K., Kääntä, L., Räisänen, T., Laitinen, M., Pahta, P., Koskela, H., Lähdesmäki, S. and Jousmäki, H. (2011) National Survey on the English Language in Finland: Uses, Meanings and Attitudes (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 5). Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Nikula, T., Saarinen, T., Pöyhönen, S. and Kangasvieri, T. (2012) Linguistic diversity as a problem and a resource: Multilingualism in European and Finnish policy documents. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta and T. Räisänen (eds) Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality (pp. 41–66). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Preisler, B. (1999) Danskerne og det engelske sprog. Frederiksberg: Roskilde Universitetsforlag. Saarinen, T. (2008) Position of text and discourse analysis in higher education policy research. Studies in Higher Education 33 (6), 719–728. Saarinen, T. and Välimaa, J. (2012) Change as an intellectual device and as an object of research. In B. Stensaker, J. Välimaa and C. Sarrico (eds) Managing Reform in Universities: The Dynamics of Culture, Identity and Organisational Change (pp. 41–60). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics. Vol. 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press.

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Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1996) The colonial legacy in educational language planning in Scandinavia: From migrant labor to a national ethnic minority? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 118 (1), 81–106. SOU (1997) Steg mot en minoritetspolitik – Europarådets konvention för skydd av nationella minoriteter. At http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/12175 (accessed 26 April 2013). Spiegel, G. (2005) Introduction. In G. Spiegel, Practicing History: New Directions in ­Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (pp. 1–31). New York: Routledge. Swedish Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages (2009) Lag om nationella minoriteter och minoritetsspråk 2009:724. At http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/ Dokument-Lagar/Lagar/Svenskforfattningssamling/Lag-2009724-om-nationella-m_ sfs-2009-724 (accessed 18 February 2014). Swedish Constitution (1974) Regeringsformen 1974:152. At https://lagen.nu/1974:152 (accessed 16 February 2014). Swedish Language Act (2009) Språklag 2009: 600. At http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/ Dokument-Lagar/Lagar/Svenskforfattningssamling/Spraklag-2009600_sfs-2009-600 (accessed 16 February 2014). Telegraph (2012) Brawl erupts in Ukraine parliament over Russian language bill. The Telegraph, 24 May. At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ ukraine/9288953/Brawl-erupts-in-Ukraine-parliament-over-Russian-language-bill. html (accessed 16 February 2014). van Dijk, T. (1985) Introduction: The role of discourse analysis in society. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Vol. 4: Discourse Analysis in Society (pp. 1–8). London: Academic Press. van Leeuwen, T. (1995) Representing social action. Discourse and Society 6 (1), 81–106. van Leeuwen, T. (1996) The representation of social actors. In C. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 32–70). London: Routledge. Virta, E. (2006) Finskt och svenskt. Stereotypier, status och dolda känslor. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Svenskt i Finland – finskt i Sverige. Vol. 2: Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter (pp. 380–404). Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Woolard, K. and Schieffelin, B. (1994) Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 55–82.

3 Building walls or bridges? A language ideological debate about bilingual schools in Finland Sally Boyd and Åsa Palviainen In the autumn of 2011, the former spokesperson of the Swedish Green Party, Maria Wetterstrand, moved to Finland with her two children. She did so because her duties as a spokesperson were over, while her spouse, Ville Niinistö, was chair of the Finnish Green Party and a serving government minister. The family had lived in Stockholm and was now relocating to Helsinki. Wetterstrand was interviewed soon after her arrival in Finland in the Swedish-medium newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet (11 September 2011) about various aspects of her new life in Finland, among them her stated intention to keep out of Finnish politics. But the newspaper also reported the following: 
 Det är synd att Finland inte har särskilda tvåspråkiga skolor, tycker Wetter­strand. I den finska skolan i Sverige får barnen lära sig både finska och svenska på modersmålsnivå genast i första klass. Här kunde familjen inte ha valt en finskspråkig skola, då skulle barnen börjat läsa svenska först i sjuan om man inte väljer bort engelskan.… Det är synd med enspråkigt svenska skolor, i ett tvåspråkigt land borde man ju värna om tvåspråkigheten. It’s too bad that Finland doesn’t have special bilingual schools, ­Wetterstrand says. In the Finnish school in Sweden, children can learn both Finnish and Swedish at the mother tongue level immediately in first grade. Here, the family can’t choose a Finnish medium school, because the children wouldn’t learn Swedish until seventh grade, unless they forfeit English [in third grade].… It’s a shame that there are only monolingual Swedish schools. In a bilingual country you should protect bilingualism. 57

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This article and Wetterstrand’s apparently offhand comment sparked a lively debate in several Finnish newspapers (see Karjalainen & Pilke, 2012; Slotte-Lüttge et al., 2013) and on the internet (see Palviainen, 2013) about the possibility of introducing bilingual Swedish/Finnish schools in Finland. This chapter presents an analysis of the debate between 11 September and late December 2011 in two national Helsinki-based newspapers: ­ Hufvudstadsbladet (hereafter Hbl), the largest Swedish-language daily newspaper, and Helsingin Sanomat (hereafter HS), the leading liberal Finnish-language daily. We have analysed over 100 contributions on this topic in these two newspapers in the light of international discussions and research on bilingual education and of the perennial debate in Finland about the role – in education in particular – of the two languages, Finnish and Swedish. Through the analysis, we describe how the participants represent and attempt to influence one another and the respective readerships, and what they think about the roles of the two national languages in presentday Finnish society, particularly the roles of these languages in education. Our aim is to show that the debate have we analysed recycles two major and several minor discourses (i.e. discourses in place – see below) of language ideology in Finland which were already present in earlier discussions about related questions in the area of language and education. We also aim to show that there is a slight but significant convergence in both major and minor discourses reached at the end of the debate and at least one new form of education is proposed, which took a further step towards realisation in January 2014.

The debate as a discourse nexus The primary focus of this study is the language ideological debate itself. Language ideology is defined by King et al. (2008) simply as beliefs about language. These beliefs include beliefs about which languages should be used for what purposes, attitudes towards particular forms of linguistic inter­action, beliefs and attitudes towards language learning and bilingualism, and beliefs about the extent to which important agents can shape children’s language development. Many of these elements are present in the two major language ideological discourses we have identified. We see the debate as a nexus through which language ideological discourses circulate (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). In our analyses, we identify and describe two such major discourses – what we, for analytical purposes, call the preservation discourse and the idealist discourse – which appear in the newspaper debate. These discourses have deep historical roots in identity and state-building; they are thus part of – or nested in – a larger social and

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historical context. This means that discourses circulating through the nexus in this particular newspaper debate are re-instantiations of larger discourse cycles. However, discourses expressed at a certain moment in time and space – in nexus analytical terms discourses in place – are never exact reproductions of older ones, as they are always recontextualised and negotiated. In our analysis we follow the trajectory of the debate, its discourses and changes in them. The analysed debate is an aggregate of discrete social actions performed by individuals acting politically by using language. Each actor in the debate brings along his or her own historical body (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 13) – that is, personal experiences, beliefs and attitudes – which serves as a driving force for his or her actions. By way of example, the astonishment and dis­ appointment Maria Wetterstrand showed in the interview in Hbl about the fact that bilingual schools were not an option for her bilingual children in Finland can partially be attributed to her experiences from the SwedishFinnish school in Stockholm and her beliefs about language learning, that is, her language ideology. She is also a public person with a well-known history as a politician representing a particular political ideology, as well as a Swedish-speaking Swede from Sweden. This kind of publicly known historical body may also affect the way others react to her social actions and her expressed opinions. In our analysis, we acknowledge the importance of the historical body of individual debaters. However, since we do not have detailed information about each individual person’s historical body, we include it in the analysis only when the actor him- or herself is explicit about it, when it is publicly known and relevant, or when it appears to have had significant effects on other participants in the debate. The debate furthermore takes place in a certain media space: two print newspapers based in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, one in Swedish and the other in Finnish. All the contributions are selected and later edited by journalists and editors. The format of contributions such as letters to the editor, columns, editorials or articles reporting interviews further affects what can be said, in what language, by whom and how (Kress, 2010). Following Goffman (1983) and Scollon and Scollon (2004: 13), we use the term interaction order to refer to any of the many possible arrangements by which we form relationships in social interactions. We acknowledge the importance of interaction orders for the social actions of the debate; however, we do not analyse these effects in detail here, although Palviainen (2013), for instance, does analyse differences between debates on the internet and in printed media. In the subsequent sections, we provide a short account of historical and recent debates about language in Finland, as context for the debate we

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analyse. We go on to describe the two major language ideological discourses we have found both in previous debates and in the one we analyse. We then analyse in greater detail the two phases of the debate in both newspapers. The chapter ends with some conclusions on the trajectory of the debate, and how it has modified and recontextualised previous discourses in place.

The historical and social context of the debate about languages in education in Finland The historical context of language debates In order to understand the debate that took place in the autumn of 2011, it is important to be acquainted with some history of the relations between speakers of Swedish and Finnish in the geographical space that today constitutes Finland. Finnish- and Swedish-speakers have lived together in this part of Europe since at least the 12th century (McRae, 2007: 14). What today is Finland was an integral part of the Swedish realm for six centuries, until it became an autonomous Grand Duchy under the Russian tsars in 1809. Finland gained its independence just over 100 years later, in 1917, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Its Constitution dates from 1919. The original Language Act, which regulates the use of the two languages, dates from 1922. Swedish was the language of administration and education during the long period of unity with Sweden and continued to be used for administration in the 19th century (Lindgren et al., 2011; McRae, 2007: 14). During the century of Russian domination, a Finnish language movement was viewed in a quite positive light by the Russian authorities, as it created distance in relation to Sweden and led to the establishment of an alternative Finnish-speaking elite, who were supposed to be less Sweden-oriented (and perhaps less constitutionalist) than the Swedish-speaking one. During the Fennoman movement at the end of the Russian period, Finnish became a symbol of independence from both Russian and Swedish domination. In fact, a number of leading families in the Swedish-speaking elite carried out a language shift in their own families from Swedish to Finnish, as the creation of a Finnish-speaking elite was seen as necessary for nation-building. At the same time, Swedish remained an important language, as other members of the elite argued for the importance of Swedish, pointing out that a large portion of the Finnish national cultural heritage was expressed in this language (Lindgren et al., 2011); in the then current national discourse, it was felt that the ‘cultural spirit’ (to echo Herder) of Finland needed both languages for its expression. In this respect, then, Finnish nationalism, at

Building Walls or Bridges?  61

least among Swedish-speakers in this period, went beyond the monolingual ideals of Herder. The debates, which were at times quite heated, between these two factions of the elite, Fennomans and Svecomans, at the turn of the 20th century were the earliest important debates in the discourse cycle that we are studying here. One of most prominent early agitators in the Fennoman movement of the 19th century, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, had as part of his vision for Finland that schools should be bilingual. He thought that bilingual schools would be beneficial for Finnish-speakers, since Swedish gave access to social positions which were not otherwise available; he also argued that the Swedish-speaking elites needed to learn Finnish (Lahtinen, 2006). However, Snellman’s vision was never fully realised. The Finnish language developed into a modern all-purpose language during the 19th century (Hyvärinen et al., 2003; Tandefelt & Finnäs, 2007: 37) and the first grammar school using Finnish as the medium of instruction was established in Jyväskylä in 1859; other schools then followed. Education was then and is now one of the main arenas for language debates in Finland, as in other contexts around the world. Despite the fact that Swedish was at the time of independence the first language of only about 13% of the population, Swedish and Finnish were given equal status in the Finnish Constitution, allowing all citizens to communicate with authorities in their mother tongue. This arrangement was due to the continuing influence of Swedish-speakers, not the least in the capital region (Tandefelt & Finnäs, 2007: 39). The equal status for Swedish and Finnish was confirmed in the Language Act of 2004, which ‘enunciated a clear mandate to “protect and promote”’ both languages and the ‘cultural tradition of the nation’ (McRae, 2007: 26; see also Chapter 2). It is note­ worthy that this tradition is expressed in the singular. The notion of one nation with two languages thus remains strong.

Finland as a bilingual state Unlike states such as Belgium and Switzerland, Finland’s bilingualism is not dependent on federalism. Each individual is assigned a linguistic affiliation (in terms of ‘mother tongue’) by their parents shortly after birth. Based on these affiliations, if the proportion of speakers of the less-used language in a municipality rises above 8% or there are more than 3000 speakers of that language, the municipality is categorised as bilingual. If the proportion falls under 6%, the municipality is categorised as monolingual. The population of the country as a whole is currently 5.4% Swedish-speaking (Statistics Finland, 2011), about half of whom live in Swedish-dominant communities

62 Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media

and about half in Finnish-dominant communities (Liebkind et al., 2007: 3). Currently, over 85% of municipalities are categorised as monolingual Finnish-speaking; the remaining 15% are rather equally divided between monolingual Swedish-speaking and bilingual municipalities with Swedishand Finnish-speaking majorities. The rights to use a language and to be given service in one’s preferred language are guaranteed in bilingual municipalities and towns, but these services are limited in monolingual ones. While an individual’s linguistic affiliation can easily be changed, only one language affiliation is allowed; there is at present no possibility for registering a child as bilingual. In this chapter, ‘bilingual children’ are those whose parents have different language affiliations from each other, regardless of which affiliation is chosen for the child. According to Tandefelt and Finnäs (2007: 44–45), the proportion of Swedish-speakers starting families with Finnish-speakers has risen steadily, so that at present there are more families in which the spouses belong to different language groups than there are unilingual Swedish-speaking families. They also report that 60% of the children in bilingual families are registered as having Swedish as their mother tongue. While the registration of children tended previously to match the majority language in the district where the family lived, Tandefelt and Finnäs claim that there is considerable evidence that more bilingual families are at present actively choosing to raise their children bilingually, regardless of where they live. They estimate that as many as 75% of bilingual families in the Helsinki region choose Swedish-medium education for their children (Tandefelt & Finnäs, 2007: 50). The Constitution and associated laws give the Swedish-speaking minority cultural autonomy. This means that, in addition to parallel school systems, there is also a system of parallel cultural institutions and voluntary organisations (Kreander & Sundberg, 2007). The Swedish People’s Party (hereafter SPP), a right-of-centre political party in Finland, is the hub for many of the voluntary organisations, professional organisations, training institutions, foundations and other institutions protecting and promoting the interests of Swedish-speakers in Finland and providing forums for activities in Swedish. The Swedish-speaking minority thus enjoys a high level of institutional completeness (Giles et al., 1977). In other words, bilingual policy on the state level allows for monolingual lifestyles, or what Heller (1999) calls ‘parallel monolingualism’ on an individual or institutional level. The SPP plays an important role in Finnish politics and in debates such as the one we analyse here, despite attracting only 4–5% of the vote (Kreander & Sundberg, 2007). It has been part of each successive government coalition since 1979, an indication of the importance of the issue of Swedish language in Finnish politics. The prominent role of the SPP and the fact that every

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party has language issues as part of its political programmes (as described on their websites) are indications of the concern all parties have for the language question and the status Finland as a bilingual country. There are also prominent Swedish-speakers in many other political parties, both on the right and left.

Language and education in Finland Schools in Finland, as we have seen above, are in principle either Swedishmedium or Finnish-medium.1 However, pupils in a Finnish-medium school are required to study Swedish as a second domestic language and those in a Swedish-medium school Finnish from grade 7, if they have not started to study the language earlier (Juurakko-Paavola & Palviainen, 2011; ­Palviainen, 2010). The vast majority of the pupils in Finnish-medium schools (90%) start studying Swedish from grade 7, while in Swedish-medium schools the majority (95%) start studying Finnish from grades 3–5 (Juurakko-Paavola & Palviainen, 2011). Immersion education is also provided, primarily in Swedish for Finnishspeaking pupils, in bilingual cities such as Vaasa and Helsinki. The option of education in Swedish is available, not only in Swedish-speaking and bilingual communities, but also to some extent elsewhere, from day care through to university. But as Wetterstrand discovered, the Swedish-medium schools (like the Finnish-medium ones) are intended to be 100% Swedish-medium, with instruction in Finnish as ‘the second domestic language’, that is, as a target language, not the medium of instruction. For children bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, some schools also offer the option of receiving nativelevel instruction in the language which is not the language of the school (Finnish or Swedish) for a few hours a week. It is currently only in the immersion classes that instruction through the medium of both Swedish and Finnish systematically takes place. However, immersion education is not intended for children from bilingual families. An important part of the discourse cycle to which the bilingual school debate we analyse belongs is the question as to whether instruction in schools in the ‘other domestic language’ should continue to be obligatory. This has been the topic of intense debates at regular intervals since the implementation of the ‘other domestic language’ as an obligatory school subject in the early 1970s. A more detailed analysis of this debate is given by Geber (2010), Hult and Pietikäinen (2014) and Ihalainen et al. (2011), and by Ihalainen and Saarinen in Chapter 2 of this volume. Currently, the major political parties argue for the status quo, although some groupings within the major parties have suggested modifications of the current

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regulations and the nationalist populist party, the True Finns, has officially questioned the necessity of instruction in the ‘other domestic language’. The topic continues to be hotly debated in many political circles, and during the election campaign in the spring of 2011 (less than six months before the debate we analyse), several parliamentary candidates discussed the issue in their campaigns, making a stand either for or against Swedish as an obligatory subject in school for Finnish-speaking children. The True Finns increased their support significantly in this election. Thus we can see that the debate on bilingual schools which we discuss below, sparked by Maria Wetterstrand’s comments as reported in Hbl, can be seen as a new cycle in the ongoing debate of the role of the Swedish and Finnish languages in bilingual Finland (Saukkonen, 2011). As we shall see, the debate also took a somewhat unexpected turn which helped to lift it to a new level of discussion before it ebbed away at the end of 2011.

The Finnish debate in the light of international discussions about bilingual education Discourses of bilingual education We have analysed the ongoing debate about language policy in Finland around two central discourses, which we claim were present prior to the debate we analyse and also have been, in a somewhat revised form, after it. We would like to relate these discourses to a taxonomy of what Ruiz (1984) calls ‘language orientations’ surrounding bilingual education, which is elaborated by García (2009: 13–19). There are three such orientations: (1) language as a problem; (2) language as a right; (3) language as a resource. The first orientation considers language diversity as a problem in a modern nation-state, which, according to Herderian national romantic ideals, should be culturally homogeneous, secular and monolingual. Because this orientation is largely absent from the discourses we have analysed, as nobody in this newspaper debate seriously argues that Finland should become a monolingual nation-state, we move on to Ruiz’s other two ­orientations. The second one, language as a right, arose in European and North American discussions after the economic downturn of the 1970s, according to García (2009: 14), when various linguistic minorities declared their

Building Walls or Bridges?  65

linguistic rights, and grounds for discrimination began to include ‘language’. One could trace its origins even further back, to the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s in the United States, after which other groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, began demanding equal rights (see Chapters 5, 7 and 8 in this volume for a description of Finnish activism in Sweden; see also Allardt & Starck, 1981). The third orientation, language as a resource, arose during the 1980s, when globalisation and internationalisation led to an increasing diversity of workplaces and nation-states. Rather than seeing language as a right, which the less powerful need to fight for, linguistic diversity was seen as a benefit to all or a choice for all, in the context of a neoliberal world where the nation-state has decreased in importance. Language skills become commodities which can be measured and quantified. Bilingual and multilingualism are seen as resources primarily for individuals, rather than of institutions or states. Bilingualism is seen as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It is a means to increase prosperity and well-being, for example in being able to market products in languages that potential customers are more skilled in. The connection between languages and groups is seen as less strong than in the ‘language as a right’ conception. In 2003, for example, UNESCO proposed, in addition to mother tongue education and bilingual and/or multilingual education for linguistic minorities, intercultural education for all in order to promote understanding between different population groups and ensure respect for fundamental rights (see García, 2009: 15–16). These three orientations are also discussed by Petrovic (2005), who argues that ‘language as a right’ is a more productive basis on which to build a bilingual education programme than ‘language as a resource’. Heller (1999) also criticises the conception of language as a commodity as not always being, in the long run, conducive to high-quality bilingual or multilingual education, which empowers less privileged language groups. Thus, this taxonomy should not be interpreted as one in which conceptions are continually improved and refined with time. Another discourse which appears, in a specifically Finnish form, in this debate is the discourse about endangered languages, which became current among linguists in the early 1990s, after the publication of an article by Hale et al. (1992), although research on language contact, shift and death preceded that article by at least 20 years (e.g. Dorian, 1972). Many – not to say most – sociolinguists are agreed upon the negative consequences of the demise or disappearance of a large proportion of the world’s smaller languages and, following Hale et al. (1992), often compare the process of language shift and language death to the extinction of biological species, using similar terminology as in biology and ecology. This discourse tends to

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see language contact as necessarily involving competition between languages and a sort of linguistic ‘survival of the fittest’. Languages are not of course in themselves more or less ‘fit’ to survive; it is their speakers who have more or less power to impose their will and their preference for communication in a particular language on less powerful participants in communication in multilingual contexts. We call this discourse ‘sociolinguistic Darwinism’ (see Cameron, 2007, for a similar discussion).

The Finnish context: Preservation and idealist discourses Our studies of others’ analyses of prior discourses have led us to delineate two general lines of thinking in argumentation around language in education in Finland, originating from the discussions and conflicts surrounding the nation-building process in the late 19th century and relating to the international discourses described above. These discourses – the preservationist and idealist discourses – are echoed in both the previous discussions and the ones we have analysed. We summarise them below. The preservation discourse represents a version of ‘bilingualism as a right’, but in a specifically Finnish form. It has its point of departure in the equal status accorded to both languages in the Constitution of Finland, but recog­ nises the reality of the differing size and strength of the two languages’ respective communities of speakers. As many discourses of language maintenance and shift, the preservation discourse includes a strong discourse of what we call sociolinguistic Darwinism. The argumentation is based on the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’, where the weaker language, Swedish, needs protection from the stronger one, Finnish, in order to survive as a living language in Finland. Consequently, there is a clear need to support the weaker language in order to maintain equilibrium. This discourse seems to assume that monolingualism in the stronger language is a natural state, towards which individuals or states tend to move if nothing is done to protect and promote the weaker language. But the preservation discourse also advocates rights for Finnish-speakers; for example, the provision of obligatory instruction in Swedish for all makes it possible for Finnish-speakers to compete for attractive state jobs that require high levels of bilingualism. The recommended way to support the weaker language in Finland is often summed up in what is known as ‘Taxell’s paradox’ (Liebkind & Sandlund, 2006: 260), named after a prominent politician in the SPP in the 1980s, Christopher Taxell. Taxell is credited with the claim that, in Finland, monolingual solutions (e.g. institutions, facilities and organisations where one language is used) lead to bilingualism (i.e. the maintenance of societal bilingualism), while bilingual solutions, where the same facilities and

Building Walls or Bridges?  67

institutions serve both groups, tend to lead to monolingualism (i.e. these institutions tend towards the monolingual use of Finnish). The latter is the outcome of Swedish-speakers tending to use Finnish in multilingual communication more readily than Finnish-speakers use Swedish. The only way to maintain a bilingual society is therefore for institutions to be as much as possible separate for both languages. A similar argument has been prevalent in Francophone Canada (Heller, 1999: 37–38). Again we see the assumption that monolingualism is an easier regime to maintain in an institution, rather than allowing bilingualism, which perhaps is considered less orderly than monolingualism and tending towards change (Henriksson, 2011). The preservation discourse often makes a strong link between language and identity. Those who use the preservation discourse describe Finnish society as consisting of two separate language groups, each with a strong first language, and differing levels of proficiency in the other domestic language. In order for people to have a strong identity as a Swedish-speakers, they must have Swedish as their stronger language, usually strengthened by having most if not all their education in that language. In general, persons who use this discourse place great emphasis on formal language instruction in school as the way to bilingualism. The other domestic language is learned primarily through instruction in school, within this discourse. Generally speaking, we think that this discourse stresses the importance of societal bilingualism in Finland: that two strong domestic languages, Finnish and Swedish, are used in different contexts within a single state. The goal is that not only Finnish-speakers, but also Swedish-speakers should be able to live their lives in their first language (L1), at least as regards contact with public authorities and institutions, as guaranteed by the Constitution and language laws. While they see the country as consisting of two L1 groups, it is important that everyone learns the other group’s L1 through instruction in school. In this way, societal bilingualism also provides the basis for individual bilingualism through education. These forms of education can vary and include forms such as immersion education, where instruction is carried out in both languages, but where the pupils come from one group or the other. The forms of instruction which are advocated are planned for one language group or the other, but not for both together, as the fear (expressed in Taxell’s paradox) is that providing education for both groups together would lead to education mainly or solely in Finnish. The other discourse we call the idealist discourse. It is perhaps closest to the neoliberal discourse of bilingualism as a resource in Ruiz’s taxonomy, but, like the preservation discourse, in a particular Finnish version. In fact, it lacks some of the problems that Petrovic (2005) and others see in the neoliberal bilingual discourse but includes some others.

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According to this discourse, the relations between the two L1 groups in Finland ought to be improved; unnecessary suspicion and bad feelings exist between the groups. The idealists see the improvement of relations as taking place through increased contact between the groups. While those who employ this discourse underscore the value of societal bilingualism, as do also the proponents of the preservation discourse, they also point more clearly to the value of bilingualism on an individual level, and more often refer to the increasing number of bilingual individuals in Finland (i.e. persons who have grown up with both languages from an early age). Proponents of the idealist discourse see it as common sense that bilingual individuals ought to be able to choose bilingual solutions such as bilingual schools. This freedom of choice also often includes the freedom to choose Swedish or some other language as the second language to be learned in school; that is, the idealist discourse advocates a weakened or discontinued requirement for instruction in Swedish for Finnish-speakers. The idealists tend to downplay the threat of language shift felt by the proponents of the preservation discourse, and instead argue that bilingual institutions provide freedom of choice for individuals – a third choice in addition to Swedish- and Finnish-medium alternatives. They claim that the Swedish-speaking minority is strong enough to participate in institutions and contexts in which Finnish-speakers also participate. They do not see contact as a direct threat to the preservation of Swedish in the future. They claim that contact between the groups will lead to mutual language learning in both directions, not simply to sociolinguistic Darwinism. There seems to be a belief, not always clearly stated, that language use does not need to be so strictly regulated within institutions, and that if children go to school together, they will naturally learn one another’s languages. The idealist discourse includes some elements of Ruiz’s neoliberal conception of ‘language as a resource’. While the preservation discourse tends to stress the need for planning and controlling language use in contexts where members from both groups come together, the idealist discourse espouses a more laissez-faire practice. It does not always go so far as to ‘commodify’ language or see languages as competing in a ‘free market’, such as a school, but assumes potential developments such as improved Swedish skills among Finnish-speakers through contact between the two groups. However, these aspects of the neoliberal discourse have emerged in certain other debates, such as the one on Swedish versus Russian as school subjects (Ihalainen et al., 2011) or on obligatory Swedish for Finnish-speaking pupils (Palviainen, 2011). Both discourses share a commitment to continuing societal bilingualism in Finland. None of the serious participants in previous debates, nor in the

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one we have analysed, argue that Finland should become monolingual, or that societal or individual bilingualism is a ‘problem’ – as in the first discourse in Ruiz’s taxonomy. But while those who use the preservation discourse argue for maintenance of the status quo in order to maintain bi­lingualism, those who use the idealist discourse believe that changes can and should be made without negatively affecting the maintenance of Swedish as a vital minority language in the country. It is not the case that only or all Swedish-speakers espouse the preser­ vation discourse while Finnish-speakers promote the idealist one. For one thing, much of the debate surrounding the role of Swedish in Finland takes place within the Swedish-speaking community. Furthermore, there are idealists and preservationists in both language groups. As we will try to show, the debate in the two newspapers that we have analysed includes elements from both discourses, not only in the same newspaper, but, especially later in the debate, at times by the same writer. We claim that the debate about bilingual schools during the autumn of 2011 altered these discourses somewhat and opened up some new possibilities in this ongoing discourse cycle, and potentially for changes in educational policy as well.

The debate about bilingual schools during the Autumn of 2011 Here we analyse discourses in place in the debate and relate them to the two more comprehensive discourses: the preservationist and idealist discourses.2 We have chosen to divide our discussion of the analysed debate into three parts: phase 1 in Hbl, phase 2 in Hbl and phase 2 in HS. The first part concerns the debate in Hbl, from the report on Wetterstrand’s comment (11 September) until a survey, commissioned by HS, was reported on 31 October. Except for one small article in HS about Wetterstrand’s comment, the debate during those weeks was confined to Hbl (and other Swedishlanguage newspapers and web sources which we do not consider here, but see Karjalainen and Pilke (2012), Palviainen (2013) and Slotte-Lüttge et al., 2013). We discuss the second phase of the debate, from the publication of the poll (31 October) until Christmas 2011, separately for Hbl and HS.

The debate in Hufvudstadsbladet 11 September – 31 October 2011 What is characteristic of the first phase of the debate is that it is largely an internal debate among Swedish-speakers. Most debaters assume that the bilingual schools Maria Wetterstrand suggests be established are going to replace some or all Swedish-medium schools in Finland.

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Early in the first phase of the debate (20 September), an article appears where representatives of different parties are asked about what form of education should be available for children coming from bilingual homes. SPP politician Maria Björnberg-Enckell makes the suggestion that one or more private Swedish-medium schools – unclear for whom – ought to be tried out as a new form of instruction in Helsinki. These schools should be modelled, according to her, on the German–Finnish and French–Finnish tuition-free independent schools already allowed by Finnish law. She says the school should be founded by making a legal exception, and that it should be oriented towards Sweden Swedish rather than Finland Swedish language and culture. Her suggestion appears under the main headline on the front page of Hbl, indicating the importance of the school language issue in the newspaper, but the suggestion is followed up by only a few participants in the debate during this first phase. The same issue of Hbl also includes a feature article about the Finnish–Swedish school in Stockholm that ­Wetterstrand’s children attended prior to their move to Finland and describes it in a positive light. Following the reasoning of the preservation discourse, described above, most debaters in Hbl during this period expressed the fear that bilingual schools (for Swedish-speaking pupils) would further weaken the already threatened position of Swedish in Finland. Their contributions on several occasions appealed to ‘Taxell’s paradox’ either directly or indirectly. In an interview reported in Hbl (2 October), then party leader of the SPP Stefan Wallin appeals to Taxell’s paradox when he says Argumentet att tvåspråkiga lösningar oftast blir enspråkigt finska lösningar har … blivit en kliché i språkdebatten – men en kliché som stämmer. The argument that bilingual solutions usually become monolingual Finnish solutions has … become a cliché in the language debate – but a cliché which is correct. However, he does, like other SPP politicians in this phase, mention the possi­bility of alternative models, such as immersion and an independent bilingual school in Helsinki (also Björnberg-Enckell), in order to increase understanding between the language groups. Such a school would have to be private, as, at least according to most readings of the Basic Education Act (ch. 4, sec. 10), it is not possible for schools to have instruction in both languages for the same pupils; such an arrangement would require special permission.

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Another example of a preservationist is Barbro Allardt Ljunggren, a Swedish-speaking bilingualism researcher living in Sweden, who writes the following in a column in Hbl (23 September): Att införa tvåspråkiga svenskfinska skolor för finlandssvenska barn skulle vara ett allvarligt led i att försvaga svenskans möjlighet till l­ivskraftig fortlevnad i Finland. To introduce bilingual Swedish–Finnish schools for Swedish-speaking children would be a serious move to weaken the possibilities for the vigorous survival of Swedish in Finland. She also warns of the dangers of applying instructional models developed in Sweden, an officially monolingual country, to schools in Finland, with its official bilingualism. However, at the very end of her article, she suggests that bilingual instruction might be beneficial for Finnish-speaking pupils: för att främja tvåspråkigheten [skulle det vara] betydligt rimligare att göra om de enbart finskspråkiga skolorna till tvåspråkiga finsk-svenska skolor. to increase bilingualism [it would be] significantly more reasonable to change the Finnish-medium schools to bilingual Finnish–Swedish schools. Henrik Wilén, general secretary of Föreningen Norden3 and columnist in Hbl, also presents a well reasoned example of the preservation discourse during this part of the debate. Like Allardt Ljunggren, he writes (27 September) that Sweden should not be held up as a model for Finland – as they view the countries to be so different and to have very different language policies. The main thrust of his argument is to preserve Swedish-medium schools. Att ett land är tvåspråkigt betyder inte att alla medborgare behärskar, eller ens förutsätts behärska landets båda språk, utan att samhället ska göra det möjligt för individen att leva på sitt modersmål.… Om man går in för att minoritetens skolor ska bli tvåspråkiga kan man på sikt fråga sig vad värnandet om minoriteten har för betydelse. Om individens tvåspråkighet är ett mål i sig kan naturligtvis landets alla skolor göras tvåspråkiga. That a country is bilingual does not imply that all citizens have knowledge, or even are assumed to have knowledge of both languages in

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the country. Rather, it implies that society makes it possible for the individual to live in her/his mother tongue.… If one decides that minority schools should be bilingual one can in the long term ask oneself what protection of the minority means. If individual bilingualism is a goal in itself, then all the schools in the country can naturally be made bilingual. At the same time, there are also some strong arguments proposed by proponents of the idealist discourse. These tend to be more about individual bilingualism than Finland’s status as a bilingual country. One of them, the educator and pedagogical researcher Fritjof Sahlström, points out (7 October) that many Swedish-medium schools already are de facto bilingual. Sahlström makes his historical body relevant by mentioning in his column the fact that he and his family have spent several years in Sweden and thus their aim is not only societal bilingualism, but individual bilingualism for the children. He argues that the Swedish-speaking minority is strong enough to be educated in a bilingual school and to help educate Finnish-speakers to become bilingual, an argument that echoes Snellman (see above): Lärarna, föräldrarna och eleverna [i vissa finlandssvenska skolor] verkar tro att det egna språket och den egna identiteten kan räcka till för att inspirera och bilda också andra. Till och med helt finskspråkiga. Teachers, parents and pupils in certain Swedish-medium schools seem to believe that their own language and identity can adequately provide inspiration and educate others as well. Even monolingual Finnishspeakers. While several debaters argue for the Swedish-medium school’s importance in helping pupils develop their identity as Swedish-speaking Finns, at least one (journalist Johanna Minkkinen, 25 September) complains that the Finnish education system has deprived her of a bilingual identity. The connection between language and identity is made in many of the contributions to the debate, usually a direct connection: schooling in Swedish leads to a stronger identity as a Swedish-speaking Finn. Another debater who can be considered an ‘idealist’, journalist Jens Finnäs, criticises Taxell’s paradox and complains (25 September) that Swedish-speakers (because of their Swedish-dominant bilingualism) play a role as ‘safeguards’ of societal bilingualism: Det här påståendet [‘en fungerande tvåspråkighet kräver enspråkiga lösningar’] kan stundtals göra mig fruktansvärt provocerad. Hur lätt är det inte att sitta och tala varmt om enspråkigt svenska lösningar när

Building Walls or Bridges?  73

man själv pratar perfekt finska? Det är vi [österbottningar, nylänningar, åbolänningar], som gått igenom alla de högt värderade enspråkiga institutionerna, som får ta rollen som garant för landets tvåspråkighet med våra egna finskkunskaper som pris. This statement [‘a functioning bilingualism demands monolingual solutions’] can at times be terribly provoking to me. Isn’t it rather easy to sit and discuss warmly the monolingual Swedish institutions when you speak perfect Finnish yourself? It is us, [the Ostrobothnians, Nylanders and Åbolanders] who have gone through all the highly valued monolingual institutions, who have to take the role as ‘guarantors’ for bilingualism in this country, with our own knowledge of Finnish as the price. In general, this part of the debate is dominated by what we call preservationists. Most debaters tend to see bilingual schools as replacing Swedish-medium schools and thus as being a threat to the survival of Swedish as a national language. Bilingual schools, where both languages are used, would tend to become monolingual Finnish ones, is their reasoning. A few academics and journalists see the value of children from both groups, and bilingual children, attending the same schools. While societal bilingualism is the main goal of the preservationists, individual bilingualism is of greater value for the idealists.

The Helsingin Sanomat survey, as reported on 30 October 2011 On 30 October, HS published the results of an opinion poll that initiated a new cycle in the debate that Wetterstrand’s comment on 11 September had started. The opinion poll was commissioned by HS very soon after ­Wetterstrand’s comments were published in Hbl. In all, 528 respondents, all parents of children of compulsory school age and living in the Helsinki region, were asked two questions: (1) Suomessa ei nyt lainsäädännön mukaan voi olla kaksikielisiä kouluja, joissa opetetaan sekä suomeksi että ruotsiksi. Pitäisikö tällaisia kouluja olla? (2) Voisitko panna lapsesi tällaiseen kaksikieliseen kouluun? (1) According to current Finnish law, schools cannot be bilingual, that is, with instruction in Finnish as well as in Swedish. Should such schools exist? (2) Would you consider placing your child in such a bilingual school?

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Of these parents, 55% answered ‘yes’ to the first question and 67% responded ‘yes’ to the second. A breakdown of the answers along political party lines indicated that a majority of respondents supporting all major parties answered ‘yes’ to the second question. The largest proportions were found among supporters of the Green Party and the Conservative Party. (Few, if any, of those who were consulted were (registered) Swedish-speakers.) In other words, the different opinions did not seem to follow party lines. The second figure – that 67% would be consider placing their child in a bilingual school – changed the form of the previous debate in two ways. First, the fact that the survey was commissioned by the major Finnishlanguage newspaper in the country, and was conducted predominantly among Finnish-speakers, indicated that at least the editors and publishers of HS regarded bilingual schools as an option not only for Swedish-speakers but also – if not primarily – for Finnish-speakers. The assumption present in Hbl during the first phase of the debate, that bilingual schools would replace Swedish-medium schools, was thus changed dramatically, as soon as the questions were asked of predominantly Finnish-speaking respondents. In other words, the site and content of the debate had changed, becoming in this sense multi-sited. Secondly, the respondents were probably more positive about the idea of bilingual schools than most people would have expected, as the general discussion was often in terms of the ‘poor relations’ between the groups, of the ‘negative climate’ in the debate about language (Saukkonen, 2011). Of course, we cannot know how reliable and valid these results were. The survey, too, can be regarded as a social action intended to mould as much as to report on public opinion; it is more an act of journalism than of social science (Kullenberg, 2012). The publication of the results of this survey indicate an opening in the thinking of at least a sample of parents in Helsinki to a bilingual school system. It brings to the debate other options than ‘monolingual’ Finnishor Swedish-medium education. The continuing debate in Hbl takes into account this change in the climate of opinion in different ways.

The debate in Hufvudstadsbladet continues in November–December 2011 The results of the poll in HS are reported immediately in Hbl. These results are mentioned by many of the contributors to the continuing debate, and thus have an important impact on how the debate continues. It now becomes evident that bilingual schools could also replace Finnish-medium schools, not only or primarily Swedish-medium ones. This means that they

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could be an option for Finnish-speakers and not just children in bilingual families, like Wetterstrand and Niinistö’s. The readers of both newspapers also receive a strong indication that many Finnish-speakers, at least in the capital region, are more positive about education in the Swedish language (and, indirectly, therefore about Swedish-speakers) than most believed previously and that they can imagine an institution that provides instruction in both languages, and a new alternative to the system of parallel institutions serving separate language groups. The two discourses outlined above – preservation and idealist – are still present in the ensuing debate in Hbl, but as the debate intensifies at least the preservation discourse becomes modified and more diversified than during phase 1. There are quite a few leading politicians from SPP who reiterate the suggestion made at the beginning of the debate for an experimental bilingual school in Helsinki, on the model of the German–Finnish or French–Finnish schools which already exist there. Per Stenbäck, for example, writes a column on 10 November. He is identified there as former a SPP chair, inter­ nationally active and a former Minister for Education, important elements in his historical body: Intresset bland finskspråkiga föräldrar i huvudstadsregionen för tvåspråkig undervisning [är] glädjande och bör tas tillvara. Nu gäller det för oss finlandssvenskar att tänka i nya banor … och se till att ­slutresultatet stärker minoritetsspråket.… Modellerna finns hos de andra språkskolorna. The interest in bilingual instruction among Finnish-speaking parents in the capital region is gratifying and should be taken advantage of. We Swedish-speaking Finns need to think in new ways … and make sure that the end result strengthens the minority language.… The models exist in the other language schools. Stenbäck thus encourages new ways of thinking among ‘us’ Swedish-­ speaking Finns and that the interest among Finnish-speaking parents should be taken advantage of. Immersion instruction is mentioned by many contributors to the second phase of the debate in Hbl. In an article on 7 November, a number of educational experts are interviewed, who, according to the headline, are ‘agreed that immersion is the key to bilingualism’. This is reiterated two days later (9 November) in an interview with Anna-Maja Henriksson, an SPP politician and Minister of Justice in the government.

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Dan Johansson, chair of the Swedish-speaking teachers’ union, uses a tone of concession in an interview on 17 November about existing forms of bilingual education: Satsa på samarbete över skolgränserna, språkskolor typ Deutsche Schule, elev- och lärarutbyte, språkduschar och språkbad. Språkbad och andra extraordinära lösningar kostar, men det är en utgift Finland måste vara beredd att ta. The answer is cooperation between schools, language schools like Deutsche Schule, pupil and teacher exchange, partial immersion and immersion. Immersion and other special arrangements cost money, but it is money Finland must be prepared to spend. But in the same article he is also reported as criticising those Swedishspeaking politicians who have given bilingual instructional models their undivided support. Other debaters who are concerned about the future of Swedish are suspicious both of the survey and of the positive attitude shown by others. One example is SPP politician Sture-Christian Eklund, who writes on 16 November: Man hejar [inom andra partier] på ‘tvåspråkiga skolor’ utan att ha en aning om vad det kan ha för konsekvenser för det svenska språket i Finland.… Modersmålet är ingenting man skall leka med. Den som vill bevara det svenska språket i Finland måste se till att de åtgärder man vidtar inom skolväsendet idag förstärker det svenska i framtiden. People [in parties other than SPP] cheer on ‘bilingual schools’ without having any idea what consequences they can have for the Swedish language in Finland.… The mother tongue is nothing to play around with. If you want to preserve the Swedish language in Finland, you need to make sure that the measures you take within education strengthen Swedish in the future. Some people whose letters to the editor were published in November – December use an only slightly modified preservation discourse. One example is Marika Kuusakoski on 20 November. Here we can see both Taxell’s paradox and an openness to certain forms of bilingual education – for Finnish-speakers. She ends her letter, however, with preservation discourse in a rather high moral tone.

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Det behövs bara en finskspråkig bland tio svenskspråkiga och allt går på finska. Det är inget nytt. Om den finskspråkiga befolkningen verkligen i praktiken vill lära sig svenska är det allra enklast att börja med språkbad och sätta in svenskundervisning tidigt i de finska skolorna.… Rör inte våra svenskspråkiga skolor. Vi har rätt till ett starkt modermål. Vi går inte i fällan! There only needs to be one Finnish-speaker among 10 Swedish-speakers for everything to end up in Finnish. This is nothing new. If the Finnishspeaking population really wants to learn Swedish, it is simplest to begin with immersion and start Swedish instruction in the Finnish schools early.… Don’t touch our Swedish-medium schools. We have the right to a strong mother tongue. We won’t go into the trap! The contributors who used an idealist discourse in the first phase are still active during this phase, such as the educator Fritjof Sahlström. He writes (4 December) a column where he gives 21 reasons – of varying degrees of seriousness – for Finland to have bilingual schools; his list uses many of the same arguments as in phase 1, including the improved group relations and mutual language learning which he believes would be the result of education of children from both language groups in both languages in the same school. Another proponent of the idealist discourse is Olav S. Melin (journalist and editor), who writes clearly in the idealist discourse in his contribution on 2 December: I stället för en mur borde vi bygga en bro som främjar umgänget mellan människor. Ju fler två- och flerspråkiga barn det finns desto bättre – både för dem som individer och för hela samhället. Instead of a wall, we should build a bridge which facilitates social contact between people. The more bi- and multilingual children the better – both for themselves and for the entire society. Melin criticises certain other Swedish-speaking debaters for taking a defensive position, or for being willing to try only an experimental school form. Melin writes optimistically about bilinguals, that their numbers are increasing and that they have the future of bilingualism in their hands. These are arguments we already saw in phase 1, but they are more strongly expressed here. In a similar vein, Fred Granberg, in a letter to the editor on 16 December, applauds the results of the survey and the parents ‘who see the value of

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filling up with both languages at an early age’ (som inser värdet av att tanka båda språken i låg ålder). The school form he suggests, however, is much the same as that advocated by the preservationists, namely immersion. But he goes on to criticise others and also advocates new school forms in addition to immersion: att komma dragande med Taxells paradox som bortförklaring hamnar nog i vrångstrupen hos de intresserade.… Att mixa båda språkgrupperna i samma dagis och skola, på något pedagogiskt genomtänkt sätt, måste ligga i tiden. to use the old Taxell’s paradox as an excuse probably ends up choking those who are interested.… To mix both language groups in the same day-care and school, in some pedagogically thought-through way, must be the way to go these days. In other words, he is in favour of a school form which goes beyond immersion and allows children from both groups to receive instruction together. His contribution has elements of both the preservation and the idealist discourses. Thus we can see that in phase 2 in Hbl, the preservationists retain some of their arguments, but also show that they are in favour of some compromise solutions, above all immersion instruction and SPP’s suggestion from phase 1 – an experimental language school in Helsinki. These school forms are primarily intended for Finnish-speakers while, it is assumed, Swedishmedium schools remain monolingual. Their tone is somewhat less anxious and more open to the interest shown by the Finnish-speaking parents in the capital region. Some debaters remain sceptical, however. The idealists are also in favour of immersion, but we can see that a few suggest forms of bilingual schooling considered more radical in Finland, but which exist in other parts of the world, including Sweden. In these schools, children from both groups attend school together and learn each other’s languages. As in phase 1, their discourses continue to mention also the needs of bilingual children and the possibility of improved relations between the groups. Different forms of bilingual schooling could alleviate these problems, they argue. Next we look at how the debate was carried out in HS, the Finnishlanguage paper that commissioned the survey that helped the debate change course.

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The debate in Helsingin Sanomat after the survey, November–December 2011 One of the most influential participants in the debate in HS is its editor, Mikael Pentikäinen. In an editorial the day after the survey results were published he wrote, under the headline ‘A bilingual school would make Swedish a living language’ (Kaksikielinen koulu toisi ruotsin kielen eläväksi) (1 November): Kaksikielinen koulu saattaisi myös parantaa merkittävästi suomalaisten ruotsin kielen taitoja.… Modernissa monikulttuurisessa maailmassa kannattaisi pikemminkin avata perheille ja lapsille uusia vaihtoehtoja kuin lyödä ovia säppiin. A bilingual school would also in a meaningful way improve the Finnishspeakers’ proficiency in Swedish.… In a modern, multicultural world we should make more choices available for families and children instead of putting a lock on the door. Here the point is clear that it is the Finnish-speaking pupils’ bilingualism which is the goal of bilingual schools. He also uses the neoliberal discourse of freedom of choice in his editorial. Later, in another editorial he writes (13 November): On selvä, että kaksikieliset koulut eivät voi korvata suomen- tai ruotsinkielisiä kouluja perusopetuksessa.… On ilmeistä, että kaksikieliset koulut vahvistaisivat ruotsin asemaa Suomessa.… Muurin sijaan pitäisi rakentaa siltaa, joka lisää ihmisten välistä kanssakäymistä. It is clear that bilingual schools should not replace Swedish- or Finnishmedium comprehensive schools.… It is obvious that bilingual schools would strengthen the position of Swedish in Finland.… Instead of building a wall, we should build a bridge which increases the possibility of people working together. In this editorial, we see first of all the direct denial of the assumption of phase 1 of the debate in Hbl, that bilingual schools would replace Swedishmedium ones. He claims, in contradiction to the preservation discourse, that bilingual schools would strengthen Swedish in Finland. Here we see the same metaphors as in Melin’s (idealist) column, published on 2 December in Hbl: the walls to protect Swedish should be replaced by a bridge, facilitating

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contact, understanding and mutual language learning, he proposes. It is interesting that not only the idealist arguments but even the metaphors are passed between the newspapers. On 1 December, Ville Niinistö writes a letter to the editor. He was Maria Wetterstrand’s spouse at the time, bilingual father (of Finnish-speaking origin) of the two bilingual children whose schooling was the impetus to Wetterstrand’s original comment. But he presents himself here as leader of the Greens of Finland and Minister of the Environment. Not surprisingly, he is a representative of the idealist discourse. Kaksikieliset koulut olisivat täydentävä vaihtoehto nykyisille yksikielisille kouluille, eivätkä ne korvaisi ruotsinkielisiä kouluja. Sen sijaan ne tarjoaisivat kaksikielisillä paikkakunnilla lapsille aidon mahdollisuuden ylittää kielimuurin ja oppia sujuvasti molempia kieliä.… Tätä nykyä suomenkielisten on vaikea päästä sisälle ruotsinkieliseen kulttuuriin, vaikka haluaisivatkin. Bilingual schools would complement today’s monolingual schools; they would not replace Swedish-medium schools. Instead, they should offer children in bilingual municipalities real possibilities of climbing over the language wall and learning to be fluent in both languages.… Today, it is difficult for Finnish-speakers to be allowed into the Swedish-speaking culture, if they so desire. Like the idealists in Hbl, Niinistö sees the value of bilingual schools in terms of group relations, but primarily from a Finnish-speaking perspective. By becoming fluent in both languages, Finnish-speaking children have the option of entering Swedish-speaking cultural environments, he argues. Again, the wall metaphor is used as a symbol of the separation of the two groups, a wall which he advocates ‘climbing over’. There are also preservationists writing in HS, however. Three days after the publication of the survey in HS, several letters to the editor using preservationist arguments are published. Markku Hyyppä, a neurologist living in Sweden, writes a letter to the editor on 3 November in which he expresses his fears that a Finnish- and Swedish-medium mixed school would imply that the Swedish-speaking pupils will stop using Swedish. He paints a gloomy picture in which ‘the socially enriching culture which our linguistic minority has would languish’, which would entail ‘a loss for the whole country’. Here we see an indirect reference to Taxell’s paradox and the strong connection that is often made between language and culture – the same connection we saw in Niinistö’s idealist discourse above. On the same day (3 November),

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two other letters to the editor concern immersion schools. Taisto Kurki, a Finnish-speaking father of three children in Swedish-medium immersion programmes, argues for expansion of immersion education in school and pre-school. In addition, Nils Torvalds, who presents himself here as SPP’s city chair in Helsinki, responds to Pentikäinen’s editorial (1 November) and argues for the value of immersion programmes. His contribution is made in Finnish, in HS, whereas he does not contribute to this debate in Hbl. The preservationist and party leader of SPP (at that time) Stefan Wallin, who also participated in the debate in Hbl, contributes here too with a letter to the editor, on 5 November, under the headline ‘Children need to be granted the possibility of getting a strong mother tongue’ (Lapsille taattava mahdollisuus omaksua vahva äidinkieli): Olen vakuuttunut, että kaksikielisistä kouluista kiinnostuneet vanhemmat tarkoittavat hyvää. Kysymys kaksikielisistä kouluista on kuitenkin liian monimutkainen, jotta se olisi tiivistettävissä ­pelkistettyyn kyllä tai ei -muotoon, joka esitetään verrattain pienelle otannalle vanhempia. Ajatus kaksikielisistä kouluista on sympaattinen, mutta sisältää riskejä. I am convinced that the parents mean well when they show an interest in bilingual schools. However, the question about bilingual schools is complicated so it is not possible to summarise it as a yes or no question, directed to parents of small children. The idea of bilingual schools is appealing, but implies risks. In this letter to the editor, Wallin points out bilingual options that are already available, such as common facilities under one roof (e.g. cafeterias and gymnasiums) and shared school buildings. These suggestions are added to the ones he mentions during phase 1 in Hbl: immersion programmes and an experimental bilingual school. He feels there is no need for bilingual schools more widely, as these and other forms of bilingual education – such as exchanges between Swedish- and Finnish-medium schools and nativelevel instruction in the other domestic language – already exist. But he tries to be pragmatic, to meet the newly expressed interest in bilingual schools from Finnish-speaking parents, while at the same time retaining his preservationist arguments. One of the last contributions to the debate in HS analysed here is an article (10 December) reporting on an interview with Professor of Nordic Languages Marketta Sundman, by heritage a Finnish-speaker. The headline for the article is ‘Bilingualism a threat to Swedish’ (Kaksikielisyys uhka

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ruotsille), which is probably overstated. She claims in the interview that bilingual schools would benefit only Finnish-speaking pupils. She is quoted as saying: Jos meillä olisi esimerkiksi Helsingissä ja Turussa samassa koulussa kaksikielistä opetusta, niin näissä kaupungeissa valitsisi osa jopa täysin ruotsinkielisistä perheistä sen kaksikielisen koulun, koska he haluaisivat taata lapselleen mahdollisimman hyvän suomen kielen taidon.… Suuri riski on, että ruotsinkielinen koulu korvaantuisi kaksikielisellä koululla, missä enemmistö oppilaista olisi suomenkielisiä. If we had schools in, for example, Helsinki and Turku with bilingual instruction, families where both parents are Swedish-speaking would choose the bilingual school in these cities, since they would want to guarantee that their children would learn Finnish as well as possible.… There is a major risk that the Swedish school would be replaced by bilingual schools, where the majority of pupils would be Finnishspeaking. Sundman thus sees a risk that the establishment of bilingual schools would reduce the number of pupils who attend Swedish-medium ones. The implication is that these schools might be of value for Finnish-speaking pupils, but not, in the long term, for societal bilingualism in Finland. The debate in HS is not so different from that in Hbl during phase 2. Both discourses are present, although perhaps they are more clearly separated here than in the second phase of the debate in Hbl. The idealists in HS go so far as to claim that bilingual schools can strengthen Swedish and they refer, as in Hbl, to the possibility for improved group relations and understanding as a result. The preservationists use Taxell’s paradox and mention a few already existing options, but also see risks in the maintenance of societal bilingualism in Finland if bilingual schools became a reality on a large scale. The perspective here is understandably more Finnish-speaking than Swedish-speaking, but the arguments and discourses are much the same.

Discussion, conclusions and later developments Our analysis of the discourses in place circulating through the debate nexus in both newspapers has shown that these represent two major discourses: what we call the preservationist and the idealist discourses. However, at the same time, there is a widespread agreement – a joint discourse – about certain aspects of the current situation in bilingual Finland and certain future scenarios to aim for. This consensus existed from the

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very start of the debate. First, all serious participants in the debate in both newspapers are agreed that Finland should remain a bilingual country with two national languages, Swedish and Finnish. No one seriously argues for weakening Swedish and strengthening Finnish; even the Finnish-speaking participants see the value of a strong Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Second, there is also widespread agreement, we believe, that societal bi­ lingualism in Finland needs to be managed. If left to itself, to sociolinguistic Darwinism, Finland would soon become dominantly Finnish-speaking, if not monolingual. A few radical idealists, such as the educator Fritjof Sahlström, might question this view, but these ‘radicals’ were a minority in the debate. Third, we would argue that almost all the participants in the debate, even the idealists, tend to see Finland as consisting of two separate language groups: Finnish-speakers and Swedish-speakers. (The consensus on these three points exists in parliament as well – see Chapter 2.) Bilingual families sometimes surface in the debate, but rarely so. Moreover, speakers of other languages such as Sámi or Russian are largely if not totally absent. Even when idealists such as HS’s editor-in-chief Mikael Pentikäinen and columnist Olav S. Melin in Hbl use the walls-to-bridges metaphor, the metaphor is one of bridges between – presumably – separate entities on either side of a river or some other divider. There is no melting pot metaphor; the only examples of a similar metaphor are in letters to the editor by an SPP politician, Fred Granberg (Hbl, 16 December), and by a Stockholm neurologist, Markku Hyyppä (HS, 3 November). They use the verb or participle ‘mix(ed)’ in the passages cited above, describing – the first positively, the second negatively – how ‘both groups’ could go to day-care or school together. Even here, we still have the idealist Granberg’s dualist use of ‘both groups’ and the preservationist Hyyppä’s reference to ‘Swedishspeaking pupils’, indicating that both contributors still see the pupils as belonging to one of two distinct groups. Likewise, Niinistö, an idealist, uses the metaphor of ‘climbing over the wall’. The wall still remains, but he wishes to give children the chance to climb over it. In other words, Niinistö sees the division between groups as remaining intact, even if bilingual schools were established. Our analysis of discourses in place has also shown that different participants use terms in different ways and thus end up talking at cross purposes. As Karjalainen and Pilke (2012) have shown, different debaters mean different things by the term ‘bilingual schools’. What many preser­ vationists were concerned about during phase 1 of the debate was the prospect of Finnish-speakers, or bilingual children with poor proficiency in Swedish, attending the same schools as children for whom Swedish is their stronger language. When the survey with the question specifically

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mentioning instruction in both languages is published, the debate becomes focused more on the question of the medium of instruction, rather than of the school population. After the survey, there is more discussion of both existing alternatives, such as immersion, and about the possibility of a new language school for older children in Helsinki. But these alternatives are considered primarily for Finnish-speaking children. So in the second phase of the debate, it still is clear that ‘bilingual schools’ would not involve children from (what is conceived of as) the two language groups attending the same schools and receiving instruction together, except among a few idealists. It is also interesting to contrast (Swedish politician) Wetterstrand’s role with that of HS editor-in-chief Pentikäinen. Wetterstrand’s comment got the debate going, among Swedish-speakers, in Hbl. But, as we have shown, the argumentation followed established lines between preservationists, who, on the defensive, were afraid of bilingual schools replacing Swedish-medium ones, and idealists, who could imagine changes of various kinds. It was the survey commissioned by HS which set the debate on a new track. Here, editor-in-chief Pentikäinen played a major role in setting the agenda, by demonstrating the strong positive interest among Finnishspeakers for education in Swedish and Finnish and claiming that bilingual schools could even strengthen Swedish. The preservationists responded in various ways to this positive interest and the strong defensive stance was modified; some mentioned existing forms of schooling in both languages available to each group, while some, especially SPP politicians, suggested a new alternative language school in Helsinki. The focus also shifted from the Swedish-­ speaking minority to the Finnish-speaking majority. It is probably also significant that the impetus for this – albeit minor – change in the existing discourses was brought about by a domestic Finnish voice, Pentikäinen’s, rather than Wetterstrand’s Swedish one. Here we see but one example of the importance of the two major participants’ respective historical bodies. Another is that they are perceived as members of two linguistic majorities: the Finnish-speakers in Finland and the Swedish-speakers in Sweden, respectively. This means that neither major participant came from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. But, clearly, virtually all the participants’ contributions were affected by the language groups they have registered themselves as belonging to, the languages they were raised in, their own school attendance, their families’ language use, and so on. These historical bodies also have an impact on the minds of the readers, with all their myriad historical bodies. Personal and public historical bodies, on the one hand, and the media spaces and their participatory affordances (i.e. the interaction orders), on the other, also played a role in who said what, when and in which

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newspaper. Among others, we find politicians, parents, journalists and academics expressing their opinions in editorials or letters to the editor (which requires the social action of formulating a text with opinions), or being interviewed by journalists (who ask for opinions). A minority of the debaters were visible in both newspapers and these were SPP politicians (e.g. the preservationist Wallin and the preservationist/idealist Stenbäck). Others contributed to only one of the papers. By way of example, SPP poli­ tician Torvalds expressed preservationist arguments in HS (but not in Hbl), the leader of the Greens of Finland, Niinistö, presented idealist discourses in HS (but not in Hbl), and the educator and idealist Sahlström published columns on the topic in Hbl (but was not visible in HS). Notably, writers with a Swedish-speaking background contributed to either Hbl or HS or both, whereas very few Finnish-speakers participated in the debate in Hbl. We have seen that the debate became livelier during November and December 2011, after the survey, but then a broad consensus was established and the debate subsided for a while. The question may arise, following our analysis, what sort of social action did this debate actually lead to? One year later, in December 2012, Hbl conducted a new poll, in which 1005 Finns were asked to respond to the statement ‘There should be bilingual schools where all pupils get instruction in Swedish as well as in Finnish’ and received very similar results as the poll commissioned by HS in 2011: 54% of the respondents agreed completely or to some extent with the statement (Hbl, 28 December 2012). The interest among Finnish-speakers (this time not restricted to parents and the metropolitan area) thus seems to remain strong. In response to the newspaper debate, panel discussions with invited participants – primarily researchers and politicians – were organised in Helsinki on a couple of occasions, and in 2013 a scholarly edited volume on bilingual schooling and future perspectives in a multilingual Finland appeared (Tainio & Harju-Luukkainen, 2013). The debate in 2011 also led the think-tank Magma to commission Professor Marketta Sundman to study the pros and cons of bilingual schools, based on previous research and experiences from other countries. Sundman (2013) concluded her study by suggesting the establishment of a bilingual school model in which half of the pupils come from Finnish-speaking homes and half from Swedish-speaking or bilingual ones. Whereas Sundman in the newspaper debate two years earlier used preservationist arguments and pointed to the risks of bilingual schools (see interview quote above from HS, 10 December), her conclusions in this report leaned more heavily on idealist reasoning. In January 2014, the SPP politician Marcus Rantala put a motion to the city council of Helsinki to establish a Nordic school, using the French– Finnish and the German–Finnish independent schools as models. The idea

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of an independent Swedish language school was, as we have seen, launched early on in the newspaper debate by SPP politician Maria Björnberg-Enckell, and was taken up later by others such as Pär Stenbäck. Rantala’s motion to the city of Helsinki now turned into a concrete social act, however. As a motivation for his suggestion, Rantala echoed Stenbäck in saying ‘Many Finnish-speakers want to learn Swedish; we have to take care of that interest’ (Hbl, 30 January 2014). Rantala explicitly avoided the term ‘bilingual school’ and used preservationist discourse we recognise from the debate analysed above. He stressed that the school should be established primarily for Finnish-speakers and should have a Nordic profile, offering the study of other Scandinavian languages in addition to Swedish. The school should thus not compete with Swedish-medium schools. The motion immediately raised a lot of interest and positive reactions from school administrators and local politicians of other parties. Unlike Rantala, several of them suggested that the school admit pupils from Swedish-speaking and bilingual homes. The motion was scheduled to be considered by the city council of Helsinki in 2014 and the school could start admitting pupils as early as 2015 (Hbl, 31 January 2014). The strong interest shown in the debate we analysed for bilingual education among Finnish-speaking parents in the Helsinki region has clearly had the potential to lead to concrete social action in the form of the proposal of a new school form in the capital, as well as to alter the course of similar debates in the future, such as the continuing debate on obligatory Swedish. A conclusion that can be drawn from the debate we have analysed and the debate on obligatory Swedish is that Finnish-speakers want to be able to choose between different types of instruction in Swedish, not only instruction (obligatory or otherwise) in Swedish as a target language within the framework of monolingual Finnish-medium education. What happened in January 2014 indicates that they may indeed get a new alternative for bilingual education. Our expectation is that debates similar to the one we analyse, on this or other topics having to do with Finland as a bilingual country, will surface again, as soon as something happens to get the discourses going again. But perhaps their point of departure will be characterised by greater consensus and less division and suspicion than in the first phase of this debate and previous ones in this discourse cycle. Our analysis indicates, in contradiction to the question posed in Saukkonen’s (2011) report Mikä suomenruotsalaisissa ärsyttää? (Why are Swedish-speaking Finns so irritating?), that the areas of agreement seem to be increasing slowly but surely, rather than decreasing. But we expect the general lines of the two discourses – preservationist and idealist – to remain intact even in future debates.

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Notes (1) Finnish-medium and Swedish-medium schools are sometimes located in the same buildings but with separate administrative bodies (Sahlström et al., 2013). (2) We would like to thank Maija Lappalainen and Sari Pöyhönen who provided the database with the newspaper articles and performed some of the analyses of the Helsinki Sanomat material. (3) Föreningen Norden (the Norden Association) promotes cooperation among the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the autonomous regions of the Åland Islands, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

References Allardt, E. and Starck, C. (1981) Språkgränser och samhällsstruktur. Finlandssvenskarna i ett jämförande perspektiv. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Cameron, D. (2007) Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics. In A. Duchêne and M. Heller (eds) Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages (pp. 268–285). London: Continuum. Dorian, N. (1972) A hierarchy of morphophonemic decay in Scottish Gaelic language death. Word: Journal of the International Linguistic Association 28, 96–109. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Geber, E. (2010) Den obligatoriska svenskan i Finland – en historisk analys. Magma-pm 1/2010. Helsinki: Magma, Finland’s Swedish Think Tank. Giles, H., Bourhis, R.Y. and Taylor, D. (1977) Towards a theory of language in ethnic group relations. In H. Giles (ed.) Language Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations (pp. 307–325). London: Academic Press. Goffman, E. (1983) The interaction ritual. American Sociological Review 48, 1–19. Hale, K., Krauss, M., Watahomigie, L.J., Yamamoto, A.Y., Craig, C., Masayesva, J. and England, N.C. (1992) Endangered languages. Language 68 (1), 1–42. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Longman. Henriksson, L. (2011) En eller tvåspråkiga lösningar. Magma-pm 2/2011. Helsinki: Magma, Finland’s Swedish Think Tank. Hult, F.M. and Pietikäinen, S. (2014) Shaping discourses of multilingualism through a language ideological debate: The case of Swedish in Finland. Journal of Language and Politics 13 (1), 1–20. Hyvärinen, M., Kurunmäki, J., Palonen, K., Pulkkinen, T. and Stenius, H. (2003) Käsitteet liikkeessä: Suomen poliittisen kulttuurin käsitehistoria. Tampere: Vastapaino. Ihalainen, P., Saarinen, T., Nikula, T. and Pöyhönen, S. (2011) Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi. Kasvatus & Aika 3. Juurakko-Paavola, T. and Palviainen, Å. (2011) Svenskans situation i Finland: Lagar och utbildningssystem. In T. Juurakko-Paavola and Å. Palviainen (eds) Svenskan i den finska skolan och högre utbildningen: Om kunskaper och motivation genom olika utbildningsstadier (pp. 9–22). HAMKin julkaisuja 11/2011. Hämeenlinna: HAMK. Karjalainen, K. and Pilke, N. (2012) Samlokalisering, samarbete eller kanske ­sammansmältning? Analys av begreppet ‘tvåspråkig skola’ i en dagstidning. In N. Nissilä and N. Siponkoski (eds) Kielet liikkeessä, Språk i rörelse, Languages in Motion, Sprachen in Bewegung (pp. 58–69). Vaasa: VAKKI.

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King, K., Fogle, L. and Logan-Terry, A. (2008) Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (5), 907–922. Kreander, M. and Sundberg, J. (2007) Cultural autonomy in politics and in Swedish voluntary organisations. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 187/188, 55–73. Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A Social Semantic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Kullenberg, C. (2012) The Quantification of Society: A Study of a Swedish Research Institute and Survey-Based Social Science. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Lahtinen, M. (2006) Snellmanin Suomi. Tampere: Vastapaino. Liebkind, K. and Sandlund, T. (2006) Räcker det med svenskan? Om finlandssvenskarnas anknytning till sina organisationer. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland. Liebkind, K., Tandefelt, M. and Moring, T. (2007) Introduction: Why a special issue on the Swedish-speaking Finns? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 187/188, 1–11. Lindgren, A.-R., Lindgren, K. and Saari, M. (2011) From Swedish to Finnish in the 19th century: A historical case of emancipatory language shift. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 209, 17–34. McRae, K.D. (2007) Toward language equality: Four democracies compared. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 187/188, 13–34. Palviainen, Å. (2010) The proficiency in Swedish of Finnish-speaking university students: Status and directions for the future. Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies 4 (1), 3–23. Palviainen, Å. (2011) Frivillig svenska? Utbildningsrelaterade konsekvenser. Magma-studie 3/2011. Helsinki: Magma, Finland’s Swedish Think Tank. Palviainen, Å. (2013) National identity and a transnational space: The strength of tradition in a time of change. Sociolinguistica 27, 1–18.. Petrovic, J.E. (2005) The conservative restoration and neoliberal defenses of bilingual education. Language Policy 4, 395–416. Ruiz, R. (1984) Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15–34. Sahlström, F., From, T. and Slotte-Lüttge, A. (2013) Två skolor och två språk under samma tak. In L. Tainio and H. Harju-Luukkainen (eds) Kaksikielinen koulu – tulevaisuuden monikielinen Suomi. Tvåspråkig skola – ett flerspråkigt Finland i framtiden (pp. 319–340). Jyväskylä: Suomen kasvatustieteellinen seura. Saukkonen, P. (2011) Mikä suomenruotsalaisissa ärsyttää? Selvitys mediakeskustelusta Suomessa. Magma-studie 1/2011. Helsinki: Magma, Finland’s Swedish Think Tank. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Slotte-Lüttge, A., From, T. and Sahlström, F. (2013) Tvåspråkiga skolor och lärande – en debattanalys. In L. Tainio and H. Harju-Luukkainen (eds) Kaksikielinen koulu – ­tulevaisuuden monikielinen Suomi. Tvåspråkig skola – ett flerspråkigt Finland i framtiden (pp. 221–244). Jyväskylä: Suomen kasvatustieteellinen seura. Statistics Finland (2011) Population according to language 1980–2011. At http://www. stat.fi/til/vaerak/2011/vaerak_2011_2012-03-16_tau_001_en.html (accessed 5 March 2013). Sundman, M. (2013) Tvåspråkiga skolor? En analys av fördelar och risker med införandet av skolor med svenska och finska som undervisningsspråk. Tarvitaanko Suomessa kaksikielisiä kouluja? Selvitys kaksikielisten koulujen eduista ja haitoista suomenkielisten ja ruotsinkielisten kannalta. Magma-Studie 4/2013. Helsinki: Magma, Finland’s Swedish Think Tank.

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Tainio, L. and Harju-Luukkainen, H. (2013) Kaksikielinen koulu – tulevaisuuden monikielinen Suomi. Tvåspråkig skola – ett flerspråkigt Finland i framtiden. Jyväskylä: Suomen kasvatustieteellinen seura. Tandefelt, M. and Finnäs, F. (2007) Language and demography: Historical development. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 187/188, 35–54.

4 Language rights of the Russian-speaking minority in Finland: Multi-sited historical arguments and language ideologies Mika Lähteenmäki and Sari Pöyhönen

The present chapter discusses the current status of Russian in Finland and also addresses the question of the language rights of the Russian-­speaking minority, which has become a globally significant topic due to the rapid growth of the Russian-speaking diaspora after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The motivation for this discussion is twofold. First, the current status of Russian, which has become the third most spoken language in Finland as a result of intensive migration during the past two decades, can be seen as analogous to the status of Finnish in Sweden, which has become a significant minority language due to a massive flow of migrants from Finland to Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapters 5, 8 and 9). Second, the official view of Russian as belonging to the category of ‘other groups’ in the Finnish Constitution of 2000 (see Chapter 2) is compared with the status of Swedish as a ‘national language’, with the aim of showing that historical arguments can be used in strikingly different ways as justifications for language policy within one country. The most powerful argument for the status of Swedish in Finnish legislation has traditionally been the historical-cultural view that emphasises the common history of Sweden and Finland and the role of the Swedish-speaking cultural elite in the creation of Finnish national culture (see Chapter 6). In the case of Russian, in contrast, the situation seems to be quite the opposite. It is argued here that the Finnish interpretation of the common history of Russia and Finland, which plays a central role in the 90

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grand narrative of Finnishness, downplays the significance of Russia and Russian cultural influence by representing Russia as a potential threat. This narrative, deeply rooted in the collective memory of Finns (see ­Lähteenmäki & Vanhala-Aniszewski, 2012: 125), also underlies current suspicions of Russia and Russians (e.g. Tanttu, 2008) and may hinder the promotion of its current status in Finnish language legislation. After a brief overview of the common history of Finland, Sweden and Russia, we move to the discussion of recent outside reactions to the language situation in Finland. The data consist of the monitoring cycles of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Language (Council of Europe, 1992), the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe, 1995) and the statements and initiatives to promote the role of Russian as a minority language outside the Russian Federation by the Russian government and the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation. We focus on how Russian-speaking language communities are described in these documents, how language rights are represented and what the main arguments for the promotion of the rights of the speakers of minority languages are. Our assumption is that while the responses of the Council of Europe and the Russian counterparts to the language policy of Finland and the status of Russian in particular share a common goal, namely the promotion of the language rights of the Russian-speaking minority, the political and ideological agendas as well as the underlying conception of the relationship between language, individual and society are significantly different. Finally, the findings are discussed against the backdrop of Finnish language legislation and current language policy discourse in Finland. The present discussion is based on the assumption that formal language policy discourse, including language legislation, represents the most institutional and normative form of language ideological discourse. While all acts of ideological construction, including language policy, manifest themselves in a particular context, they can also be seen as part of more general sociopolitical and historical processes taking place in a particular society (Blommaert, 1999: 2). Thus, language policy discourses are essentially multisited in the sense that particular discourses are both rooted in the history of a particular society (the vertical dimension) and connected to other relevant contemporary discourses (the horizontal dimension) produced by different actors and stakeholders (see Chapter 1). An important methodological implication for the analysis of language policy discourses that follows from the multi-sitedness is that, apart from the immediate context, the analysis has also to take into account wider political, historical and cultural contexts in order to reveal the ways in which particular language political views and language policy have been and are being articulated. In order to illustrate

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the horizontal dimension of multi-sitedness, we have chosen two different sets of data, Council of Europe and Russian, that shed light on the language situation in Finland from their particular perspectives.

Russian in Finland: Historical background Apart from the Finnish–Swedish state bilingualism of the country, the large and fast-growing number of speakers of Russian compared with other language groups is a characteristic feature of the contemporary linguistic landscape in Finland. While in 1990 the number of Russian-speaking people living in Finland was 3884, at the end of 2013 there were over 66,000 living permanently in Finland who declared Russian as their first language (Statistics Finland, 2014). This rapid rise in the number of Russian-speakers is explained by the substantial immigration of people of Ingrian-­Finnish background to Finland in the 1990s after President Mauno Koivisto had stated, in 1990, that people descending from the Finnish-speaking Lutheran people who settled the Orthodox Ingrian-speaking territory during Swedish rule would be treated as repatriates in case they wished to migrate to Finland from the former Soviet Union. Even though the percentage of Russian-speaking persons (1%) is currently still very low compared with the proportions of speakers of Finnish (90%) and Swedish (5%), in the majority of the municipalities of Finland the number of speakers of Russian is higher than that of speakers of Swedish (Statistics Finland, 2009). In addition, there are municipalities in eastern Finland in which the number of Russianspeaking persons comprises 3.5% of the population (Statistics Finland, 2009). This is explained by the fact that the Swedish-speaking population is concentrated on the west and south coast of Finland and in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The Russian-speaking population in Finland is intimately linked with the long common history of Finland, Russia and Sweden, characterised by conflicts and shifts of borders. When most of the territory of presentday Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden (from the 13th century to 1809), there were different forms of cross-border contacts and conflicts between Finns, Karelians, Ingrians and Russians living on both sides of the border between Sweden and Russia. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian-speakers had migrated to Finland in three waves. The first took place in the early 18th century, comprising serfs and farmers who moved to the province of Karelia, which had been lost by Sweden to Russia. The second wave consisted of civil servants, merchants and soldiers who migrated to the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland from other parts of the Russian empire in the period of autonomy in the 19th century.

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In addition to this, the Karelian isthmus was a popular summer resort for approximately 100,000 Russians who resided in Saint Petersburg. The third wave of migration comprised people who fled Soviet Russia after the October Revolution in 1917 and immigrated to Finland, which had gained its independence in 1917. The Russian-speaking people and their ancestors who moved to Finland before the collapse of the Soviet Union have until very recently been called the ‘old Russians’, most of whom have been totally assimilated and changed their language to Finnish or Swedish (see e.g. Niemi, 2007). The term ‘new Russians’ has been used to refer to the Russian-speaking population that settled in Finland during the period of Soviet perestroika and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘New Russians’ is a somewhat imprecise name for an ethnically, culturally, religiously and linguistically heterogeneous group who include Orthodox and Lutheran Ingrians, most of whom had become linguistically and culturally Russian during the Soviet period, ethnic Russians most of whom moved to Finland as a result of Finnish–Russian marriages or work-related migration and, finally, members of other ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union whose main language was Russian. Thus, the Russianspeaking population of Finland represents a heterogeneous group within which the ethnic, cultural and linguistic identities are multiple and increasingly situated in time and space (Lähteenmäki & Vanhala-Aniszewski, 2010; Rynkänen & Pöyhönen, 2010). By this we mean that in the era of late modernity, which is characterised by growing mobility of people and social, economic and cultural globalisation, the identity of an individual can rarely be anchored to the conventional categories of geography, history or language, which have played a crucial role in the creation of nation-states in Europe (see Smyth, 2013). Moreover, as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 shows, even those anchor points that are often taken as given and can be a significant part of the identity of an individual (e.g. country of origin) may cease to exist, which necessarily forces individuals to reconsider and redefine their identity in the changed context. As to the status of Russian in present-day Finland, we argue that the project of construing the Finnish nation since the 19th century and its interpreta­tion of the common history of Finland, Russia and Sweden are still relevant and affect the ways in which the roles of Russian and Swedish are articulated in Finnish language legislation and language policy discourse in general. The Finnish–Swedish state bilingualism has its roots in the common history of Finland and Sweden. Indeed, it is a historical fact that the Swedish-speaking population of the Grand Duchy of Finland played a central role in the development of the Finnish language, culture, nation-state and national identity. For instance, a significant number of

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Fennomans, whose aim was to promote the development of the Finnish language and culture in the 19th century, spoke Swedish as their mother tongue (see Chapter 6 for details). The prominent role of the Swedishspeaking cultural elite in the formation of Finnish culture and national identity is seen as an important historical justification and argument for the current status of Swedish in Finland. However, the way in which the ‘common history’ discourse is used in the discussion about the status of Russian in Finland is radically different from that of Swedish (for a detailed discussion, see Lähteenmäki & Vanhala-­ Aniszewski, 2012). The idea of Russia and ‘Russianness’ as primordial enemies and potential threats to Finland and ‘Finnishness’ has long historical roots and plays a prominent role in the grand narrative of Finnishness (see Tarkiainen, 1986; Vilkuna, 2006). The fear of Russia, Russian and the Orthodox religion is also present in Finnish folklore and local history (see Leppänen & Pahta, 2012). Further, it has been strengthened by events in the more recent history of the countries. These include the first (1899–1905) and second (1909–17) eras of oppression, during which the aim of Russian chauvinist politics was to subdue the growing nationalist movement in Finland and fully integrate the Grand Duchy of Finland into the Russian empire (Jussila, 2004; Zetterberg, 2005). Also the Civil War (1918), the Winter War (1939–40) and the Continuation War (1941–44) between Finland and the Soviet Union have been interpreted as demonstrations of Russian aggression. In 1948 the countries concluded the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assist­ance, as a consequence of which Finnish foreign policy during the Cold War was characterised by so-called Finlandisation, that is, a policy of not questioning the interests of the Soviet Union. Thus, the contemporary discourse on language policy and the status of Russian in particular is deeply rooted in the historical narrative which presents Russia as an enemy and potential threat to Finnishness. From the pervasiveness of this narrative, which plays a significant role in the grand narrative of Finnishness, it follows that the promotion of the language rights of the Russian-speaking minority is even today a politically sensitive topic with a great historical burden. The same mechanism is also at work in discourses about the status of Swedish, although it seems mostly to work in the opposite direction. The power of the narrative of the ‘common history’ of Finland and Sweden is reflected in Finnish parliamentary discourse, which tends to maintain the current status of Swedish and avoids any reconsideration of Finnish language policy as a whole (see Chapter 2). In the next section we analyse how and to what extent, if at all, the articulation of the grand narrative of Finnishness and the ideological views

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concerning the common history of Finland and Russia, which underlie contemporary language policy discourse in Finland, are reflected in the reactions of the Council of Europe to the current status of Russian in Finland.

Language rights and Russian-Speakers: A European view on Finnish policy There are two treaties of the Council of Europe that deal with language rights, namely the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992, henceforth ECRML or Charter) and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995, henceforth FCPNM or Convention), both of which have been signed and ratified by Finland. The data for the analysis of the reactions and recommendations concerning the status of Russian in Finland by the Council of Europe consist mainly of the monitoring cycles of the Charter. The focus here is on the ways in which the Russian language and speakers of Russian have been represented and conceptualised in both Finnish government reports and the expert and advisory committee documents from the Council of Europe. The main aim of the ECRML is to strengthen the position of regional and minority languages as part of European heritage, and to develop their status among European hegemonic languages. The regional or minority languages are defined as languages which are: i) traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of the State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and ii) different from the official language(s) of the State. (Council of Europe, 1992) The Charter does not define a ‘traditionally used’ language in terms of time, and it is largely up to the member states (parties) to determine how and to which languages this concept is applied, which has led to quite different applications in the case of Finnish in Sweden and that of Russian in Finland, for instance. The Charter aspires to promote the right to use a regional or minority language in both private and public life. The ECRML also aims to protect small, diminishing languages that are used by citizens in the countries that have signed and ratified the Charter. It is note­worthy that neither ‘dialects of the official language(s) of the State’ nor ‘the languages of migrants’ are included in the ECRML as categories of languages needing protection (Council of Europe, 1992).

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A central concept used in the characterisations of the status of different languages in the Charter is territory, which refers to ‘the geographical area in which the said language is the mode of expression of a number of people justifying the adoption of the various protective and promotional measures provided for in this Charter’ (Council of Europe, 1992). The Charter makes a distinction between territorial and non-territorial languages, the latter being defined as languages used by nationals of the State which differ from the language or languages used by the rest of the State’s population but which, although traditionally used within the territory of the State, cannot be identified with a particular area thereof. (Council of Europe, 1992) The Charter consists of five parts. Parts I and II define general provisions (e.g. definitions), objectives and principles on which the parties should base their policies, legislation and practice regarding regional or minority languages. Part III, the most extensive, consists of a list of measures for the promotion of the use of regional and minority languages in public life, including education, judicial authorities, administrative authorities and public services, media, cultural activities and facilities, and economic and social life. Part IV is devoted to the applications of the Charter, while Part V contains the final provisions. Finland submits reports on the realisation of the measures recommended in the Charter every three years. The first report appeared in 1999, and the reports have been evaluated by the Council of Europe four times. Finland submitted its fourth (and at the time of writing most recent) report on the application of the ECRML in Finland in September 2010, which was followed by a report of the Committee of Experts and recommendations of the Committee of Ministers published in March 2012. In its first report, the Finnish government declared that it would apply 65 of the provisions under Part III to the Swedish language as the less widely used official language and 59 to the Sámi language as a regional language (the minimum number of paragraphs or sub-paragraphs to be chosen is 35 in Part III) (Government of Finland, 1999a: 1). In addition, Finland declared that it would undertake to apply (mutatis mutandis) the principles of Part II to the Roma language as well as to other non-territorial languages spoken in Finland. In the first report, the languages included in this category were Russian and Tatar (Government of Finland, 1999a: 6). It should be pointed out that the information about the exact composition of the Committee of Experts is not publicly available, but there are certain regulations concerning its constellation. According to the Explanatory

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Report on the ECRML (Council of Europe, 1992: Part IV, articles 15–17, paragraph 131), the number of members of the Committee of Experts will be the same as the number of parties to the Charter. They must be persons of recognised competence in the field of regional or minority languages. At the same time, by placing emphasis on the intrinsically personal trait of the ‘highest integrity’, the Charter makes it clear that the experts appointed to the Committee, in carrying out their task, should be free to act independently and not be subject to instructions from the governments concerned. It is also considered important that a substantial part of the members of the Committee are either legal experts or experts in sociolinguistics. For some time these two expert categories have represented slightly less than 50% each of the total number of members. The Committee includes some other experts who have been appointed on the basis of their competence in the field of regional or minority languages, including teachers, former diplomats, former Members of the European Parliament and so forth. The chair has been a legal expert, as have the vice chairs. Regarding the personal background of the members, there is no general preference to choose experts from the speaker groups of the relevant regional or minority languages, even if this in practice is occasionally the case: it is the individual’s personal integrity that is decisive. The internal procedures for nominating candidates for appointment may also differ between nation states (Jarmo Lainio, oral communication, 7 March 2013). As mentioned above, the second important document relating to language rights within the Council of Europe is the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. The Convention defines the basic principles relating to the protection of national minorities in their own territory and lists the obligations of the countries that have signed and ratified the treaty. The chief aim of the obligations is to strengthen protection against discrimination and to maintain and develop minority cultures. As to the implementation of the recommendations of the Convention, the government of Finland has submitted three reports since 1999, the latest (at the time of writing) dating from February 2010. The Council’s Advisory Committee published its response to the latest report together with the comments of the Finnish government in April 2011. The final resolu­tion and the recommendations of the Committee of Ministers appeared in February and March 2012. According to the explanatory report on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe, 1995: Section IV, articles 24–26, paragraph 96), the Committee of Ministers will determine ‘the composition and the procedures of the advisory committee, the members of which shall have recognised expertise in the field of the protection of national minorities’.

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Article 5 of the Convention states that the parties are expected to: promote the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage. (Council of Europe, 1995) The text of the Convention does not provide any explicit definition of the notion of national minorities and, consequently, it remains unclear what this central concept refers to. An attempt to characterise national ­minorities in terms of territory, tradition and number can be found in article 10, which states that: in areas inhabited by persons belonging to national minorities traditionally or in substantial numbers, if those persons so request and where such a request corresponds to real need, the Parties shall endeavour to ensure, as far as possible, the conditions which would make it possible to use the minority language in relations between those persons and the administrative authorities. (Council of Europe, 1995) That ‘national minorities’ had been left undefined at the time of the ratification of the Convention was pointed out in the first report submitted by the Government of Finland (1999b: 3). From this, it followed that the passages of the Charter which describe the national minorities in Finland were based on earlier documents containing an overview of the history of the Sámi, the Roma, the Jews, the Tatars, ‘old’ Russians and Swedishspeaking Finns in Finland that had been submitted to United Nations treaty bodies, referred to in the Convention. The ambivalence of the notion of national minorities is also reflected in the discussion of the language rights of the speakers of Russian, in the sense that it is not always clear who are included in the Russian-speaking minority. The first periodical report on the implementation of the ECRML submitted by the Finnish government in 1999 makes a distinction between the ‘old Russians’ and ‘new Russians’, whereas the relevance of the distinction for the discussion of language rights in the contemporary context is seriously questioned in the report of the Committee of Experts that appeared two years later: At this moment there are some 20,000 Russian-speaking persons living in Finland, of which some 5,000 are so-called Old Russians. (Government of Finland, 1999a: 6)

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Russian is a traditional language in Finland. The Russian-speakers form a rather heterogeneous group of about 5,000 so-called Old Russians, of whom only a part has maintained the Russian language, and 15,000– 25,000 New Russians, depending on the time of their arrival in Finland. The Committee has however decided to consider this language without the distinction of whether its users are ‘new’ or ‘old’. (Council of Europe, 2001: 8) The government report does not comment on the language itself, but refers to ‘Russian-speaking persons’, who are divided into two groups. The Expert Committee report, in contrast, disclaims the distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Russians and states that the language is the same irrespective of the fact that the speakers of Russian form a heterogeneous group. It is difficult to say whether Finland has made the distinction in order to categor­ise the ‘new Russians’ as belonging to the group of migrants, in which case they would not be included in the Convention. During the process of drafting the report, the government of Finland had consulted the Russian Cultural-Democratic Union (Russkii kul’turno-demokraticheskii soiuz) associated with the ‘old Russians’, whereas representatives from other organisations of Russian-speakers were not contacted. This can be explained by the fact that FARO, the Finnish Association of Russian-Speaking Organis­ations, was established in the same year Finland submitted its first report. A question remains, though: why was it important for Finland to make the distinction between the two groups of Russian-speaking people in the report? On the one hand, a possible explanation is that Finland followed the practice adopted in the Framework Convention, where the ‘old Russians’ were defined as a national minority in Finland. On the other, this categorisation would allow the government to treat ‘new Russians’ as a recent migrant group, in which case the Russian-speaking minority would not be entitled to the rights listed in the ECRML, since the language rights of migrants are not covered by the Charter. The second and third periodical reports on the Charter by the Finnish government (Government of Finland, 2002: 11; 2006: 9) provide a wider perspective on the uses of the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Russian-speakers’. The second report mentions that ‘while Swedish-speakers are the largest language minority in Finland, the Russian-speaking persons constitute the largest non-territorial language group’. The distinction between the ‘old Russians’ and ‘new Russians’ is no longer used, but the government reports refer to the ‘historical Russian-speaking minority/population’ as opposed to ‘immigrants/new immigrants’, thus effectively recapitulating the earlier distinction. What is more, ‘many Ingrian returnees’, who had been granted

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the status of repatriates on the basis of their Finnish origins, are included in the Russian-speaking population, although the third report emphasises that ‘many of them nevertheless wish to maintain their Finnish identity’ (Government of Finland, 2006: 9). The government reports characterise the promotion of the language rights of the Russian-speaking minority as ‘challenging’, as a result of the heterogeneity of the group. Both periodical reports also acknowledge ‘the enterprising spirit of Russians in Finland, which has contributed to the strengthening of their identity and culture’ (Government of Finland, 2006: 9; emphasis added). The use of the expression ‘Russians’ in this context would seem to imply that Russian-speaking people are understood as an ethnic group, whereas elsewhere in the reports the expressions used are Russian-speaking population/population group/minority/persons and there are several references to the heterogeneous nature of the group. The second evaluation report (Council of Europe, 2004: 6) of the Charter comes back to the issue of the relevance of the distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Russians for the description of the situation of the Russian language in Finland. The evaluation report starts with an estimation of the number of Russian-speaking people in Finland and then continues by stating that ‘this figure includes the so-called “old Russians”, “new Russians” who are migrants, as well as the Ingrian returnees’. Thus, the distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Russians has been replaced with the tripartite distinction between a historical national minority, recent immigrants and repatriates. The third evaluation report (Council of Europe, 2007: 5) disclaims both distinctions and merely acknowledges that ‘the Russian-speaking population is not a unified group and due to the different backgrounds their condition in the Finnish society varies’. The third periodical report on the Framework Convention (Government of Finland, 2010b: 18) states that ‘the different Russian-speaking groups’ are treated equally with regard to the provision of services and support. The report also adds that ‘no distinction is drawn between “the Old Russians” and the other Russians or Russian-speaking people belonging to the population of Finland’. The Advisory Committee had encouraged the Finnish authorities to re-examine the justifications for the distinction between the two groups in its previous periodical opinion (Council of Europe, 2006), and in its third opinion (Council of Europe, 2010) the Advisory Committee was ‘pleased to note’ that the distinction between the ‘old Russians’ and ‘new Russians’ was no longer upheld in the documents submitted by the government of Finland. Elsewhere in its report the Advisory Committee continues to use the expression ‘the Russian-speaking minority’. The fourth report of the Committee of the Experts (Council of Europe, 2012: 18) of the ECRML pays attention to the fact that there are increasingly

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negative attitudes towards Russian-speaking people in Finland, and refers particularly to recent immigrants. The report describes the worries of ‘the speakers’ that Russian is portrayed in a negative light in the Finnish media, and ‘young people do not always dare to use their mother tongue in public’. Similar negative attitudes towards the Swedish language have also been reported, with an emphasis on the political debate regarding the mandatory position of Swedish in Finnish schools as well as the protection of the language rights of the Swedish-speakers during the latest regional administrative reform, concerning, among other things, health care. The report of the Committee of the Experts characterises the status of Swedish as a second official language as ‘fragile’ (see Chapter 2 on the position of Swedish in the legislation). The 2012 report of the Committee of the Experts puts more pressure on Finland and requires the government to take more efficient measures for the protection of Russian as a regional or minority language, in addition to which it pays attention to permanent problems in establishing a dialogue between the representatives of the Russian-speakers and the Finnish government (Council of Europe, 2012: 11). The report also refers to the earlier recommendations by the Council of Europe with regard to the availability of Russian language education for the speakers of the language and concludes that Finland has not succeeded in meeting the needs of the Russian-speaking minority and no significant improvement has taken place (see also Council of Europe, 2010: 30). The Experts’ report states that ‘the most serious difficulty lies in the fact that it [Russian] is not treated as a regional or a minority language’. What is more, apart from preventing an increase in negative attitudes towards Swedish-speaking and Romani people, the Committee of Experts (Council of Europe, 2012: 18) ‘encourages’ the Finnish authorities to ‘take measures to promote tolerance and raise awareness among the majority population about the Russian language as an integral part of the Finnish culture’. This recommendation, which ascribes to the Russian language the same role in the development of Finnish culture that has traditionally been attributed to Swedish, assumes that historical arguments and justifications are an essential tool for ‘promoting tolerance’. While the idea that knowledge of history helps people to understand and cope with present-day phenomena is most welcome, the formulation seems to ignore the cultural fact that the traditional interpretation of the role of the common history of Finland and Russia in the construction of the grand narrative of ‘Finnishness’ is radically different from that suggested by the Committee of Experts. The passages quoted above represent the strongest and most explicit criticism of the current status of Russian in Finland in the documents

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produced by the Council of Europe. Next, we turn to Russian legislative documents and language policy discourse dealing with the language rights of Russian-speaking people residing in the Russian Federation and across the globe, which contain a particular ideological view concerning the interrelationship of language, culture and nation. While these documents address the question of language rights of the Russian-speaking diaspora on a general level, they have, by definition, a direct bearing on the language rights of the Russian-speaking population in Finland.

Language policy and the language rights of RussianSpeaking people in Russian language policy discourse Russian is considered one of the ‘world languages’; it ranks eighth in the list of the most widely spoken languages of the world and is spoken in 33 different countries (see e.g. http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size). According to different estimates, there are currently approximately 140−160 million first-language speakers of Russian, whereas the total number of Russian-speakers, including those for whom Russian is a second language, is approximately 220−280 million. However, it has been estimated that the number of Russian-speakers will fall significantly in the near future. According to Aref ’ev (2006), the number of Russian first-language speakers in the Russian Federation will fall from 140 million (2004) to 110 million by 2025. The decrease in the total number of speakers of Russian around the world is expected to be even more dramatic: from 278 million (2004) to 152 million by 2025 (Aref ’ev, 2006). There are at least two main reasons for the rapid decrease in the number of Russian-speaking people. First, the population of the Russian Federation is expected to decrease in the near future, due to the low birth rate and low life expectancy among its citizens. Second, a significant number of current Russian-speakers are first-generation migrants living outside the Russian Federation (in the former republics of the USSR, the USA, Canada, Israel, Germany, Finland and so forth) and their children and grandchildren are less likely to speak Russian to the same extent as their parents and grand­parents. This demographic development, together with the decreasing number of speakers of Russian, has been met with concern by Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, because it presents a potential threat to Russia’s superpower status and the status of the Russian language among world languages. This is naturally reflected in Russian language policy discourse and the official language policy of the Russian Federation, which express the concern about the future of Russian among other world languages.

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A concrete manifestation of this concern was the introduction of the law ‘On State Language of the Russian Federation’ (Zakon ‘O gosudarstvennom iazyke Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, henceforth ZGIaRF), adopted in May 2005 (for discussion, see Pyykkö 2010; for the Russian text, see http://­constitution. garant.ru/act/right/12140387). Together with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the law defines the status of the Russian language as the state language, in addition to which Russian is seen as an essential tool for promoting mutual understanding and strengthening bonds between different nations in the unified state. The law on state language represents a particular ideological view concerning the inter­relationship of the concepts of language, culture and nation. For instance, it states: the protection and the support of the Russian language as the state language of the Russian Federation promote the increase and mutual enrichment of the spiritual culture of the peoples of the Russian Federation. (ZGIaRF, §1, 5) In contrast to the Humboldtian idea of a linguistic Weltanschauung, which assumes an intimate connection between the spiritual and cultural capacity of a nation and its language, the above formulation contains a somewhat different view on the connection between language, culture and nation. The Russian language is seen as an important source and expression of both the Russian national culture and the national cultures of those peoples who reside within the territory of Russia. Thus, the Russian language is given a special role among the languages spoken in Russia, in the sense that the protection and support of Russian are seen as an important means of mutual enrichment of the spiritual culture of all the nations within the territory of the Russian Federation. The common language is seen as an important ingredient in the identity and unity of the Federation, whereas in Swedish language policy discourse the same idea of ‘one language for all’ is presented as a prerequisite for access to Swedish society (see Chapter 2). Apart from its role as the expression of Russian spiritual culture, Russian is represented as an international semiotic master key capable of contributing to the development of all national cultures. The characterisation of the Russian Federation as ‘a unified multinational state’ (ZGIaRF, §1, 4) is clearly motivated by and dependent on the hegemonic status attributed to Russian as both the state language and the unifying language of intercultural communication in the Russian Federation. It can be argued that the idea of unified multinationality echoes the imperialistic understanding of the role of the former Russian empire as a unified multinational space which is the spiritual home of a multiplicity of

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linguistically, confessionally and ethnically diversified groups (Gerasimov et al., 2009). This idea remained basically intact after the October Revolution despite the anti-imperialist proclamations of the Bolshevik regime. While the Bolsheviks originally condemned all forms of imperialistic colonisation characteristic of the Tsarist Russian empire and emphasised the importance of the national self-determination of its peoples, the nationality question became acute in the very first years of the Soviet Union. In order to secure access to necessary natural resources located in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet state, the Bolshevik regime, with the help of former imperial economists, developed a programme of Soviet colonisation, effectively recapitulating the idea of the former Russian empire in Marxist-Leninist terms (Hirsch, 2005: 6–7). The continuity between Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union has also been emphasised by Suny (2001: 26), according to whom neither pre-revolutionary Russia nor the Soviet Union was ever an ethnically Russian empire, because the ruling institutions (the nobility and the Communist nomenklatura) were always multinational, although they were predominantly Russian by nationality and ‘ruled imperially over Russian and non-Russian subjects alike’. What is known as today’s Russia has been linguistically and culturally diverse from the very beginning, and the ‘Russian idea’ was never based on national unity. As pointed out by Hobsbawm (1990: 57), the belief in the unifying power of a shared language has produced a ‘sort of platonic idea of language, existing behind and above all its variant and imperfect versions’, which is then protected through language policy and legislation. In language policy this quest for the uniformity and normativity of a particular language is manifested in various practices of standardisation and codification. According to Wright (2007: 205), the idea of a shared unified language raises a question for language policy makers: What is the language that needs protection – an ideal system outside of its speakers or the diversified and heterogeneous reality of actual linguistic practice? Moreover, the idea of ‘perfect’ language is sometimes present in linguistic research as well, in the sense that migrant variants of Russian spoken in different countries are not studied on their own terms as different variants of Russian, but are evaluated against some hypothetical standard provided by the normative ‘real’ Russian language residing in a Platonic realm (for a critical discussion, see Rynkänen & Pöyhönen, 2010). While the law ‘On State Language of the Russian Federation’ mainly defines the status of the Russian language within the Russian Federation, recent Russian discussions of language policy and language rights have focused on the rights and possibilities of the Russian-speaking people living outside the Russian Federation to preserve their linguistic and cultural

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heritage. These considerations apply, by definition, to the language rights of the Russian-speaking population in Finland. There has been a growing concern about the language rights of those Russian-speaking people who live in the former republics of the Soviet Union, which in current Russian discourse are referred to as ‘the near abroad’, part of whose populations became diasporic linguistic minorities without leaving their home countries. The expression ‘the near abroad’ (ближнее зарубежье) is an ideologically loaded metaphor that echoes the age-old imperialistic idea of Russia characterised by multinational unity. In addition to this ‘stranded’ or ‘beached’ diaspora, there also exist ‘genuinely’ diasporic communities, that is, growing Russian-speaking communities, some with a long history, in different parts of the world, including Finland. As a consequence of this sudden large-scale diasporisation of Russian-speaking people, who may or may not have Russian citizenship, the Russian Federation has become extremely concerned about the protection of their language rights in their new home countries. Another manifestation of the same political rhetoric is the recent controversial law that prohibits the adoption of Russian children in the USA due to the alleged cases of child abuse among children adopted from Russia. It seems that these concerns are motivated, at least in part, by the demographic crisis that is expected to face Russia in the near future. This crisis, together with the large-scale diasporisation of Russian-speaking people, will lead to a decrease in the number of speakers of Russian. In this light, it seems that the chief aim of the recent provocative outbursts mentioned above is to convince Russians that Russia is the best place to live for a Russian, and to warn those who may think about emigrating from Russia that the conditions are much worse abroad. Apart from defending the language rights of the Russian-speaking diasporas in different countries, the language legislation of the Russian Federation, together with other government documents, also touches upon the place of the Russian language among ‘world languages’. While the law on state language is primarily aimed at the promotion of the use of Russian as the state language within the Russian Federation, some passages deal with promoting the use and study of Russian outside Russia, to strengthen its role as a language of international communication (ZGIaRF, §4, 4). More explicit views regarding the role of Russian as one of the ‘world languages’ and defending the language rights of Russian-speaking people living outside the Russian Federation can be found in the document ‘The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation’ (henceforth FPCRF; President of Russia, 2008). The FPCRF, which was approved by the President Putin in June 2008, is a document that defines the system of views regarding the foreign policy

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of the Russian Federation. One of the general goals mentioned in this document is ‘the comprehensive protection of the rights and legitimate interests of Russian citizens and compatriots abroad’ (FPCRF, section I). A recent manifestation of this protective action is the document ‘On the Status of Human Rights in Several Countries of the World’, published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (MIDRF, 2011). Among other things, this highly controversial and programmatic document discusses at considerable length the situation of human rights in Finland, including discrimination against refugees and immigrants, as well as ‘the lack of a distinct national policy in relation to the Russian-speaking population’ (MIDRF, 2011: 43). From the point of view of the present discussion, it is noteworthy that the protection of the rights of the Russian-speaking diaspora includes ‘the expansion and strengthening of the space of the Russian language and culture’ (FPCRF, section V) in their countries of residence. Apart from protecting the rights of the Russian-speaking diaspora to preserve their linguistic and cultural identity, the document also aims to enhance the status of Russian among the world languages by contributing to the ‘learning and spread of the Russian language as an integral part of the world culture and an instrument of inter-ethnic communication’ (FPCRF, section V). A significant function of the foreign policy activities of the Russian Federation is the preservation of ‘the ethnic and cultural identity of the Russian diaspora and its links with its historic motherland’ (FPCRF, section V). This formulation seems to assume the Herderian idea of an inseparable link between language, culture, ethnicity and territory, thereby ignoring the heterogeneous nature of the Russian-speaking diaspora. For instance, the Russian Federation was never the homeland of Russian-speaking people living in the newly independent countries that were former republics of the Soviet Union, who simply decided to stay in their home countries after the declaration of independence and consequently became linguistic minorities (Pavlenko, 2008: 30). Although the first generation of the Russian-speaking linguistic minorities was born in the Soviet Union, their children were born in independent countries with no connection to the Russian Federation. This discourse also seems to take monolingualism as a norm, thus ignoring the fact that the people being referred to are factually multilingual. The underlying assumption that, regardless of country of birth or residence, individuals who have Russian-speaking ancestors and speak Russian auto­ matically connect themselves to the ‘historic motherland’ and its spiritual culture is highly idealised and dated in the contemporary world, characterised by mobility and growing post-nationalism (Heller, 2011). In fact, the very applicability of the concept of diaspora can be questioned, because the

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members of a diaspora live ‘in a society distant from the homeland … to which they one day expect to return’ (Laitin, 1998: 29). Apart from the legislation and official documents, the language rights of the Russian-speaking diaspora are being actively discussed by various organisations supported by the government of the Russian Federation. In recent years one of the most active and prominent organisations has been the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which was established by President Putin and is a joint venture of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Science. The Foundation sees its main aim as promoting ‘the Russian language, as Russia’s national heritage and a significant aspect of Russian and world culture, and supporting Russian language teaching programs abroad’ (quotes here and below taken from the Foundation’s Russian-language website, http://www.russkiymir.ru/). It also aims to ­ enhance the international visibility and ‘the appreciation of Russian language, heritage and culture’. While the chief goal of the organisation, which has been articulated explicitly in various documents, is to enhance the international recognition of the cultural values associated with the Russian language and the history of Russia, its activities have a clear political and economic agenda, the aim of which is to gain recognition for the role of Russia as one of the superpowers. In his address delivered at the Federal Assembly of the Russkiy Mir Foundation in 2007, President Putin stated: The Russian language not only preserves an entire layer of truly global achievements but is also the living space for the many millions of people in the Russian-speaking world, a community that goes far beyond Russia itself. As the common heritage of many peoples, the Russian language will never become the language of hatred or enmity, xenophobia or isolationism. Here, the Russian language is conceptualised using two different metaphors. First, it is seen as a layered container or reservoir of cultural, scientific, technological and so forth achievements of its speakers. While it assumes that a language is a true expression of the spirit of its speakers as well as their history and culture, the formulation emphasises that the achievements associated with the Russian language and culture are not only nationally significant but have a ‘truly global’ significance. Instead of viewing Russian as a national language, it is given a universal role. What is more, not only are the achievements preserved in the Russian language characterised as global, but neither is the language itself seen as the sole property of the people residing in historic Russia and the expression of Russian national culture

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but it is characterised as the ‘heritage of many peoples’. Thus, the above passage presents an interesting mixture of the imperialistic understanding of the history of Russia as a unified space and spiritual home of all of its ‘many peoples’, combined with an aspiration for making Russian a global language. Second, the Russian language is conceptualised as ‘the living space’ for the speakers of Russian, which extends beyond the territory of the Russian Federation. Thus, ‘space’ is not tied to a particular location or geographical context but is conceived of as a translocal space that exists simultaneously in different geographical locations around the globe and has a wider globally significant dimension as well. In the mission statement of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, this space is referred to as ‘the Russian world’ or ‘Russian community’, which is not limited to the territory and population of the Russian Federation but also includes those ‘millions of ethnic Russians, native Russian speakers, their families and descendants’ who live in diasporic communities across the globe. This fluctuation between local and global points of view is also apparent elsewhere. It is argued that Russia as a multicultural society has made sig­nifi­ cant contributions to global culture, but at the same time it is emphasised that the writers, artists, composers and other cultural figures coming from this multicultural society ‘continue spreading and uniting Russian language and culture across the globe’ (emphasis added). The characterisations of the Russian language are equally ambivalent. On the one hand, it is seen as something that is ‘at the heart of Russian culture and society’, thus establishing an unbreakable link between language and culture. On the other, Russian is in other instances characterised as the ‘heritage of many peoples’, which is supposed to make it an ideal language for communication between different peoples, due to its hegemonic status within ‘the Russian world’. While the passages cited above acknowledge the translocal nature of the current ‘Russian world’ as a specific linguistic and cultural space, this translocality is not considered a desirable property but a potential threat to the unity of ‘the Russian community’. Accordingly, the aim of the Russkiy Mir Foundation is to reconnect ‘the Russian diaspora’ with their homeland, which seems to be taken to refer to Russia irrespective of the country of birth or residence of a particular Russian-speaking individual. It is taken for granted that all Russian-speaking people scattered across the world would automatically feel that Russia is their homeland, although they may not be ethnic Russians and may not ever have had Russian citizenship. As argued above, this special emphasis on the Russian language as the unifying feature of ‘the Russian world’, which overrides national and ethnic heterogeneity as well as the geographical dispersion of its speakers, represents a case of strategic essentialism, a form of imperialist discourse, the aim of which is

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to create ‘imagined and projected boundaries of groupness’ (Gerasimov et al., 2009: 20). It is based on the idea that there exists an inseparable link between language and homeland, and a common language is seen as the most important single attribute that unites a particular grouping of people and determines the identity of an individual. The idea that all speakers of Russian scattered around the globe would automatically feel affinity with the ‘Russian world’ raises some fundamental questions associated with language rights (see Wright, 2007). First, is it an individual or a group (and if so which group?) whose language rights are to be protected and promoted? It seems that the Russkiy Mir Foundation is primarily interested in strengthening the status of Russia by promoting the unity of the ‘Russian community’, whereas the linguistic rights of an individual are subordinated to the main goal of the organisation. This presupposes that the linguistic rights of an individual do not have an absolute value but are considered valuable only insofar as their protection contributes to the promotion of the status of the whole ‘Russian community’. Second, is it possible for individuals to refuse these rights, if they do not identify themselves with the group membership imposed on them by the policymakers? The above passages seem to take it for granted that becoming a member of the ‘Russian world’ is neither a deliberate decision nor a matter of free choice but something that is beyond the control of an individual. Thus, it is assumed that every Russian-speaking person, irrespective of place of residence, family history and so forth, automatically identifies him- or herself as a member of the ‘Russian community’ solely on the basis that he or she happens to speak Russian. Recently, it has been argued that, due to the growing diversity, mobility and inequality produced by the increasing economic, social and cultural globalis­ation, there is an urgent need for a re-conceptualisation of the traditional categories of sociolinguistics (e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Heller, 2008, 2011). According to Heller (2008: 504–505), the categories and concepts of traditional sociolinguistics are not adequate for understanding the mechanisms behind the changed forms of multilingualism, because they are based on the ideology of modernist nationalism and nation-state reflecting its views on the relation between language, nation, community, identity and so forth. While the need for a re-theorisation of the conceptual and analytical tools of sociolinguistics is widely accepted among its practitioners, the present discussion shows that the discourse of the nation-state, which emphasises the unifying function of a common language, still holds the hegemonic position in Russian language policy discourse. It can be argued that the same holds true for the language policy in Finland and Sweden as well, as shown by other chapters in this volume.

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Chto delat’ – What Is To Be done? It has been argued that the current status of Russian in Finland and its relation to Swedish cannot be properly understood without considering the complexities of the long common history of Finland, Sweden and Russia. This is because contemporary language policy discourse, including language legislation, represents a highly normative form of language ideological discourse which is both situated in and part of more general historical, cultural and sociopolitical processes taking place in Finnish society. We have also discussed outside reactions to the status of Russian in Finland, focusing on the treaties and evaluation reports of the Council of Europe, on the one hand, and the law ‘On State Language of the Russian Federation’, ‘The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation’ and the documents of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, on the other. While these texts represent rather different understandings of language policy and justify the need for the protection of linguistic rights from different perspectives, they share the concern for the status of Russian either within the European Union or on a global scale. The treaties and evaluation reports of the Council of Europe recommend that the language rights of the Russian-speaking population of Finland be considered more thoroughly. The Council of Europe even criticises the inability of the Finnish authorities to promote the rights of the Russian-speakers and teaching of Russian, and states that, in fact, Russian is not treated as a regional or minority language at all. This concern about the status of Russian in Finland has also been expressed, either directly or indirectly, by the representatives of the government of the Russian Federa­ tion and the Russkiy Mir Foundation, who criticise official the language policies of neighbouring countries and aim to promote the language rights of Russian-speaking communities living outside the Russian Federation. The idea of universal language rights, not to mention their implementation, is highly problematic, for language use, which always involves making deliberate choices on different levels, can be seen as an indicator of power (Wright, 2007: 204). Thus, changes in language legislation and language rights will necessarily cause changes in the power relations between languages and their speakers. This link between language and power is also present in the examples from our data which show that there are tensions between Finnish language policy discourse and the views of outsiders in defining speakers of Russian and notions of Russian language. Whose language is it that is talked about when references are made to the protection of the Russian language? (See also Chapter 5 on the definitions of Finnish in Sweden as a historical minority language and a language of recent incomers.) In the Finnish government’s periodic reports, Russian has

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been given several meanings: it is referred to as the language of the ‘old Russians’ (who have assimilated into either Finnish or Swedish communities and do not necessarily master Russian any longer), the language of the recently arrived heterogeneous group of migrants, and a foreign language to be taught for the majority (i.e. Finnish-speakers). The fact that Russian is referred to in multiple ways is an important language political act, because the classifications and categorisations of particular languages found in the periodic reports, as well as in language policy documents in general, do not merely function as neutral descriptions of their roles in society, but necessarily establish certain hierarchical power relations between these languages. The power relations and hierarchy between the languages defined in Finnish language legislation are discursively upheld in the periodic reports by the Finnish government, which effectively repeat the spirit of the Finnish Constitution and the Language Act (see Chapter 2). Finland clearly tries to avoid situations in which the discussion of the language rights of the Russian-speaking minority could be seen as parallel to the argumentation used in the promotion of the language rights of the speakers of Swedish or Sámi. Apart from the power relations between the languages, the discursive strategies used in the periodic reports to the Council of Europe reflect a more fundamental question associated with language policy within another European organisation, namely the European Union: what is the relationship between the language legislation of a sovereign member state and the language policy of the Union? One could also ask whether and to what extent an improvement in the status of the Russian language in one member country (e.g. Finland) would put pressure on other member countries in which the relative number of Russian-speaking population is even higher (e.g. Estonia) to change their language legislation. The documents produced in the Russian Federation share the view that the protection of the language rights of Russian-speaking people is of the utmost importance for the future development of the Russian Federation and for the promotion of the Russian language and cultural heritage on a global level. As pointed out above, the aspiration to have a greater appreciation of the Russian language and culture cannot be separated from the geopolitical and financial factors associated with Russia’s pretension to be recognised as one of the superpowers, although the latter motivation is not explicitly expressed in any of the documents. As to the arguments regarding the need to protect of the language rights of the Russian-speaking people residing across the globe, it is striking that there are no direct references to the right of individuals to use and maintain the language they choose, but the chief motivation behind the promotion of Russian is to strengthen the

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unity of the Federation by uniting various diasporic communities into a single unified ‘Russian world’. Current estimates suggest that the Russian-speaking population will continue to grow in Finland. Thus, the acute need for providing services in Russian (day-care, pre-school education, teaching of the mother tongue and so forth) will not vanish, and it is very likely that both the Council of Europe and the Russian Federation will put more pressure on Finland to improve the status of its Russian-speaking minority. It should be pointed out that Finnish language policy discourse is by no means uncontested and there have been some regional attempts to challenge the state bilingualism of Finland. A few municipalities located near the Russian border, where demand for knowledge of Russian is high, have appealed to the Ministry of Education for authorisation to provide instruction in Russian as a mandatory language in basic education, instead of Swedish. However, these applications have been categorically rejected by the Ministry, which has emphasised that there is no need to amend the existing language legislation. Public discussion on the topic is very polarised (see e.g. Ihalainen et al., 2011), and even though the political debate is sometimes heated, there have not been any serious attempts to change the language legislation of the country in the direction of the Russian language receiving the same status as, for instance, the Sámi language or Finnish sign language. The multi-voicedness that manifests itself both in the Finnish language policy discourse and in outside reactions to it derives from the multisitedness of language ideological and language political discourses and, more importantly, reflects the power relations between the different actors and stakeholders participating in these discourses. Given that the number of speakers of Russian in Finland is likely to increase, it is also likely that the tension between the positions of the different actors and stakeholders will become more profound and the language policy discourse concerning the status of Russian will become more polarised than today.

References Aref ’ev, A. (2006) Budet li russkii v chisle mirovykh iazykov v budushchem? Demoskop Weekly 251/252. At http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2006/0251/tema05.php (last accessed June 2014). Blommaert, J. (1999) The debate is open. In J. Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates (pp. 1–38). Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2011) Language and superdiversity. Diversities 13(2), 1–22. At http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002147/214772e.pdf (last accessed June 2014).

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Council of Europe (1992) European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and accompanying Explanatory Report, both athttp://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/ Reports/Html/148.htm (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (1995) Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and accompanying Explanatory Report both at http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/ en/Reports/Html/157.htm (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (2001) Report of the Committee of Experts on the Charter. Application of the Charter in Finland, 1st Monitoring Cycle. ECRML 3. At http://www.coe.int/t/ dg4/education/minlang/Report/EvaluationReports/FinlandECRML1_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (2004) Report of the Committee of Experts on the Charter. Application of the Charter in Finland, 2nd Monitoring Cycle. ECRML 7. At http://www.coe.int/t/ dg4/education/minlang/Report/EvaluationReports/FinlandECRML2_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (2006) Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Second Opinion on Finland. ACFC/OP/II(2006)003. At http:// www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_fcnmdocs/PDF_2nd_OP_Finland_ en.pdf (last accessed July 2014). Council of Europe (2007) Report of the Committee of Experts on the Charter. Application of the Charter in Finland, 3rd Monitoring Cycle. ECRML 7. At http://www.coe.int/t/ dg4/education/minlang/Report/EvaluationReports/FinlandECRML3_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (2010) Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Third Opinion on Finland. ACFC/OP/III(2010)007. At http:// www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_FCNMdocs/PDF_3rd_OP_Finland_ en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Council of Europe (2012) Report of the Committee of Experts on the Charter. Application of the Charter in Finland, 4th Monitoring Cycle. ECRML (2012) 1. At http://www.coe.int/t/ dg4/education/minlang/Report/EvaluationReports/FinlandECRML4_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Gerasimov, I., Glebov, S., Kusber, J., Mogilner, M. and Semyonov, A. (2009) New imperial history and the challenges of empire. In I. Gerasimov, J. Kusber and A. Semyonov (eds) Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-description in the Russian Empire (pp. 3–32). Leiden: Brill. Government of Finland (1999a) Initial Report of the Government of Finland on the Application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. MIN-LANG/PR (99) 4. At http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang/Report/PeriodicalReports/Finland​ PR1_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Government of Finland (1999b) Report Submitted by Finland Pursuant to Article 25, Paragraph 1 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. ACFC/ SR(1999)003. At http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_FCNMdocs/ PDF_1st_SR_Finland_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Government of Finland (2002) The Second Periodic Report of Finland on the Application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. MIN-LANG/PR (2003) 2. At http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang/Report/PeriodicalReports/Finland​ PR2_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Government of Finland (2006) The Third Periodic Report of Finland on the Application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. MIN-LANG/PR (2006) 1. At http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang/Report/PeriodicalReports/Finland​ PR3_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014).

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Government of Finland (2010a) The Fourth Periodic Report of Finland on the Application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. At http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/ education/minlang/Report/PeriodicalReports/FinlandPR4_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Government of Finland (2010b) Third Periodic Report on the Implementation of the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. Finland. ACFC/SR/III(2010)001. At http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_FCNMdocs/PDF_3rd_SR_ Finland_en.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Heller, M. (2008) Language and the nation-state: Challenges to sociolinguistic theory and practice. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), 504–524. Heller, M. (2011) Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, F. (2005) Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ihalainen, P., Saarinen, T., Nikula, T. and Pöyhönen, S. (2011) Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi. [Time in the politics of language. An analysis of the conceptions of history in the internet dis­ cussion fora in Finnish newspapers.] Kasvatus & Aika 3, 1797–2299. At http://www.kasvatus-ja-aika.fi/dokumentit/aika_kielipolitiikassapaivalehtien_ nettikeskustelujen_historiakasitysten_analyysi_3009111039.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Jussila, O. (2004) Suomen suuriruhtinaskunta 1809–1917. Helsinki: WSOY. Lähteenmäki, M. and Vanhala-Aniszewski, M. (2010) Introduction. In M. Lähteenmäki and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski (eds) Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (pp. 9–14). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Lähteenmäki, M. and Vanhala-Aniszewski, M. (2012) Hard currency or a stigma: The Russian–Finnish bilingualism among young Russian-speaking immigrants in Finland. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta and T. Räisänen (eds) Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality (pp. 121–141). Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Laitin, D. (1998) Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the New Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leppänen, S. and Pahta, P. (2012) Finnish culture and language endangered? Language ideological debates on English in Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta and T. Räisänen (eds) Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality (pp. 142–175). Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. MIDRF (2011) On the Status of Human Rights in Several Countries of the World. At http://www.mid.ru/bdomp/brp_4.nsf/9f9f2a6497b5822f43256a2900463456/2b469 4cd44b6411e44257974003e49c4/$FILE/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0 %B0%D0%B4.pdf (last accessed June 2014). Niemi, H. (2007) Russian immigrants in Finnish society. Social work and Society (inter­ national online journal). At http://www.socmag.net/?p=270 (accessed 8 April 2009). Pavlenko, A. (ed.) (2008) Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. President of Russia (2008) Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation. At http:// archive.kremlin.ru/eng/text/docs/2008/07/204750.shtml (last accessed June 2014). Pyykkö, R. (2010) Language policy as a means of integration in Russia. In M. Lähteenmäki

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and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski (eds) Language Ideologies in Transition: Multilingualism in Russia and Finland (pp. 81–100). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rynkänen, T. and Pöyhönen, S. (2010) Russian-speaking young immigrants in Finland: Educational and linguistic challenges to integration. In M. Lähteenmäki and M. Vanhala-Aniszewski (eds) Multilingualism in Finland and Russia. Language Ideologies in Transition (pp. 175–194). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Smyth, S. (2013) Introduction. In C. Opitz and S. Smyth (eds) Negotiating Linguistic, Cultural and Social Identities in the Post-Soviet World (pp. 1–18). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Statistics Finland (2009) Suomessa on jo yli 50 000 venäjänkielistä. At http://www.stat.fi/ artikkelit/2009/art_2009-09-08_005.html (last accessed July 2014). Statistics Finland (2014) Foreign-language speakers account for 90 per cent of the population growth in 2013. At http://www.stat.fi/til/vaerak/2013/vaerak_2013_2014-03-21_ tie_001_en.html (last accessed July 2014). Suny, R.G. (2001) The empire strikes out: Imperial Russia, ‘national’ identity, and theories of empire. In R.G. Suny and T. Martin (eds) A State of Nations: Empire and NationMaking in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (pp. 23–66). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanttu, J. (2008) Venäjänkielisenä Suomessa. Helsinki: Vähemmistövaltuutettu. Tarkiainen, K. (1986) Se vanha vainooja: käsitykset itäisestä naapurista Iivana Julmasta Pietari Suureen. Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura. Vilkuna, K.H.J. (2006) Paholaisen sota. Helsinki: Teos. Wright, S. (2007) The right to speak one’s own language: Reflections on theory and practice. Language Policy 6, 203–224. Zetterberg, S. (2005 [2001]) Main outlines of Finnish history. Virtual Finland. At http:// finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25909 (last accessed 18 February 2009).

5 The Art of societal ambivalence: A retrospective view on Swedish language policies for Finnish in Sweden Jarmo Lainio

Politics functions as a main driving force in, and reacts to, the status and prestige of languages (see e.g. Ammon & Hellinger, 1992), at local/personal, group, and national/societal levels, partly through the process of legislation. It also frames the existential conditions for language per se, through the social construction and conception of language. Furthermore, it affects the everyday conditions for speakers’ willingness to use different languages, and to a high degree selects the conceptual keywords for our discourses on language. However, democracy is a symbiotic situation in which the ‘end users’ of political discourse and policy implementation also have a say, and these reflexively influence the political and legal dimensions as well as modify the meaning of concepts. As McCarty says (2011: xii), ‘policy is not a disembodied thing, but rather a situated socio-cultural process’. A profound background-staging concept for the study of language policy in Sweden is the understanding of Sweden as a site for a monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 2002), but with competing tolerant ideas, which at times have caused ambivalence between expressed political ambitions and their fulfilment. In this chapter I present the Finnish language in Sweden as a case study, as it is the largest national minority and migrant language in terms of number of speakers, has a long historical presence, and has been subject to several political and societal turns, which all seem to contain their own versions of ambivalence in political discourses, regulations, implementation and attitudes. I draw on earlier research, published and unpublished materials, media reports and statements by politicians and other participants in the language ideological debates, to help us understand the use and 116

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status of Sweden Finnish in relation to ambivalent political formulations. The descriptive content of the chapter reflects the development and survival prospects of Sweden Finnish in relation to Swedish language policies, but may be generalised to other cases as well. I first give a social and historical-contextual description, including a description of what Swedish self-understanding has been, and how the demo­graphic and linguistic proportions have altered that self-­understanding and an outline of the other societal changes that have affected the conditions for Finnish in Sweden, and the role it has played in the Swedish language policy field. Second, I present an ideological frame, referring to some main concepts that underpin most of the present-day debates on language in the Swedish context. These have influenced decisions and political changes of importance for Sweden Finnish, from legal and language policy points of view from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Third, since much of the language policy issues – be they overt or covert – are situated in an educational context, a more detailed discussion on the development of this field is given. Fourth, I discuss the legal status of Finnish in Sweden and Sweden Finns’ own perception of their language and developing minority priorities.

Historical, social and demographic context Historical self-understanding among Swedes and the Finnish presence in Sweden A view repeated in Sweden till the 1980s was that it had a monolingual and monocultural history, which hindered the understanding of domestic linguistic diversity. According to Skolöverstyrelsen (the National Board of Education) Sweden had become a country of immigration, which in a few decades had changed Swedish society from a homogeneous and almost monolingual society to a heterogeneous and multilingual one (see Paulston, 1983). This homogeneity perspective is now vigorously contested (Daun, 2005: 61ff., 188ff.; Schwarz, 1971): it has been pointed out that neither migrants nor Swedes should be referred to stereotypically as homogeneous groups. These pluralist views have been followed by statements that Sweden, in reality, has always been multilingual and multicultural (Boguslaw, 2012; Daun, 2005; Svanberg & Runblom, 1990; cf. Chapter 1), which perspective authorities and politicians now side with (Ekström, 2012; Wadensjö, 2012). However, while Sámi people, Finns and Roma have had a continuous presence in Sweden for centuries, it is mainly through the recent immigration lens that the homogeneity picture has been challenged. Here, only the Finnish presence is described in detail (cf. Elenius, 2006).

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Finns have always headed west within Sweden and beyond it (­Tarkiainen, 1990; cf. Björklund, 2009; Kostiainen, 1990; Lammervo, 2009), which has resulted in a historical tripartite territorialisation of Finns in Sweden. Finnish-speakers have lived in mainland Sweden for a millennium in the north and been part of the street life in Stockholm since medieval times. For about 400 years Finnish was spoken in the vast forest areas of central Sweden, last in the County of Värmland, where the last fluent speaker of Finnish died in the late 1960s (Huovinen, 1986a; Wedin, 2007). Some cultural revitalisation has though taken place in that region since. In Tornedalen, Meänkieli has become a language in its own right, with a minority status in 2000. Tornedalians have been seen both as immigrants from Finland and as part of a domestic Swedish development. Other temporary and restricted patterns of Finnish migration have recurred (Reinans, 1996; Tarkiainen, 1993). Descend­ants of Finnish ‘tribes’ (stam) were reported in ethnicity statistics from 1930 to be living in Tornedalen, Stockholm and the County of Värmland (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 1930). This tripartite historical pattern of Finnish-speaking habitation was challenged from the Second World War on by extensive migration from Finland to booming industrial regions (see Chapter 8). Today, a new pattern of territorialisation has been established; concentrations of mostly urban Finnish-speakers and their descendants are found around Gothenburg on the west coast, and around Lake Mälaren (west of Stockholm), in cities like Eskilstuna, Västerås and Uppsala (De Geer, 2004; see also Björklund, 2012). Today, there is a continuum of generations of Sweden Finns, which is the official term used since 2000 for those with a migrant background from Finland. Migration from Finland strongly increased after 1954, when the Nordic free labour market was opened and visa requirements between the Nordic countries were abolished (Lainio, 1996, 1999). Those who migrated are usually called first generation, but this is sometimes restricted to those who arrived early, during the 1950s and 1960s. The second generation refers to children with a Finnish background, whose parents and grandparents are of Finnish origin. The third generation has parents or grandparents who were born in Sweden. The once typical monolingual Finnish-speaking family has become rare since the mid-1980s (Reinans, 1996). Since the 1980s, the number of Finnish–Swedish and multilingual families, in which Finnish is one of the heritage languages, has increased steadily. Finnish has been relatively strongly promoted among the heritage languages in such families (Natchev & Sirén, 1986; Nygren-Junkin, 2008). The (stereo)typical Finnish migrant, the industrial worker with only compulsory schooling and a rural background, largely vanished in the 1980s, but the image remains (Björklund, 2012; Lainio, 2013a).

The Art of Societal Ambivalence  119

Finnish has vanished locally but has never disappeared from Swedish territory as a whole at any point in time. Finnish in Stockholm evolved under laissez-faire conditions until recently, but otherwise various overt language policy measures have influenced the status of Finnish. Translation services in Finnish were guaranteed at the Swedish Riksdag in the late 18th century (Huovinen, 1986b), official regulations were translated into Finnish in the 19th century (Jonsson, 1991), Finnish was accepted as a language of instruction in Tornedalen until the mid-19th century, and Finnish sermons have been commonplace in the Finnish parish of Stockholm since 1533. A debate in the Lower Chamber in 1844 supported the continued use of Finnish in Tornedalen, since the view was that forcing citizens to abandon their mother tongue was the hardest oppression a people may face (Jonsson, 1991, citing the Högvördiga Preste-Ståndets Protokoll vid Urtima riksdagen of 1844, part I, p. 327). Periodically, the use of Finnish has been strongly rejected, for example in the reception of the Commission work on Tornedalen in 1919 and the language petition in 1928 (Wande, 1994). However, the government’s view in 1994 was that the Finnish language had been spoken within the Swedish borders during practically all of its existence and that it had also been used among peasants as a language of the Church, as well as in other official contexts. The existence of a large number of place names of Finnish origin was mentioned as evidence of the impact of the Finnish language and culture on Swedish cultural heritage (see Wande, 1996, citing a 1994 government letter ‘Finska språkets ställning i Sverige’). Nevertheless, the historical understanding of the Finnish presence remains weak, reflected for example in discussions during the mid-1990s on which groups were to be seen as Swedish national minorities. In a final committee report on migration policy (in the official state publication series, Statens offentliga utredningar, henceforth SOU) discussing integration issues among migrants, only the Sámi and ­Tornedalians were defined as Swedish minorities (SOU 1996:55: 71; cf. various chapters in Hyltenstam, 1999). This changed in a few years to cover also Sweden Finns, Jews and Roma. Thus, despite Finns being firmly rooted in Sweden and both prohibitive and supportive decisions having been taken about the use of the Finnish language, there has been a lack of knowledge about their presence and about Sweden’s common history with Finland. During the 200th anniversary in 2009 of the separation of Sweden and Finland, attempts were made by Swedish and Finnish political leaders to change this. Thus, at the inauguration of the anniversary year in the Swedish parliament, this lack of knowledge was openly criticised by a former secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, who stated bluntly that the year 1809 was

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crucial in the common history of both countries, but that, at least on the Swedish side, there exists an extensive and collective memory loss (Engdahl, 2009; see also Chapter 2). Whereas the memory loss has been most severe among the majority society, the recent minority views have been strongly influenced by the earlier image of the demographic predominance of the Sweden Finns as the major minority. Both sides have been challenged to re-evaluate their presuppositions during the last decades, due to increasing and diversified migration to Sweden.

Modern demographic developments as a basis for a renewed Swedish language policy Changing conditions, such as the effects of recent mass migration on Swedish language policy in a more overt or explicit direction (see McCarty, 2011, on the concepts), including that concerning Finnish. In the decades before the 1960s, when labour migration from Finland and other countries was actively increased, political debates had concentrated on war refugees (particularly Estonians and Jews from various war-stricken countries) instead of labour migration (Schwarz, 1971). Even earlier, there were dis­ cussions concerning the Sámi (Hyltenstam & Stroud, 1990; Wingstedt, 1998) and Tornedalen Finnish/Meänkieli (Hansegård, 1991; Wande, 1996). The post-war period highlighted language issues in novel ways, first through immigration policies, later through education and integration policies. These changes have clashed with the traditional and monolithic understanding of the roles of Swedish and Swedishness. Despite the accepted role of various languages in practice, policy has mainly catered for the learning of Swedish, for children and adults (Björklund & Sabuni, 2008). The characteristics of immigration have changed quantitatively since the first decades of the 20th century – migration has become much more extensive since the 1950s – and qualitatively – migration has brought more distant languages, cultures, religions and experiences to Sweden. More recent post-war migrant groups have in common a more temporally specific migration – that is, many arrived within a short time. Local and global crises have created need for emigration in the source countries, while Sweden, from the 1950s until today, has periodically been open to labour migration, family migration and waves of refugees. Today, an estimated 15% of the 9.5 million people in Sweden (or a total of around 1,427,000) were born in another country (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2013). If persons with at least one parent born abroad are added to this, the number of people who may be targets of various language policy decisions connected to bi- or multilingualism issues may presumably be over 2 million. The estimation of people with

The Art of Societal Ambivalence  121

a Finnish background, among three generations, is now found to be around 712,000 (Sveriges Radio, 2013). These are only partly included in the figures above. As a result of recent globalised migration, Finnish is, in terms of number of speakers, no longer uniquely dominant. Table 5.1 presents estimates of the numbers of users of the main language groups (estimates are necessary because Swedish censuses do not include language), based on different sources – mother tongue instruction, multilingual capacity, other statistics and research (see note to table). According to Sveriges Nationalatlas (2010: 146; cited in Edlund, 2011: 193), Swedish is no longer the mother tongue of the majority of the population in some municipalities. The main cities of Sweden (Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö) and other major cities south of and around Stockholm are multi­lingual, and meet the criteria of a developing super­ diversity (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). This has changed their linguistic and cultural balance. Furthermore, language policy is more complex in these urban areas where no longer one or two minority groups dominate. One consequence of these demographic, sociocultural and linguistic changes is that the earlier dominant minority or migrant position of the Finns in Sweden (cf. SOU 1983:57) has weakened visibly. Paradoxically, the official acceptance of the historical roots of the Finns in Sweden has grown. A political re-evaluation of the national minorities and a widespread re­ construction of Sweden’s past have taken place (see Chapter 2). Also, within

Table 5.1  Estimates of speakers of the largest minority and migrant languages in Sweden Group

Estimated size

Finnish-speakers

200,000 – 250,000

Arabic-speakers

147,000 – 200,000

Speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

108,000 – 180,000

Spanish-speakers

  63,000 – 130,000

Polish-speakers

110,000

Estimates based on mother tongue instruction, multilingual capacity and other statistics: Álvarez (2007) for Spanish; Edlund (2011: 144ff., 190), Lainio (2011), Reinans (1996) for Finnish; Statistiska Centralbyrån (2012), Skolverket (2011), Sveriges Nationalatlas (2010), Wolff Foster (2003: 5, 32–34) for Arabic.

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the Sweden Finnish minority views have changed: awareness has spread of the principles of assimilation and pluralism, integration processes and cultural heritage (cf. Björklund, 2012; Weckström, 2011; see also Chapter 8). Despite official acknowledgement of the historical presence of the national minorities and their languages, a widespread common-sense view regularly still categorises them as immigrants. Furthermore, the official acknowledgement has not been able to change some dominant views, such as the one that no group should be treated separately (see below). These paradoxical views have made it difficult for the national minority languages and cultures to become widely accepted in society. Ideological constructs and values as well as attitudes have been crucial in this process. On the one hand, Swedish language policies seem to be based on this novel self-understanding of Sweden’s historical diversity, which has been followed by an improved legal set-up for the national minorities. On the other hand, the changing demography places these matters in a secondary position in relation to new and urgent challenges caused by migration. In addition, other ideological shifts have taken place, both as longitudinal processes and more acutely.

Ideological and attitudinal trends and turns reflecting language issues As elsewhere in Europe, a reductionist nationalist profiling took place during the 19th and early 20th century in Sweden. The monolithic construction of Swedish and Sweden became ideologically established (Müssener & Jegebäck, 2008). A period of overt assimilation started at the end of the 19th century, targeting the Tornedalians (Hansegård, 1991; Wande, 1996) and the Sámi (Wingstedt, 1998; cf. Elenius, 2006; Huss, 2003; Hyltenstam & Stroud, 1990). In Tornedalen, policy aimed to prevent the use of Finnish because the population was seen as unreliable, with political connections to Finland, then Grand Duchy of Russia. The way to neutralise the ‘threat’ of Finnish was to prohibit its use in school, culture and church. This ­paralleled develop­ments in Norway, where the perceived danger of Finns (den finske fare) led to a prohibition on the use of Finnish as a means of instruction from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s (Eriksen & Niemi, 1981). State support for schools teaching in Finnish in Tornedalen was cancelled from 1888 (Wande, 1996). This policy was continued in practice till the end of the 1960s, but regulations made it possible to teach Finnish as a voluntary subject from 1937 (Hansegård, 1991: 37). The period starting from the late 1800s saw Swedish and Finnish nationalism, social Darwinism and ideas of race ideologies spreading (for Finland, see e.g. Colliander, 1963: 134ff.). Tornedalians, the Sámi and Roma people were targets of the Race Biology Institute of

The Art of Societal Ambivalence  123

Uppsala University in the 1920s (see Müssener & Jegebäck, 2008). Paradoxically, during and in the years shortly after the Second World War, the strong opposition to the use of Finnish in Tornedalen was balanced by the reception of about 70,000 refugee children from Finland and 80,000 refugees from Finnish Lapland, and by Swedish volunteers fighting on Finland’s side in the war against the Soviet Union. This contributes to the ambivalence in Swedish historical understanding of Finns. For our purposes, it is essential to understand the role of some Social Democratic ideological concepts, especially those of egalitarianism and the people’s home (folkhemmet), from the 1930s to the early 1990s, when the collective construction of the modern Swedish welfare state took place. These ideas, most strongly promoted by the Social Democratic politician Per Albin Hansson, included features such as the deconstruction of classbased society, the firm establishment of democracy, a good home for all Swedes, the elimination of unemployment and, later, equality for women as well as solidarity, but also the idea of social engineering (Dahlquist, 2002). Though the people’s home is part of Social Democratic political heritage, it is closer to a metaphorical argument than a practical political programme. The welfare state represents a more modern version of the idea of the people’s home. The homogenising concept of the people’s home has also had racist effects, through the sterilisation campaigns initiated in Sweden and elsewhere, inspired by the social engineering principles of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Language policy was not a direct issue in these attempts to create a modern welfare state, but the idea of treating everyone in the same way has been transferred to the field of language policy. Nevertheless, early ambivalent features of this were the rising prestige of (American) English and the retained normativity of a monolingual habitus. English has been taught in Swedish schools since the mid-1800s. As a tool of inter­ nationalisation, it promotes the use and teaching in English in Sweden at the cost of other languages (Hult, 2012; Josephson, 2004). The positions of Swedish and English contradict egalitarianism: their treatment does not follow the principle of ‘the same treatment for all’. The concept of equality (jämlikhet), which initially referred to social and economic equality (and societal obligations) and implied the same opportunities for all, is also connected to the long Social Democratic reign. Later this developed into the political concept of equality with regard to gender (jämställdhet), which has overruled other types of equality issues, such as the socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic equality and equity aspects (see OECD, 2005). These concepts evolved into a political principle of nonseparation of specific social groups, and have been seen as the main reason for resistance to ideas of positive discrimination, but also for the promotion of

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it. They were initially fairly ‘blind’ to the effects of migration and changing demographics. The basic ideas of egalitarianism and the welfare state have become normative Swedish cultural values and self-understanding, representing what could be termed ‘imagined modernity’. The changing demographics caused a topical change from labour market issues to those concerning the assimilation of children of migrant descent, through educational policies. Assimilation thus became a normative and natural habitus during the 1960s (Schwarz, 1971; see also Chapter 7). A government committee was formed to discuss the situation of expatriate Swedish children, migrant and minority children in Sweden, and after its report in 1966, Utlands- och internatskoleutredningen (SOU 1966:55), there was a resentment among minority groups regarding the unwillingness of Swedish society to accept the cultural aspirations and anti-assimilation views of the minorities (Schwarz, 1971: 17–19, 31–33). The position of migrants from Finland and Tornedalians played a significant role in the official protest against the committee’s proposals in 1966, and this pattern was later repeated (Municio, 1994; see also SOU 1983:57). The social and labour market policies reflected an ambivalent treatment of the badly needed Finnish and other labourers in Swedish industry: there was a willingness, on the one hand, to facilitate social adaptation (through assimilation) and, on the other, to downgrade long-term support for their languages and cultures. In parallel with this, Finnish-speakers developed into an identifiable language-cultural group with its own agenda. This created instances of conflict with the Swedish mainstream population. The overt policy until the early 1970s was assimilationist (an early concept used was anpassning – ‘adjustment’; Schwarz, 1971: 41–43), based on the idea of a monolithic society and a natural monolingual/monocultural habitus. The commonsensical and normative statement was (and continues to be) ‘in Sweden we speak Swedish’ (occasionally expressed even at ministerial level; Wingstedt, 1998: 271). The meaning of ‘mother tongue’ exemplifies this: up until the late 1960s it was understood to be Swedish for all children, irrespective of their heritage language, as is evident in the 1969 curriculum for primary schools (Läroplan för grundskolan (Lgr 1969) – see Lainio, 2013b; see also Chapter 7). Such views still seem to be evident, for example, in the only Swedish random-sample survey on language attitudes, conducted in the 1990s (Wingstedt, 1998: 271, 275), in which opposing and ambivalent views were expressed on the role of the mother tongue in assimilative versus pluralistic statements; Table 5.2 summarises these survey responses. This ambivalence in attitudes on Swedish versus pluralism, represented by supportive political declarations and commission reports, mirrors political rhetoric and the everyday social practices of multilingual speakers

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Table 5.2  Group-level ambivalence on Swedish, mother tongue and immigrants’ languages Assimilationist views

Agreement

Pluralist views

Agreement

From the very first, all immigrant children ought to learn that Swedish should be their mother tongue

41.1%

It is good if immigrants to Sweden keep their mother tongues and teach them to their children

71.3%

Immigrant parents should speak Swedish with their children as much as possible

68.5%

Knowing your mother tongue well is important for developing your thinking and intelligence

90.0%

In Sweden we speak Swedish!

66.1%

Knowing your mother tongue 96.7% well is important for selfesteem and a sense of identity

Multilingualism in a country creates segregation and conflicts

49.7%

Multilingualism is a resource for society and good for a country’s economy

73.3%

The number of respondents varies between 327 and 330. ‘Agreement’ is the percentage ‘fully’ or ‘hesitantly’ agreeing

in the Swedish mainstream context; positive views are declared but not implemented (Table 5.2). Such opposing views (see Lainio, 2013b, for a discussion) have led to a dualistic or ambivalent treatment of educational and language policy issues throughout the decades. One change seems to have been that views supporting assimilation have become more covert than overt. There has also been a rhetorical shift from a monolithic ideology to a more pluralist policy, which has been reflected in the development and rhetoric on the choice of languages of instruction in the educational system (Hansegård, 1991; see further below and see also Chapter 7). Paradoxically, when heritage and migrant languages officially became mother tongues (in 1997), Swedish was simply called Swedish, but as one of three core subjects in primary school, in addition to English and mathematics. The explicit protection of Swedish, as the main language complementing hegemonic social practices, was reinstituted by the 2009 Language Act (see further below and see also Chapter 2). The two peak years of mass migration from Finland to Sweden were 1969–1970. The challenges for the educational system were then highlighted

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in new, acute ways. This formed part of the focus for the government Immigrant Committee, which reported in 1974 (Invandrarutredningen, SOU 1974:69). Its recommendations were that, first, the assimilationist view should be challenged by the goal of equality, regarding opportunities, rights and obligations, and second, with regard to language and cultural issues, there should be freedom of choice, and this should take place through har­monious agreement with the majority population. These goals supported a healthy dual development of the identity of immigrants and their children. The gain was to be bidirectional, since the majority population would also benefit from this, by creating conditions for a multilingual and multi­cultural society, which would be richer than a monolingual and nationalistic Sweden. The policy outlined in the Immigrant Committee’s work has been seen as progressive and functional, but it was never fully implemented (Hyltenstam & Tuomela, 1996; Municio, 1987). This again reflects the ambivalent dimension of a political willingness to change, and the lack of implementation in practice. At the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, a new political trend developed in which the increasing diversity of Swedish society became more clearly reflected. This led to the promotion of ‘interculturalism for all’ as the new ideology, which replaced the intentions of the Immigrant Committee. This was made official in Språk- och Kulturarvsutredningen (SOU, 1983:57) (Lahdenperä, 1999). Finnish-speakers were still mentioned as needing special consideration. Also, these proposals resulted in new educational goals for Finnish-speaking and other bilingual children (see below), which were not realised in practice and against which Finnish-speaking parents protested. New waves of migration in the 1980s created a need for new policies on adaptation and the reception of newcomers into Swedish society. The formulated goals supported a multicultural or intercultural society, but explicit tools to implement these highlighted Swedish. In educational terms, this period created the basis for Swedish as a second language (foreign language) and a reorganisation of the teaching of Swedish for immigrants (SFI) (SOU 1983:57; Regeringens proposition 1983/84:199; SOU 2003:77). Sweden Finns were in a sense side-stepped, as there were few newcomers from Finland and little need of second language teaching or SFI (see Lindberg & Hyltenstam, 2013, on ambivalent processes in the treatment of Swedish). The process of integration of Sweden into the European Union in the early 1990s and the globally influenced situation led to a renewed look at the future integration of migrants and its fundamental principles (SOU 1996:55). This took place in parallel to increasingly open racism, in terms of both extremist actions and everyday insults (SOU 1996:55). One of the issues developed was an adaptation of the failed initiative for greater

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cooperation between the majority and the minorities. In this context, diversity and multiculturalism/multiethnicity (mångfald) were stressed. The latter replaced the concept of cooperation, and integration replaced the concept of freedom of choice. These concepts lack a clear definition, and are even more open-ended when used in public debates. In the now dominant interpretation in discussions on the lack of structural integration of migrants and the demand for cultural assimilation, integration has replaced assimilation as a leading concept. Its content stresses a required fast adaptation of migrants to Swedish cultural values; their understanding of the societal norms; and the learning of Swedish as the entrance tool for both the above processes within three years. (For a discussion, see SOU 1996:55: 70–73; see also Huss, 2003.) Recurrent waves of refugees have reflected a humanitarian and welcoming policy, but Sweden introduced a more restrictive immigration policy from the early 1990s on (SOU 1996:55). This is again being changed for economic, demographic and political reasons (see e.g. Ullenhag et al., 2012): open borders are needed in order to promote the Swedish economy and to guarantee a tax-paying, working-age population. Since the introduction of a minority policy in the late 1990s, aiming to promote national minorities and their languages, a confusing ambivalence has developed about how integration policy should be understood compared with minority policy. In essence they are complementary: minority policy promotes the maintenance of cultural and linguistic heritage, integration policy the learning of Swedish and Swedish cultural values. This confusion, together with the principles of egalitarianism and the monolingual habitus, have reinforced the unwillingness to implement the national minority language policy. At the core of assimilation versus integration, and various ways of creating and implementing an active, overt language policy, stands the educational system.

Educational issues: The changing language Map in schools Until the early 1970s the predominant view was that the use of mother tongues other than Swedish, in society at large and in school, should be forbidden or prohibited. Punishment for breaking this rule was recurrent (Hansegård, 1991). Views changed for three reasons. One was the questioning of the principle of assimilation. A second was a better understanding of how languages are actually learned, as a result of the findings of the (double) semilingualism debates following Nils-Erik Hansegård’s book (1968) Bilingualism or Semilingualism? (see also Chapter 7). The third factor was practice: how could schools and teachers cope with many children in the class who

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did not understand Swedish (albeit often with the same language background)? This development put an end to the policy observed previously, which was symbolically closed through a statement by the National Board of Education (Skolöverstyrelsen). It proclaimed that no official prohibition on the use of Finnish had existed, but it did however refer to 1957 cases where Finnish had been banned in practice (Hansegård, 1991; Wande, 1996). According to Hansegård, various types of prohibition, from discouragement to speak Swedish to insults and punishment had continued during the 1960s (Hansegård, 1991: 24, 37), and they popped up again during the 2000s (Milani, 2007). In 1974 the government report Invandrarutredningen (SOU 1974:69) paved the way for the regulation and regularisation of the home-language reform; this came into effect in 1977 (Huss, 2003; Hyltenstam & Tuomela, 1996; Kangassalo, 2003; Lainio & Wande, 1996; Tuomela, 2002). This made possible hour-based instruction (i.e. part-time, contracted on an hourly basis) in the language, but bilingual models of education were and have been of lesser significance. Representatives of Finnish-speakers have attempted to achieve the right to found bilingual Finnish schools during three periods in the past 50 years: in the late 1960s, at the beginning of the 1980s, and at the beginning of the 1990s (Lainio & Wande, 1996; Schwarz, 1971). The attempts were successful in the 1990s. The home-language instruction system peaked at the turn of the 1970s and into the 1980s. In the early 1980s there were strikes among Finnish-­ speaking parents in a dozen of Swedish municipalities, due to cancelled classes, or because wished-for educational options were denied or postponed (Jaakkola, 1984; see also various chapters in Peura & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994). The home-language reform was actively resisted at municipal level, in schools and by civil servants. The main option provided by the authorities was the home-language option (2–3 hours a week), and even this was difficult to obtain. There were heated discussions on the role of the mother tongue, the development of bilingualism and school results, between Finnish-speaking parents, civil servants/politicians, the National Board of Education, teachers, researchers for and against bilingual education or instruction in the mother tongue, the general public and the media. The answer to the demands of Finnish-speaking parents by the National Board of Education was to invite an internationally renowned expert, Christina Bratt Paulston, to summarise the debate. She stated in her conclusions (Paulston, 1983: 56), among other things, that the demands for homelanguage classes came almost without exception from parents and national associations – not from the pupils. She continued that home-language classes could be seen as a mechanism leading to isolation from mainstream

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Swedish society, which coincided with Finnish national requirements in Finland and therefore received support from the Finnish side. The report contributed to a reduction in class-based instruction in Finnish and other languages, at the same time as new languages were introduced as home languages due to immigration. According to a 1983 government report, Olika ursprung – gemenskap i Sverige (SOU 1983:57: 229), regulations should not be altered, and the right to receive instruction in the home language/ mother tongue should be retained if the language was a living part of the family’s everyday life. However, the concept of mother tongue was rejected and a restriction to one home language was suggested. Instruction still slowly decreased to just one or two lessons per week. Finnish-background children were treated in adapted ways, beyond the general suggestions. The everyday use was complemented with a requirement of basic knowledge and the voluntary agreement of the pupil to participate (Grundskoleförordning 1988: 655). Views varied from favouring home-language instruction (Leftist Party motion 1982/83:1611) to favouring home-language instruction being placed outside the compulsory educational system (School Minister Bengt Göransson, Social Democrat in 1988). This was rejected by the Committee of Education (Motion 1990/91:Ub259). Due to the general pressure on public spending in Sweden at the end of the 1980s, the mother tongue’s share in bilingual education was deconstructed by local- and national-level decisions. Stricter entrance requirements for home-language teacher education (double competence in Swedish and the mother tongue) reinforced the downward trend in mother tongue instruction and the bilingual options for migrant children. The structured education programme for home-language teachers was abolished, and a system of low-status primary-school teacher positions was opened (UbU 1987/88:12). For Finnish, some teacher education options remained eligible for a few years longer. Teacher education in and for national minority and migrant languages has in practice become non-existent or based on individual students’ attempts to jigsaw themselves a combination with the mother tongue as an additional subject. Mother tongue teacher training was actually abolished in 2011. After severe criticism from the Council of Europe, the National Agency of Higher Education was given the task of suggesting arrangements to solve the situation for the national minority languages (HSV, 2011). For Finnish, this led to the setting up a commission for Stockholm University to organise subject-teacher education in Finnish and Meänkieli (in 2013). Twenty years after Göransson’s proposal to isolate mother tongue instruction, a similar proposal was delivered by the Liberal Party chairman, the Minister of Education, Jan Björklund. This reflects two continuous

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sub-streams in the policy concerning mother tongue instruction. One is that it has been difficult to distinguish a clear party-political divide in the resistance to it – opponents and proponents have been found in most major parties. Secondly, the issue of mother tongue instruction has not been a matter of priority in society at large since the 1980s, and therefore its separa­ tion from core school activities developed undisturbed in the following decades. Beginning in the 1970s, there has been an increasing concentration in the field of minority language policy on the impact of educational matters (Fishman, 1991; Lainio, 1995; Sverigefinnarna och finska språket, 2013). A coherent view on bilingual children’s school development in relation to educational policies on language was long hampered by the fact that pre-school issues were seen as social questions, not educational, until the mid-2000s; Swedish was even more dominant in pre-schools (however, see SOU 1983:57). This opened the way for an extensive language shift among preschool children, before their entrance into primary school, and contri­buted to the lack of successful implementation of mother tongue instruction at primary school level. A major change in educational policy in Sweden was the transfer of state responsibilities for education to the local, municipal level in the early 1990s (see Chapter 9). Simultaneously, the social and economic responsibilities for citizens’ well-being were transferred from society to the individual. When the responsibility of compulsory schooling was transferred to munici­ palities, the adequate and earmarked funding for home languages did not keep up with the changes. A much criticised government audit report (RRV, 1990) stated that the outcome of home-language instruction was poor, its organisation was unstructured, there was an uneven distribution of funds, and the number of pupils in the mother tongue classes/groups was too small. It suggested that such municipally organised instruction should be cancelled. There were, though, still voices in favour of mother tongue instruction, sometimes based on stereotypical views of its role, referring to the strengthening of learning Swedish and warning about the effects of semilingualism. The audit report was never adopted by parliament, but savings amounting to about SEK 300 million were initiated, which were not compensated for later (Hyltenstam & Tuomela, 1996). Funding was one reason for the decline; the other was a general eagerness to cut down mother tongue instruction. References to costs for not offering it confirmed another conflict between authorities and parents. The authorities claimed that there was no demand for mother tongue instruction, whereas parents and NGOs claimed that there was no supply. This split between educational needs and rights and municipal economy remains valid today.

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As a result of the negative outcome of long-term political and educational discussions and policies, and a failed Swedish minority policy, the main Sweden Finnish national organisation, RSKL, decided to unilaterally declare Sweden Finns a national minority in 1990–91. A petition was sent to the then School Minister, Göran Persson (Social Democrat), who never officially accepted it. This coincided with the above-mentioned politicalideological shift in Swedish national politics. In 1991, a new era in Swedish educational history was begun by the introduction of independent schools (friskolor). These were founded by private initiatives: parents, organisations, foundations or stock companies. They were entitled to have their own subject profiles, but had to follow the requirements of Swedish national curricula and be open to inspection by Swedish educational authorities. The funding principle was that the average cost of a pupil in the municipal school should follow the pupil to whichever school she or he or the parents chose. Initially, due to the ambivalence among Social Democrats to the idea of independent schools, the average cost was lower than the municipal average, but it was later raised to the same level. Paradoxically, this offered an opening for Sweden Finnish bilingual schools, despite earlier eagerness among Sweden Finns to create a public bilingual education (in line with the Social Democrats’ education policy; see also Wickström in this book). To date, more than 10 bilingual Sweden-Finnish primary schools have been in operation. Dozens of pre-schools and sections of pre-schools have been founded in conjunction with the schools (RSKL, 2012; Sverigefinnarna och finska språket, 2013). No secondary-level bilingual school has managed to survive more than a year or two. The situation in the 1990s for mother tongues other than Swedish has been characterised as ‘free fall’ (Melakari, 2003): neither local authorities nor national agencies or authorities attempted to prevent the decline of mother tongue instruction, despite regulations and some public rhetoric supporting it. Instead, the fall was speeded up by a dramatic deterioration in six areas within the municipal school system (see e.g. Lainio, 2001; Skolinspektionen, 2012). First, the dispute about mother tongue instruction in the media and in municipalities continued. Second, practical teaching conditions deterior­ ated. Third, teachers’ working conditions deteriorated. Fourth, teacher education was abolished. Fifth, the lack of teaching materials was not solved. Sixth, the outsourcing of mother tongue instruction to municipal offices or private actors decreased its provision. Under this massive pressure, parents and minority organisations could not resist the process of deconstruction. In conclusion, as far as the requirements of the curricula for mother tongues are concerned, the possibility of fulfilling them are minimal from

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a quality perspective (Lainio, 2013b). Consequently, the present situation is, according to the NGO Sweden Finnish Delegation (Sverigefinländarnas Dele­ gation, 2012), critical in the extreme. For the Finnish language in Sweden, the development could already have led to a final language shift, had it not been that Sweden entered the European Union, which required a revised view on its national minority languages (see below). Regeringens proposition 1996/97:110 created a basis for an improved situation for mother tongue instruction in the Swedish compulsory school system. It stated, supported by findings by the National Agency of Education, that such instruction may have beneficial effects on the learning of other subjects, such as Swedish and mathematics. On paper, the status of mother tongue instruction changed for a period from a problem-related area in need of special measures to part of the educational field with regular quality evaluations and its own curricula. In reality, the local organisational problems and lack of prioritisation remained the same. The situation of mother tongues and their teachers did not improve to any significant extent; rather, a reverse development has taken place at the level of municipal practice. Today, it can be estimated that less than 50% of all children growing up in Sweden since the Second World War have received instruction in or of Finnish. Of this these, about one-fifth may have received some instruction in Finnish, which implies that less than 10% of all potential Sweden Finnish children have received instruction in Finnish in basic primary school. The numbers are likely to be smaller for most other languages.

The role of Sweden Finnish and the diversified resistance among Sweden Finns The heading above reflects a paradox which makes a conceptual note necessary: no legal basis for Sweden Finnish exists. The legal reference is simply to Finnish, for example in, Steg mot en minoritetspolitik. Betänkande av minoritetsspråkskommittén (SOU 1997:192/193) and the National Minority Language Act (Lag (2009:724), Om nationella minoriteter och minoritetsspråk). This mirrors historical, ideological and normative discourses as well as the low prestige associated with diaspora varieties of Finnish in relation to Finland Finnish, mainly its standard variety. The increasing and at times dramatically high net migration from Finland to Sweden created a continuous population of Finns in Sweden (in Finnish Ruotsin suomalaiset). These were relabelled as Sweden Finns in the early 1980s, also within the group itself (ruotsinsuomalaiset). This is also the legal term for the national minority. Such a renaming did not concern the language.

The Art of Societal Ambivalence  133

The foundation of the Sweden Finnish Language Board in 1975 reflected a need to support Finnish in Sweden according to the social needs of Finnishspeakers in Sweden (Ehrnebo, 2007). The issue of language maintenance was not, however, extensively debated for some decades, until the effects of the educational system’s lack of support for potentially bilingual children were seen, regarding their language competence in Finnish and school success. The lack of language statistics in Swedish censuses is an additional reason for this delay, as is also the fact that language shift (from Finnish or bilingual Finnish and Swedish to Swedish) has been unevenly spread throughout Sweden, with regard to local, social and demographic factors. For Sweden Finns, language constitutes the main difference between Swedes and Finns, to the extent that Finnish has been called a cultural core value (see discussion in Savolainen, 1987, but also Weckström, 2011). Therefore the practical and symbolic values of Finnish and Swedish have been widely debated. In addition, the view of a strong bond between language and identity is reiterated. But Sweden Finnish spans a great variety in both use and command. Its prestige – what one wants to do with it – may also differ from its status – what one is allowed to do with it (Ammon & Hellinger, 1992). This is related to the fact that it deviates from Finnish in Finland, the explicit and implicit norm among Sweden Finns. While it has been politically established that Meänkieli is a separate language from Finnish, such views have not been seriously expressed for Sweden Finnish (Cazden, 2011; Lainio, 2000). One outburst of such a debate took place in 1995, when deviations from a monolingual, Finland Finnish norm were fiercely rejected. Among the pejoratively loaded concepts used about Sweden Finnish, mixed language (contrasted with pure language), pidgin and dialect are recurrent (cf. Thomas, 1991). Thus, both the views of the majority society and contrasts with the earlier ‘mother’ or source language influence the prestige and status of Sweden Finnish. Such linguistic ‘anti-liberation’ views have also been expressed for Meänkieli; it is still a commonly held view in Finland that it is a dialect of Finnish (however, see Institute of Domestic Languages, 2012; Lainio, 2000). The discourse around and acceptance of Sweden Finnish as a language rather than a dialect is often mirrored in the situation of Finland Swedish. One predominant view is that since Finland Swedish is striving for a clear proximity to Sweden Swedish, so should Sweden Finnish be cultivated in relation to Finland Finnish (e.g. Ehrnebo, 2007). These types of reasoning (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011) may be challenged by the results of current ethnographically oriented studies. These include Investigating Discourses of Inheritance and Identity in Four Multilingual European Settings (IDII4MES), run by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) (see http://heranet.info/idi4mes/index).

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The phenomena of translanguaging and multilingual language practices have recently been seen to apply among young Sweden Finnish speakers (Lainio et al., 2012; Muhonen, 2012; cf. Gynne & Bagga-Gupta, 2013), but such findings have thus far had no far-reaching impact on views on Sweden Finnish. The development of a legally based protection of Finnish in Sweden was influenced by the efforts of minority-based NGOs (especially the Sweden Finnish national organisation, RSKL/SFRF) and educational institutions (especially independent schools). These were mainly reactions, first, to the mismatch between educational goals, such as active bilingualism, and their implementation, and second, to the lack of a structured minority policy on cultural, social and health issues. From about 2000 on, the Sweden Finnish Delegation has taken over the main responsibility for the minority language empowerment of Sweden Finns (Sverigefinländarnas Delegation, 2013; see also Nordic Museum, 2010). This process has a close connection to the minority language policies of the European Union and the Council of Europe (see below). Still, these efforts all operate under the presupposition that the norm for Sweden Finnish is the Finland Finnish standard variety. Sweden Finns have undergone a slow shift in societal focus from the early 1960s to the 1990s: the earlier working-class predominance has undergone extensive demographic and educational change (Björklund, 2012). New educational standards and social mobility have resulted in a competing type of Sweden Finnishness, and the language capacity of the later genera­ tions is now dominated by knowledge of Swedish, with the addition of English (Kangassalo & Andersson, 2003; Lainio et al., 2012; Nygren-Junkin, 2008). Finnish has thus become more an object of revitalisation efforts (cf. Fishman, 1991; Språkrådet, 2013; UNESCO, 2003), and the former social, linguistic and educational stigma is no longer a front-line issue (Björklund, 2012). In the aftermath of these processes, data show that among persons with a migrant background proceeding to Swedish tertiary education and studies at the PhD level, students of Finnish origins make up the largest category (Björklund, 2012; Lainio, 2013a).

Societal mobilisation and ambivalent implementation of the legal framework The societal and legal mobilisation Sweden joined the European Union in 1995. This put international pressure on Sweden to fulfil the obligations entailed in the ratification of some of the Council of Europe’s treaties (conventions and charters),

The Art of Societal Ambivalence  135

e­specially the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML; Council of Europe, 1992) and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe, 1995). The ratification of these treaties supports the notion that Finnish has a continuous and traditional history in Sweden (cf. Lainio, 1999). At the same time, the political debates and decisions favoured the separation of Finnish/Sweden Finnish from Meänkieli, which since the mid-1990s has been seen as a separate, regional and historical language of the County of Norrbotten. The National Minority Language Act (Bengtsson, 2008) was processed during the latter half of the 2000s, due to repeated criticism from the Council of Europe. This concerned, on the one hand, the incompatibility between aims and funding, and, on the other, failure to fulfil obligations under the ECRML. The Act came into effect in 2010 and it gives Finnish a strong, defined support within 48 municipalities (as of February 2013) and some other administrative areas where Finnish is used (county councils, county boards). This includes the right to be, wholly or partly, served in the mother tongue in pre-schools and elderly care as well as in contacts with the ­authorities. In addition, there are general promotional measures encompassing a new minority language strategy of the Swedish government, the so-called basic protection. As to specific measures, 11 national authorities were required during three years (2010–12), to build up services in Finnish. From 2013 on, some authorities are requested to offer additional services for the national minority languages (Länsstyrelsen Stockholm, 2010b, 2011, 2012). The implementation of the law is still in its infancy, and needs to be reinforced, so that, according to the former Province Governor Per Unckel, the minority policy reform should not be merely a sparkler. The new policy was, furthermore, meant to strengthen the historical ties between the former western and eastern halves of Sweden (Länsstyrelsen Stockholm, 2010a: 1).

Ambivalent implementation of the formal framework The legal status and protection of Finnish in Sweden has thus changed dramatically during the 2000s. Since 2010 it has had the status of one of the legally defined national minority languages in Sweden, in addition to Meänkieli, Romani chib, Sámi and Yiddish. Finnish is also protected as a domestic or national minority language (i.e. in the same wording as Swedish) in the new Language Act. This acceptance of its historical presence expresses a difference vis-à-vis the more recent migrant languages. According to the Language Act, it should be possible to use, develop and learn Swedish, the sign language and national minority languages, whereas

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for migrant languages the options are only to use and develop. As the Education Act (Skollag 2010:800) makes it compulsory for the state and the municipalities to organise mother tongue instruction for all languages (ch. 8, para. 10, ch. 10, para. 7), the Language Act and the Education Act reflect clearly ambivalent views. In local practice, migrant languages are also frequently prioritised over the national minority languages. According to the School Inspectorate, many municipal representatives conclude that their mother tongue instruction works as long as pupils hear nothing else; some representatives simply indicated that they have more important things to deal with, concerning a greater number of pupils than those from the national minorities (Skol­inspektionen, 2012: 19). In essence, the legal protection and promotion of Finnish is well established at present. Attitudes at official and rhetorical levels have improved. Practice, however, still differs from the world of legal texts and some provisions are not easily enjoyed (Council of Europe, 2011; Skolinspektionen, 2012; cf. Länsstyrelsen Stockholm, 2012; Sverigefinnarna och finska språket, 2013). In addition, it has been mentioned by authorities, minority representatives and in connection with the monitoring of the ECRML that some responsibility lies with the speakers: they need to make use of the rights and possibilities offered by legislation (cf. Chapter 2). For a group that has long been under the pressure of assimilation, this may require a process of reevaluating and changing attitudes. According to the findings in Björklund’s report (2012), such changes may already have been initiated.

Conclusions There is a stark contrast between the Swedish understanding and treatment of multilingualism/bilingualism, multiculturalism and diversity and the implementation of national policies (Sawyer & Kamali, 2006). This is highlighted in the special position of Finnish in Sweden, past and present. As Lainio (1997) has pointed out, a gap prevails between the official, public, liberal and understanding rhetoric on these matters and the restricted outcome of the policies and their implementation, in many cases reflected in a lack of funding. The gap is particularly noticeable in the educational field, as confirmed by several educational authorities in Sweden (HSV, 2011; Skolinspektionen, 2012; Skolverket, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2010). In this chapter, it has been proposed that there exists an ambivalence in the treatment of Finnish from a longitudinal perspective, today largely based on cultural values such as the idea of egalitarianism, the people’s home, the welfare state, and the development of equality in the course of some 50–60 years. Another prevailing and stabilising factor is the traditional hegemonic

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position of Swedish. In the attempts to sustain Finnish as an expression of Swedish cultural heritage, other factors have also clearly intervened, particularly the changing demography of Sweden. Among the Sweden Finns themselves, the historical presence and a belief in the importance of their role as a demographically dominant minority group has made them focus on achieving legal changes and an official minority status. Language and educational conflicts have played a crucial role in these processes. When the legal framework has been set up but not properly implemented, and the language shift has continued, these processes have strengthened the political resistance of the minority, but partly at the cost of internal mobilisation. In parallel to this, increased and diversified migration has undermined the legal and societal acknowledgement of Finnish and other national minority languages in discourses on language policy. These have concentrated instead on what has been deemed more urgent, for example by representatives of the municipalities, who are in charge of the implementation of the new legislation. The earlier clear-cut support for Finnish as a core cultural value among the Sweden Finnish minority has become contested through the more diverse internal demography of what is still called the Sweden Finnish minority, but which in reality now covers a much broader range of age, social and educational characteristics. The later generations have, with regard to language and identity, different priorities, not only because they in general have a higher educational standard (their capacity in Swedish is better than that of their Finnish and their parents’ Swedish), but also because their offspring much more often both live with and among multilinguals. Still, the educational system remains a core target for the diverse aspirations of Sweden Finnish, for maintaining Finnish and multilingualism, and now also revitalising the Finnish lost in the later generations. Educational matters, which continuously have placed Swedish in one corner and other languages in the other, are linked with other societally crucial matters. The discussion today on language, identity, integration and equal opportunities for all children in the Swedish school system reflects similar political and ideological issues as those that earlier concerned Finnish-speaking children. Thus, recent debates on whether or not to allow teaching in and of languages other than Swedish only superficially concern the language choice issue as such (cf. Sverigefinnarna och finska språket, 2013). Milani (2007: 35–37) states, in his analysis of a heated media debate on mother tongue instruction in the mid-2000s, that the struggle for authority is a manifestation of a clash between two ideologies: disguised assimilationism and multilingualism. It is also stated in Skolverket’s 2002 report that a contradiction exists between support for mother tongues

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(pluralism) and widespread cultural values opposing this development. This supports a conclusion that earlier overt assimilation has turned covert and is latent. The Swedish membership of the European Unioin required an acceptance of several international obligations, such as the recognition of domestic, regional or minority groups with a historical presence in Sweden. Their acceptance showed that Sweden, as little as other European countries, has been neither monolingual nor monocultural in historical terms (see also Boguslaw, 2012; and various chapters in Hyltenstam, 1999; and in Svanberg & Runblom, 1990). This has necessitated a re-evaluation of the Sweden’s historical development. The protection and promotion of these languages has ever since received slowly increasing support, both legally and in practical implementation of the relevant legislation (Länsstyrelsen Stockholm, 2013). It is, however, not known whether this reflects new values, a wider new attitudinal base, or whether it results from authorities being forced to adapt to a new legal situation. All languages except Swedish, including Sámi and Meänkieli in the north, were treated on a par with recent migrant languages until the 1990s. The recognition of the historical roots of the five national minority languages has brought about a reversed situation in legal terms: there is now a stronger public and legal willingness to accept and promote the domestic languages. But, as an editorial in Dagens Nyheter, the main (liberal) newspaper, put it, there is a need to calculate how expensive any changed view on the national minority languages might become (Dagens Nyheter, 1994). The issue of money is a red thread running through the Swedish treatment of these groups and languages, which clearly has hindered the implementation of policy aims. It is not clear whether monetary issues are the cause or the consequence of ambivalent views in Swedish language policies. The situation has recently changed for the better as a result of the new Minority Language Act. In the wake of the recognition of the national minority languages, a new principle of ambivalence has been established: recently arrived groups and their languages are frequently seen to be in a more precarious situation than the historically rooted languages of the national minorities (Government of Sweden, 2012). This reflects a paradox between two policies, that is, minority and integration policies, where the latter overrules the former. The main suggested solution is for minority children to learn Swedish well (Government of Sweden, 2012; Sveriges Radio, 2012) and through extensive funding for initial learning of Swedish in school for the newcomers (SVT, 12 September 2012). It seems that, at the crossroads of the acceptance of its multilingual and multicultural past, its promotion through legislative support and

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open-minded rhetoric, Sweden faces a challenge to combine that with the conception of its traditional monolithic past – which for many is the authentic Swedish past – the ensuing demand for assimilation or sustained Swedish cultural values, the post-war idealistic conviction of Sweden being the open-minded welfare state par excellence, and its monolingual habitus. The challenge is also highlighted by the recent, superdiverse, rapidly globalised changes which politically and in practice continue to create encounters of conflict between what is Swedish and what may become so, assimilated or integrated. The recurrent ambivalent characteristics of these processes are clearly observable. A mainstreaming process is taking place, despite political initiatives and state commission reports, especially in the educational field (Lainio, 2013b). The role of Finnish has a potential to remain at the core of these recent developments – despite its low visibility in practice – as long as there are Finnish-speakers left who continue their efforts to maintain the tradition of using Finnish as a Swedish language. So far, this remains in conflict with deeply rooted Swedish ideological values.

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Part 3 Individuals as constructors and reflectors of language policies

6 National language policy at the local level: The realisation of language legislation in late-19th-Century Finland Sofia Kotilainen

In Finland, the relation between nationalism and language constituted the most central tension and prime mover in political life in the middle of the 19th century. When autonomous Finland was annexed to the Russian empire in 1809, Swedish still remained the language of administration for decades, as a concrete and dynamic factor connecting Finnish and Swedish political culture from the 19th to the 21st century, and acting as a reminder of Finland’s and Sweden’s long common history. Also, the cultural connection to Sweden, as the former mother country, and other Nordic countries remained strong in the 19th century (Engman, 2011; Jansson, 2011). On the other hand, it was in the political interest of Russian nationalist thinking to weaken this Nordic connection and improve the position of the Finnish language, in order to bind Finland more tightly to the empire (Engman, 2009: 242). The rate of vernacularisation1 of the documents in the local administration shows how macro-level policies were realised at the microlevel and what kind of effects language legislation had on the language of the local administration. This theme has already been studied (e.g. Nurmio, 1947; Pajula, 1960; Rommi & Pohls, 1989), but my approach here emphasises the importance of the change in the position of the Finnish language from a spoken vernacular into an instrument of administration, equal in status with the other languages used (in Finland mainly Swedish and in the whole empire Russian) for different local actors and the Finnish-speaking rural population. 147

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In this chapter, I investigate when the language of parish documents really changed from Swedish to Finnish and how quickly after the middle of the 19th century the requirements of the new regulations regarding the change in the administrative language were realised in practice in the ­Finnish-speaking countryside.2 I also examine what kind of roles the local clergy and the literacy skills of rural people played in this change. Consequently, my research focuses on the extent to which rural people themselves were activated to speak for their linguistic rights and how the clergy, who had been responsible for the local administration, took care of this. Furthermore, I examine how the change in the administrative language and at the same time in people’s literacy skills affected the spelling of Finnish personal names in particular. I consider the effect of the new language legislation on how names were written at the local level (the parishes), where the majority of the population spoke Finnish but the names were entered in documents by officials who spoke Swedish as their native language. The effect of the administrative language on personal names has been seldom problematised in the Finnish research on the micro level and from the viewpoint of the rural population, particularly the agency of the Finnish-speaking local community. To some extent, attempts to reconstruct naming and the nomenclature of the 19th century have been based on the researcher’s present time and thus the principles of language spelling, standardisation and planning, formulated in the 20th century, have also been reflected in the research results and the researcher’s understanding of the nature of the historical sources. In such cases, the nomenclature that appears in a dialect form in the documents has represented only a deviation from this ‘normal’ form of a name (e.g. Lampinen, 1997; Paikkala, 1997; Palmén, 1911). But particularly in the hinterland the Finnish countryside, forenames had always been used mainly in their Finnish forms in speech, even though for a long time they continued for practical reasons to be entered in documents in Swedish. As in Finland, the rise of national ideas elsewhere in Europe affected the extent to which the vernacular language was written down in official and (local) administrative contexts. There could be, however, noteworthy differences in the relationship between a mother country and an awakening nation which had its own language and national identity. In Finland, for example, the Finnish vernacular gradually became the dominant language, whereas for example in Ireland the majority of the people started to use English instead of the vernacular Irish in the 19th century (see e.g. Coleman, 2010; Jussila, 1999: 54; see also Chapter 4; on the relation of vernacular languages to the more prestigious, dominant languages of society in the Baltic countries, see Sarhimaa, 2010: 60–72). In a broader European context

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it was nevertheless exceptional that the Finnish standard language was based on several local dialects.

Birth and baptism records as a nexus of language, Fennomanian policies and literacy skills In this chapter, the viewpoint is multilayered, but the viewpoint ‘from below’ is emphasised more than in previous research on language legislation concerning personal names. In a methodological sense, it would also be useful to know how the peasants themselves experienced the change taking place in the late 19th century and how they could make use of the new possibilities offered by language legislation. The change of the administrative standard language concerning a Finnish-speaking population was more complex than realised before, because the rural local communities were not totally illiterate or based on oral culture only, but there were semi-literacies and different types of literacies for different purposes and contexts, mixed skills of oral narratives and elementary writing skills, for example, in the different social spheres and practices (see also Street, 1984: 129ff.), as there was also multilingualism in the inland communities and peasants living in environments where the Swedish language and literacy skills were not totally unknown, even though they did not use these in their everyday lives. Out of all the administrative documents available, I concentrate on those from church parishes and especially the registers of births and baptisms, for two local communities in northern central Finland, Kivijärvi and Saarijärvi3 (records of baptisms, 1737–1959 for Kivijärvi and 1788–1910 for Saarijärvi, henceforth respectively JyMA, KSA and JyMA, SSA). My other main source is a personally compiled prosopographic or collective biographical database (henceforth SUKU) (on the collective biographical methodology, see Kotilainen, 2011), on some 9000 inhabitants of the central Finnish parish of Kivijärvi and of their family communities from the early 18th century to the 1950s.4 I compare Kivijärvi and Saarijärvi, and, with the help of the research literature, other local northern European communities are also compared with those studied here empirically. Comparisons make it possible to perceive such levels and differences of policies and discourses which would be unnoticed if only the national level was observed (Haupt & Kocka, 2004: 24–27). Furthermore, language planning and policy research has for some decades been especially interested in analysing the relationships between the macro and micro dimensions of language use, the way language behaviours on individual and community levels relate to language policies at societal levels (Hult, 2010: 7).

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Literacy among the rural population improved over the course of the 19th century, but the ability to read and write varied in different areas in Finland. Especially in remote local communities, literacy increased at a slow pace and the majority of the Finnish-speaking rural population was illiterate. Many administrative questions affecting the everyday life of the Finnish-speaking population had traditionally been dealt with in Swedish in the parish administration. Thus, even though spoken Finnish was widely used in the practice of everyday local administration, the documents were written in Swedish for centuries. In rural areas, the written language of local government changed after the mid-19th century, mainly as a consequence of the Language Decree of 1863. This was the result of the Fennoman ideology, in which not only politics but also linguistic ideology had an important role. It was seen that the Finnish language should not be used in public only in the Lutheran Church, but also in secular administration. After the Crimean War, the Fennomans decided to raise the Finnish language to a position of a civilised and national language (Häkkinen, 1994: 55; Rommi & Pohls, 1989: 69–71, 100–103). In practice, the 1863 Decree was not consistently implemented, and consequently the ways of writing names in those days has to be researched in some detail. Onomastic history (the recently revived research on the history of personal names, which uses a multidisciplinary methodology, including linguistics, history, sociology and even theology) requires the systematic analysis of original sources. The ‘historical turn’ should indeed be utilised more in onomastic research as well. In onomastic historical research, the names used by a local community have to be connected to the thinking of the contemporaries, their ideas and experiences and to the whole context. That is, names represent more than simply words, and one should ask what were in reality the ways of thinking and the experiences of the people those days, which also had an influence on their actions. Blommaert (2005: 56–57, 64–65) points out that, similarly, the merging of discourse and social structure with historical context is the foundation for critical analysis. A long-term study focusing on a single local community can reveal how and why the consequences of the changes in the national language legislation did not take place simultaneously in remote rural communities, compared with the towns and more central areas of the country. In this, I utilise some theoretical ideas from nexus analysis because of its inter­sectional viewpoint. Nexus analysis entails not only close empirical analysis of language or linguistic phenomena at a certain moment and usually on the micro level, but also a wider historical analysis of those trajectories or discourses that intersect the moment studied. In this kind of nexus of linguistic interaction, which connects different types of discourses and trajectories, it is possible to

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investigate the language in its historical context, at a certain time and place, and social relations as a whole. The past and life story of an individual (the historical body) affects his or her behaviour in social relations. Furthermore, it is important to examine how significantly an individual may have affected the language of the whole community, when the use of language is seen as a social action (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 8, 11–13). I also study how the change in the language policy and legislation at the macro level was linked with the increased use of the vernacular at the local level. To do this, I use an approach which combines the macro level (national politics), meso level (rural church parishes as fields of local administration) and micro level (concrete individual examples relating to the rural population), and analyse critically the relations between these in the changing circumstances, in order to reveal the multi-sited nature of policy discourses. These levels are somewhat relative definitions in the research, and for some researchers ‘micro’ can mean a larger or ‘macro’ a smaller scale than the ones used in this research. However, the meso level is also a crucial factor when examining local reality, because the rural church parishes had a significant role in local administration. By studying diversified levels and viewpoints it will be possible to avoid overly simplifying interpretations and to make visible the different aims, policies and interactions (see also Hult, 2010). This makes it important to study the attitudes and conceptions of the local peasants, not only the endeavours of the legislators or nationalist intellectuals.

The Language Decree of 1863 and other language legislation affecting the position of Finnish as a language of administration How significantly did the language ideologies and Fennoman ideas affect the traditional naming practices and the writing of names in the administrative language? What was the status of the vernacular language when personal names were written in the official documents? Languages are usually in a hierarchical order in relation to each other in a multilingual society: the language spoken by the upper social groups is the real language of power, as well as the language used in official connections and as a standard language. In addition to the power structures of multilingualism, the manifested variation within a single language can also form hierarchical arrangements, the breaking of which is an emancipatory development (Lindgren & Huss, 2007: 187–188). Adopting the vernacular language as the spoken and written language in one or more areas of official or public life

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where it was not used previously has often been studied in language sociological research. The rise in the status of a language can be called linguistic emancipation. For Finnish it was a question of the pursuit of equal status with the Swedish language, and also of refining the vernacular language to become a ‘presentable’ official language. The use of the vernacular language as the language of religion in connection with church services began after the Reformation in the Lutheran Church but it was the nationalism of the 19th century that speeded up its development across the whole of society. Already in the previous century vernacular languages had got a foothold in academic contexts, when both Swedish and Danish began to be used as languages of teaching at Nordic schools and universities (Lindgren & Huss, 2007: 188). At the end of the 19th century, linguistic emancipation contrasted with the purity and standardisation of the orthography of Finnish words, including personal names. First, a low-status vernacular was taken into use for administrative purposes for national reasons, but very soon it was purified to prevent unnecessary variation (Lindgren & Huss, 2007; Thomas, 1991). Linguistic purism has often been assumed to be an epiphenomenon of cultural or political nationalism, but the idea of a ‘pure’ national language can also serve as a symbol of self-identification and national identity. This is why purism can be motivated by the search for national identity (Thomas, 1991: 43–44). Biblical and Christian names were normalised as Finnish forms, but were nonetheless based on their traditional vernacular versions. Even though the diversity of first names made them more personal and lively locally, it was more important to think about the national demands. Finally, at the beginning of the 20th century normalisation of names made it easier and more precise to identify an individual as a member of a nation. All Finns had these national symbols of their identity instead of local vernacular names and often also nicknames. In the 16th century, the Church had to use Finnish in order to reach the majority of the population. The whole population had to be taught to read, but this usually meant learning only the main confessions of faith by heart. In the Nordic countries the teaching of these reading skills had already begun after the Reformation (cf. the Soviet Union’s massive campaign for literacy skills as late as the 1920s – Eklöf, 1987: 132–137; Smith, 1998: 103–107). After 1809, Swedish remained the language of local and central administration, the upper classes and educated people (Vikør, 1993: 63). When Finland was annexed to the Russian empire in 1809, Tsar Alexander I promised to retain in force the Lutheran religion of the country, the Swedish Constitution and all the former privileges of his new subjects. The Finns (including the clergy and peasants, who later were the most eager

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supporters of Fennoman ideas) hoped at the Diet of Porvoo in 1809 that the conditions of the country would remain unchanged as far as possible. The peasants requested that Swedish remain as the official language of the country, because it was feared that Russian would replace it and no one dared hope that Finnish might be raised to that position. As late as the middle of the 19th century, Finnish was so undeveloped as a legal language that a sufficient terminology did not exist and the dialect words of the vernacular language were not suitable for this purpose. This is why the educated people started to develop the legislative language at this stage in a significant way, so that it would reach the status of a ‘civilised language’ (Alapuro & Stenius, 1989; Engman, 2009: 235–236; Pajula, 1960: 128–129, 144–145; see also Chapter 4). In the age of nationalism, language planning was an integral part of nation-building. In the early 19th century the educated elites and intelligentsia were active in promoting national ideologies among the rural population (Wright, 2004: 8–9). In Finland this also meant developing the Finnish language. The (standard) national languages were seen as significant, because they provided a forum and a means for political participation. They also made it possible to achieve social cohesion and social mobility (Wright, 2004: 68). From the middle of that century the authorities strove to bring the common people within the sphere of written culture and get them to use the new standard language instead of dialects, by means of popular education (Thomas, 1991: 117–119; on the introduction of popular education in rural central Finland, see also Kotilainen, 2013a). At that time, the Grand Duchy of Finland was seen as an integral part of the Russian empire, but it was, importantly, governed according to its own Swedish Constitution and laws (Engman, 2009: 302; Jussila, 1999: 50). In the small traditional agrarian communities, people had been communicating with each other using their own language and the membership of these communities was a powerful source of identity for them. On the macro level this has also been true in nation-states, where the national language is spoken (Wright, 2004: 7). However, in autonomous Finland, the majority of the population could not communicate with the authorities in their mother tongue, Finnish, before the latter half of the 19th century. Yet in Finland the language of the Russian empire, Russian, never became the most important language of administration at the local level, and in the hinterland of Finland the Russian language was hardly ever used in everyday life (Jussila, 1999: 54; see also Chapter 4). The improvement in the position of the Finnish language meant a largescale language reform and the development of a standard language that would serve the needs of both the culture of both the class-based society

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more widely and of the peasantry. Several Swedish-speaking families of the upper classes changed their spoken and written language to Finnish in the latter half of the 19th century for Fennoman ideological reasons. At the time, nationalist aspirations were causing a similar change of language in some other Nordic and European countries as well. In Norway, after the use of Danish was relinquished, the national language was divided into two parallel official forms (bokmål and nynorsk) rather than a single uniform standard language (Vikør, 1993: 52–53). From the first decades of the 19th century on, numerous regulations were introduced in order to further the use of the Finnish language in local government. After 1824, clergymen had to pass an examination in Finnish, and after 1856 civil servants were obliged to demonstrate their oral com­petence in Finnish. The parish meetings in the Finnish-speaking congregations in the countryside were mainly conducted in Finnish in order that the parishioners might understand what was being discussed. After 1858, the records of parish meetings had to be written in Finnish, if this was the language used in local church services and by the local population. Other parish records and archives were written in Swedish still decades after that. Likewise, in the judicial sphere affairs at the local level were in practice dealt with in Finnish, and the district court sessions used mainly Finnish in their procedural activity, even though the records were drawn up in Swedish (Engman, 2009: 237–238; Häkkinen, 1994: 94, 101–102). The language question emerged as a new political divide when the Finnish Party was founded in the 1860s and 1870s. Already in the 1850s delegations of peasants visited the Tsar to petition for an improvement in the position of the Finnish language. At the same time, the newspapers were full of complaints about the language conditions (Häkkinen, 1994: 52–53; Jussila, 1999: 57). Even though the promotion of the use of the vernacular as the language of administration had already been to some extent successful, the major change and turning point in language legislation came with the implementation of the Language Decree. Signed by Tsar Alexander II in 1863, the Decree gave Finnish an equal status with Swedish in official matters concerning the Finnish-speaking population. The reform was implemented gradually, in such a way that, from the year of the Decree’s ratification onwards, Finns had the right to submit documents in Finnish to civil service departments and courts of law, and the authorities could draft records in Finnish. By 1883 the authorities – if the parties involved so wished – were obliged to issue documents in Finnish (Häkkinen, 1994: 52; Jussila, 1999: 57; Rommi & Pohls, 1989: 78, 111–114). The Decree of 1863, however, proved a disappointment to the supporters of Finnish national and cultural values, because it declared Swedish to

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be the official language of the country. The deadline for the implementation of the Decree was set well after its passing, and thus the change actually began only in the 1880s. However, the advantage of the ratification of the Language Decree was that it created an interest in developing Finnish as a practical official language (Häkkinen, 1994: 54, 102). The Implementation Decree of 1865, like the 1863 Language Decree, stated that Swedish was the official language of the country and that the Finnish language should be used only in matters immediately concerning the Finnish-language population. The civil servants already in office were not required to gain new language skills (Pajula, 1960: 178). Only with a Decree from 1902 were the two languages granted equal status. Whereas at the beginning of the 19th century 22% of the population of the Swedish realm were Finnish-speaking, in autonomous Finland no less than 87% of the population had Finnish as their mother tongue (Kuvaja et al., 2007: 34). For ideological reasons and to improve the oppressed position of the Finnish language, the language shift carried out by the Fennomans was emancipatory (Lindgren & Huss, 2007: 191). Language ideology, as political Fennoman ideas were to a great extent, can be defined as a cultural system of those ideas and beliefs as well as moral and political interests that have an effect on social and linguistic relationships. Language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group. A member’s notions about the use of language are grounded in social experience (Kroskrity, 2003 [2000]: 5, 8). In the language shift, Finnish families from the higher classes sought to convert the dialects of the Finnish-speaking people into an appropriate standard language. But for the rural population, dialects represented their native language. For them, Finnish was primarily a spoken language because learning to write took place only later and the majority were not able to write. Thus differences can be perceived in whether language shift was viewed as a question of liberation or development of the Finnish language, depending on the viewpoint of the social groups examined.

The local clergy and the language of administrative documents What kind of an effect, then, did a cleric’s personal language skills and adopted administrative practices have on the keeping of local parish registers and the writing of names in them? These questions can be approached with the help of the intersecting experiences or practices of certain persons participating in deciding the appropriate language of the parish registers at the

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turn of the century. These experiences of the people studied can be defined as part of their historical body (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 19–20). In onomastic history research, this kind of tool incorporates within the analysis a more long-term and wider understanding of the context than usual, including the entire life experience of a person. It emphasises the significance of a single person and his or her actions in the changes taking place in discourses and policies. The parish registers of the Finnish-speaking Evangelical-Lutheran congregations began to be kept in Finnish during the 1870s and 1880s. In early 1870 Finnish was used for the first time in the baptismal records of the congregation of Kivijärvi for tabular and other entries, apart from writing down the first names. The previous parish minister had died in 1868, a victim of the years of severe famine, and a new one had not yet been appointed. In the interim, church services were conducted by several different clerics. Karl Wilhelm Silfvenius, who was the deacon at the time, had not previously recorded information in Finnish. In 1870, several children in Kivijärvi were also baptised by Nathanael Kulhanen, a deacon of peasant origins born in the nearby parish of Saarijärvi. Because of his descent, writing in Finnish came extremely naturally to him, and so he wrote the first names of the children he baptised in their Finnish forms in the parish registers. However, from October on in the same year the baptismal records were again recorded in Swedish, apparently by another cleric (JyMA, KSA, records of baptism, 1870). Thus, the personal language skills of the clergy had a major effect on the way the records were written. It was not until the beginning of April 1883 that the language of the baptismal records of the parish of Kivijärvi changed totally from Swedish to Finnish. At the same time, the local minister of the parish changed. Frans Petter Krank (1844–1910) was appointed to the office of vicar of Kivijärvi on 1 May 1883. He was extremely pro-Finnish in his political views, and strongly influenced the way forenames were recorded in Finnish in the baptismal records in Kivijärvi in the coming decades. Krank remained the minister of Kivijärvi right up to 1910. He was said to have been meticulous in making entries in the church records, and his office was otherwise marked by good order. He was a fairly down-to-earth clergyman who participated in social affairs and was interested in the development of agriculture (Autio, 2012; Kotilainen, 2013a: 125; Kotilainen, 2013b: 187–188; Repo, 1990: 44). Thus, he actually influenced the recording of names over the whole period of the transition to spelling names in Finnish. Krank was married to his cousin Maria Elisabet, daughter of J.W. Durchman, who was the vicar of Ruovesi. As an orphan, Krank had spent much time with his uncle’s family in the Ruovesi parsonage, and there

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Fennoman ideas would have been familiar to him. Vicar Durchman (1806–91) had during his student­ship made friends with Elias Lönnrot, the collector of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, and an interest in Finnish themes influenced the everyday life of the parsonage at Ruovesi, exemplified by the use of Finnish as the spoken language of the family. Durchman’s children were given Finnish names quite early compared with other Finnish families (Kotivuori, 2012a; Repo, 1990: 46–47). One of his daughters, Anna Impi Gunilla, who was born in 1868, was the first known bearer of the Christian name Impi in Finland (Vilkuna, 1969: 165). The Fennoman intellectuals thought that popular education would construct national identity in significant ways. The Decree on elementary schools which was passed in 1866 led to the establishment of elementary schools in the countryside. However, at first this was voluntary; general compulsory education was enacted only in the early 1920s. The learning of writing skills in Finnish gave a peasant often an opportunity to act as an interpreter of information between the educated population (such as clergy) and illiterate rural people. Furthermore, the separation of municipal and ecclesiastical administration in 1865 had a positive effect on the practice of the local government in other ways. For example, farmers became more strongly involved in decision-making. Reading the daily newspaper was a means of constructing national consciousness and made it possible for all the members of a society to belong to a virtual community (Wright, 2004: 39). Towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, educated men who supported Fennoman ideas started to translate or Finnicise their own surnames, and often also their forenames. One reason for this was a symbolic one during the Russian oppression. In particular, the surnames of upper-class families were Finnicised especially around 12 May 1906, which was the 100th birthday of Johan Vilhelm Snellman (Lindgren & Lindgren, 2006: 349–350, 355, 386; Paikkala, 2004: 589–593; Paunonen, 1976: 394–395). In Kivijärvi, mainly the local merchant and civil servant families decided to Finnicise their surnames, but some farmers did this as well (SUKU). The Finnish-speaking population also sought to improve the position of the Finnish language. The most active farmers followed the discussion about language legislation in the newspapers and participated in it themselves (e.g. Taipale, 1860). There was also politicking at the micro level and legislation processes were carefully followed. The nation was a virtual community also in the sense that, in practice, the vernacular way of writing was adopted at the local level and the language of administration varied according to the local community. Compared with the situation in Kivijärvi, more clergymen and civil servants lived in the neighbouring parish of Saarijärvi who were interested

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in popular education and Fennoman ideas. The district doctor of central Finland, Wolmar Schildt, served as the nobility’s representative on the Diet in 1863. A peasant representative, Erkki Klami, proposed that the Diet enact a language law similar to the language decree that Snellman had suggested. Schildt proposed in his own address to the Diet that the nobility would agree with the request of the peasants. Schildt stipulated the language question as a matter of life and death for the common people. He wondered why eight-ninths of the people could not get documents from the authorities in their own language. He supported the addition of knowledge of the Finnish language to the entrance requirements of the university and also hoped that women would receive instruction in the Finnish language (Jokipii, 1993: 25–26; see also Chapter 1). Furthermore, a local farmer, Matti Taipale (1825–68), was an uneducated autodidact who became a significant local spokesman for popular Finnish culture (Kotilainen, 2013c). His thought it important to improve the position of the Finnish language. Especially after the Crimean War he concentrated on linguistic disadvantages. In 1859, he wrote to the newspaper Suometar 5 to demand that Finnish (instead of Russian) be the command language of the army of the Grand Duchy and the Finnish names be given to the soldiers (instead of traditional Swedish ones). The following year he wrote that he had perceived during his journey to the town of Hamina that, at a few roadhouses, visitor logs in the Finnish language were missing. He also mentioned how the civil servants did not want to promote Finnishness in Finland but wanted to retain the Swedish culture or Russianism (Taipale, 1859, 1860; also ‘C.E.A.’, 1860). His experiences and writings caused a minor newspaper polemic. Taipale thought that ‘the Finnish language would not develop if the people did not develop it themselves’. In addition, he thought that people had to take the initiative in this matter. Taipale was interested in the language question and also discussed the matter with the district doctor, Schildt-Kilpinen, who took a Finnicised last name [Schild(t) < kilpi] and used it beside his father’s surname of a foreign origin – as did many other educated and common people in Finland at the turn of the century. Possibly because of his wish Taipale started to organise the parish meeting of ­Saarijärvi to request from the authorities that the judges of the jurisdictional district and other civil servants in future give their decisions in Finnish. In the minutes of the parish meeting on 7 July 1861 (para. 2) it is stated that Taipale and others had visited the vicar in the spring proposing that the men of the parish meet and decide whether permission could be asked for the crown civil servant to write in Finnish the protocols, decisions and other official texts concerning the rural people. Subsequently, Vicar

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Karl Stenius organised the meeting, where it was decided to ask the Tsar for permission for judges and civil servants to write documents in Finnish. Furthermore, it was asked that men without proficiency in Finnish could not be chosen as judges or civil servants, and that, consequently, at the university, an oral and written examination in Finnish would be required of all those who intended to apply for these posts (Haavio, 1952: 402–403; Kallio, 1972: 659). Vicar Stenius (1816–84), who was born in the chapelry of Saarijärvi, had worked (among other things) as a teacher in the Vyborg and Porvoo grammar schools and as a rector in the town of ­Savonlinna before he finally became the vicar of Saarijärvi parish in 1855. He was also an active spokesman on Fennoman ideas and eager to establish new elementary schools in rural central Finland (Kotivuori, 2012b). The central agent in the drawing up of the local initiative was Matti Taipale, who already in the early 1860s had understood that the improvement of the position of the Finnish language also required the improvement of the language circumstances at the university. He was interested in improving the position of Finnish and saw the significance of Finnish litera­ ture and newspapers in developing it. Finnish-speaking peasants made similar initiatives in different parts of Finland at the same time. Farmer Johan Matti’sson (Johan in the Swedish and Matti in the Finnish form of the name) from Lempäälä had submitted already in 1845 with several other parish men a similar petition to the Senate, although it had not led to any measures. In 1861, the peasantry of the counties of Oulu, Mikkeli and Kuopio sent their representative to the imperial court in Saint Petersburg, and two years later peasants from Savo equipped a delegation for a similar journey. The initiative of Taipale was linked to this peasant movement, which also had significance for the realisation of the 1863 language legislation (Haavio, 1952: 404). The work of J.V. Snellman is usually mentioned in connection with the birth of the Language Decree, but it is less often remembered that peasants also had an active role in language politics – although no doubt with the support of the local clergy. This had significant consequences. Almost at the same time a similar decision was made by a parish meeting in Jyväskylä, on 12 May 1861. Schildt-Kilpinen delivered both petitions to be discussed by the Senate. Thus the parishioners of Saarijärvi were involved in accomplishing, together with others, the 1863 Language Decree, in which the Finnish language was determined to be equal with Swedish, at least in principle. A couple of sessions later the parish meeting of Saarijärvi made further decisions related to the position of the Finnish language. In 1862, it was decided to ask doctor Schildt to contact the Tsar. A hope was expressed that the trivial (i.e. lower secondary) school of Jyväskylä would be continued

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with upper secondary school classes so that those pupils who had graduated from it could be accepted as students of the university (Kallio, 1972: 660). In 1863 a great number of parishioners came to remind the vicar of the fact that in the election of a cantor for Saarijärvi the Swedish-speaking Jaakko Backman had been placed first. A complaint about the matter had been made to the chapter, where the case had already been solved in practice so that it was not possible for Backman to get the office in Saarijärvi. A little later Taipale wrote in the newspaper that everyone, both members of the upper classes as well as peasants, should adopt Finnish surnames as a matter of honour. Fennoman endeavours also included the improvement of the material status of the population. Taipale paid a lot of attention to economic questions. He wrote about the wealth relations, the necessity of establishing an agricultural college and fire insurance companies, enterprise, parish magazines and years of crop failure, beggars and pedlars, and the boiling of rowan berries. All these texts reflected a clear ideological and national base. Even though he himself was a wealthy farmer, he realised the problems of the population who did not own land themselves. He saw it was reprehensible that the vocational schools were mainly for the Swedishspeaking, so that it was not possible to train rural people to do useful work, but the farmer population had to support them also (Kallio, 1972: 660). Comparing the situation in Kivijärvi with that in the parish of Saarijärvi shows that both the vicars of the transition period, Krank and Stenius, were active in promoting the Finnish language. In Kivijärvi, the peasants were not quite so proficient in their literacy skills as the peasants in Saarijärvi. Vicar Stenius was a correspondent of the national newspaper and similarly farmer Matti Taipale often wrote in the newspapers. There were fewer members of the upper classes living in Kivijärvi, which had only recently gained the status of an independent parish, being a former chapelry of the mother parish, Viitasaari. Saarijärvi, on the other hand, was an old mother parish. This is why the clergy had different kinds of resources. It was also typical that many of the vicars of Saarijärvi stayed in the parish for the rest of their lives, whereas the chaplains of Kivijärvi moved on to larger parishes soon after their arrival. Interest in the local understanding of the language, the experiences of the members of the speech community (Kroskrity, 2003 [2000]: 6), can be regarded as important factors in the language change. The local clergy often had a strong ideological commitment to Fennoman ideas in the rural areas.

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The writing of names of the Finnish-Speaking population in documents before the beginning of the 20th century In practice, nearly all Finns had Christian names because the vast majority of them were members of the Lutheran Church. The introduction of the vernacular into the local government took place over several decades in Finland, in the latter half of the 19th century. The transition from Swedish to Finnish in the church registers reveals the different forms taken by the Finnish equivalents of people’s baptismal names, which were originally entered in their Swedish forms. The transition between the two languages was manifested in fluctuation and inconsistency in the ways the names were written (JyMA, KSA). Usually it was the parish clergy who decided on the spelling of names and kept the baptismal records. However, towards the end of the 19th century the child’s parents also gradually came to exert an increasing influence in the spelling of forenames. In Kivijärvi, the language of the baptismal records changed very late, only as a consequence of the 20-year transition period stipulated in the 1863 Language Decree (JyMA, KSA). This watershed offers an interesting perspective because the records kept after the transitional stage, when the names were always written in their Finnish forms, also provide information about the Finnish name forms of the persons who had been baptised before it. Thus, a Finnish name form can be ascertained from the first names at least of parishioners who were born during the first half of the 19th century. Previously, a person had had both a familiar Finnish name, and a Swedish name entered in the parish records and used for more official purposes. The difference between these two remained significant for the older members of the population even after the adoption of Finnish forms of personal names in the parish registers, as they continued to be referred to by the written Swedish forms of their names. Sweden’s 1686 Church Law had stipulated that parish ‘history books’, in other words registers of baptisms, marriages and burials kept in the parish, be regularly maintained (Hellemaa et al., 1986). This practice had become estab­lished only gradually and in different parts of the realm at very different times. Likewise, the information contained in the records became more diversified only in the course of time, and for example the form of the baptismal records and the way they were kept varied in early times from one parish to another. The written language was usually Swedish, but the clergy used also to some extent Latin headings and terms in the church records. In the local rural communities studied, the clergy registered Finnish

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names in the records in their Swedish equivalents until the latter half of the 19th century. The general method of keeping the church records also affected the way in which names were written in the registers: the information was often first recorded in kind of a notebook or even just on loose slips of paper, from which it was later transferred to the actual parish register stored in the parish archives. This is indicated, for example, by the fact that in 1859 ministers were urged to enter the records of newborn children in the actual baptismal register monthly or quarterly. If several different pastors were responsible for conducting the different church rites and if every one of them made his own notes, the chance of human errors and lapses of memory was considerable (JyMA, KSA). Different clerics may have written the same personal name differently when the person was baptised, married or buried if the parish minister had changed in the meantime, and consequently the spellings of personal names entered in the parish registers in connection with these rites often differed from each other. In addition to this, even the same writer varies the spellings of names in different situations. For example, in January 1884 Vicar Krank baptised in Kivijärvi a cottager’s daughter, Olga Eveliina Hakkarainen, whose mother’s forename he wrote in the records in the dialectical form ‘Auruura’. She was a crofter’s daughter and had been baptised in Kivijärvi 1863 as ‘Aurora’ by Vice Pastor Carl Gustaf Dahlgrén. Her husband, mentioned in the records in Finnish as ‘Kaarlo Kaapriel’, a farmer’s son, had been baptised in 1861 in the Swedish written form as ‘Carl Gabriel’, also by Dahlgrén (SUKU; JyMA, KSA). He obviously wrote the name Carl in the records in the same form as his own first name. Krank, on the other hand, entered, from the 1880s on, rural people’s names according to how they themselves pronounced them in everyday speech. However, even Vicar Krank varied the spelling of forenames over time. In 1887 he christened a son of a farmer ‘Abel’, but in 1900 used the Finnish form ‘Aapeli’. Between 1883 and 1907 he baptised 18 boys, of whom eight got as their first forename ‘Alpert(t)i’ and ten ‘Pertti’ (in Swedish, Albert). The former were christened between 1883 and 1885 (and the last in 1898), whereas the boys named Pertti were baptised at the turn of the century: in 1894 a cottager’s son was baptised Pertti Lampertti (in Swedish, Lambert) (SUKU; JyMA, KSA). It can be noticed that in the 1880s Krank used both Swedish and Finnish forms of names, especially of those names that had been less common among the rural people or that had no well established local variants. The ways in which names were written also varied simply because no Finnish (or indeed Swedish) standard language had as yet become established. The spellings of personal names were normalised only in the course

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of the 20th century (JyMA, KSA; SUKU). Therefore, the clergy could mainly themselves decide on the spellings of names. This period constitutes a clear turning point in the recording of name forms, even though Finnish spellings had occurred, albeit sporadically, in the records ever since the beginning of the 1860s. These included such Finnish forenames as Antti (formerly Anders), Heikki (Henric or Henrik), Martti (Mårten) or Matti (Matts, Mats, Matthias or Mathias), and they were more often names of boys than of girls. Possibly this was because the men’s names had more Finnish-language examples in earlier literature than did women’s. At that time, men had a more active role in society and also as actors in the most important texts, such as religious and historical books. Until the year 1887, the records of baptisms were still written exclusively in Swedish in Saarijärvi. In the records of baptisms in the parish there had been occasional notes in Finnish before, and in October–November 1887 a few. Only in December that year were the records drawn up exclusively in Finnish (JyMA, SSA). The change in Saarijärvi thus took place later than in Kivijärvi, even though Saarijärvi was otherwise more progressive in a cultural sense and, for example, in the development of the literacy skills of the population. The clergy retained Swedish for the church archives for longer, even though they wrote documents for parishioners in Finnish at the same time. For example, in Kivijärvi, already in the 1870s, the clergy wrote the first names of ­parishioners in the records of parish and church meetings using their Finnish equivalents, and even in the baptismal records the practice changed during the next decade. In 1913 the records were signed by Karl Pekkarinen (in local speech Kalle or Kaarle) and G.[ideon] Kainulainen (in local speech Kiideon or Kiiti). On the other hand, in the summer 1914 Juho Puranen signed his name in the Finnish form, although his Christian name in the baptismal records was Johan (JyMA, KSA; SUKU). Even though the document was written in Finnish, the signature might have been written in Swedish, and vice versa. When examining the literacy skills of the rural people it is important to notice the difference between ‘basic literacy’ and the ‘discursive or functional literacy’ skills. Competence in argumentation and critical reading of texts is not the same thing as the ability to write one’s name as a signature. Functional writing skills were rare among Swedish peasants in the 18th century and were still so at the beginning of the 19th. Members of the populace for the most part were regarded as sufficiently literate when they knew the basics of the Christian faith by heart, but it was not supposed that they would have functional literacy skills, because there were always ‘mediators’ in the local communities (such as clergymen or local parish writers) who could draw up documents for peasants when needed, for instance those

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that had to be sent to the Crown or other authorities (Kuvaja et al., 2007: 67–68, 93). When church records were written in Finnish from the end of the 19th century on, forenames were recorded in popular and colloquial forms in the baptismal records, as the Finnish spellings of names were not yet estab­ lished. The clergy tried to record the names pronounced by the name-givers in a Finnish dialect form, even when the name was possibly a foreign one. In such cases the name-givers often belonged to the lower classes. For example, Lyytia Johanna Kotilainen, baptised in 1891, and Hilja Lyytia Kotilainen, baptised in 1893 (JyMA, KSA, records of baptism, 1891 and 1893; SUKU), got their names on the parish registers in a popular form, even though their parents may have meant the names Lydia or Lyydia. It was not a question merely of orthographic variation; in the wider context, the clergy had for centuries and in many respects a central role as mediators of the written thought and purposes of the illiterate population. Besides, this was also a matter of the power of the clergy to exert concrete influence on (language) politics. At the turning point, these different spellings of names were seen in the parish registers and the clergy recorded them in whatever form parents told them to, in spoken language. Furthermore, they became visible in people’s own signatures (the difference between the names recorded by the clergy and the rural population’s own way of spelling can occasionally be perceived also in the texts on local sepulchral monuments – see ­Kotilainen, 2013b). Later, and especially when Finland had become independent, an attempt was made to remove all dialect forms from the language (as a result of ele­ mentary schooling and also compulsory education in the 1920s), and at the same time the spellings of personal names were also established. Language normalisation was also seen in the names: ‘pure’ Finnish was aimed at, so that those who also had their forename in a Swedish form in the parish registers usually wrote their names in Finnish even in official documents. For example, in 1873 Edvard Walpas (Finnish name Walpas, in English ‘alert’ or ‘attentive’) was baptised in Saarijärvi, and in 1880 Armas Emil (Finnish name Armas, in English ‘beloved’) and Onni Mathias (Finnish name Onni, in English ‘happiness’ or ‘luck’) were baptised; in other words, Finnish forenames were combined with those spelt in Swedish. In addition to these names of Finnish origin, foreign names which had been adapted to the Finnish language over the course of centuries were now written in a more Finnicised form. In 1899, Armas Iisakki and a farmhand’s son, Aukusti Alfred, were baptised. In Swedish the same names would have been written ‘August’ and ‘Isa(a)k’ or ‘Isa(a)c’. Also, in the 1870s the name Elina, for example, was often written according to the Finnish spelling, when in

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Kivijärvi it was frequently in the Swedish form, Elin. On the whole, fewer dialectal spellings of first names were written in Saarijärvi than in Kivijärvi in the parish registers at the turn of the century. Sometimes Finnish names may also have been recorded in the more ‘snobbish’ form, such as the first name of a crofter’s daughter, Helly Maria in summer 1888 (cf. Helli and Hellin, forms that were used at the time for example in Kivijärvi) (JyMA, SSA, the records of the baptisms 1870–1910, and KSA, the records of the baptisms 1870–1910). Some names were considered more snobbish because Swedish-speakers were perceived as being of a higher status. The Swedish language was used by the upper classes and it was more valued in society than vernaculars. The written examples of Swedish names had also appeared in calendars or religious texts before. The native language became, at the end of the 19th century, a corner­ stone in the construction of identities in autonomous Finland (Kuvaja et al., 2007: 33). Identity refers to one’s self in relation to the group. It is dependent on context, occasion and purpose, and usually involves a semiotic process of representation, such as using symbols and narratives (Blommaert, 2005: 203–204). Personal names are the most effective symbols of identity in lingual and social relations, and they can also function as miniature biographies and narratives, at least in the case of nicknames (Kotilainen, forthcoming: 168–170). The written forms – names in documents – can also describe a change in the linguistic identity of a rural people when they are investigated in a long-term perspective. However, people do not so much have an identity but their identities are constructed in practices which produce, enact or perform identity. This is why identity is identification, an outcome of socially conditioned semiotic work or signifying. To be established, an identity has first to be recognised by others. Most of the identities are processed by others, not by oneself (Blommaert, 2005: 205). In a way, the Fennoman linguistic ideology also defined the way of identifying the common people and gave them eventually an established mother tongue form of a forename. However, the transition was full of name variants and several different symbols of these new identities. Towards the end of the century, names were recorded by the clergy in the parish registers in more Finnish forms and even in intentionally dialectal forms. The names and identities produced by them were not only personal or local any more, but they also had deeper, national dimensions than before. As a result of the influence of Fennoman nationalist ideas, the popularity of names of Finnish origin increased (JyMA, KSA). During this transition period rural people had both Finnish and Swedish names, and they could be identified with the help of both. Their identities – like life experiences – were connected to places and spaces (Blommaert, 2005:

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221–222). This is why to perceive several parallel identities one must utilise, in research, as many sources as possible, in order to gain access to the entire living environment of a rural people.

The effects of language legislation on local naming culture and identities As a consequence of the changes in language legislation after the mid-19th century, the Finnish-speaking population were able to have their personal names entered in the church records in their Finnish forms. However, the ideal of the new language legislation was only gradually realised. The legis­lative changes (governing the whole of Finland) changed traditional practices in the countryside very slowly. Who, then, had the power to decide what the right name for an individual was? When Finland was part of the Swedish realm, the choice of forenames was not restricted by legislation but the clergy may have judged their suitability locally. In Finland this tradition was preserved during Russian rule. The clergy as important agents had considerable influence on the speed and the ways in which the new language legislation was implemented from the 1860s on. To the clergy it was important to get the entire Finnish-speaking population behind the Fennoman movement, for political reasons. At the turn of the century at the latest, Finnish forenames became diversified and the time of different local linguistic experiments began when the clergy took a stand on what was still an allowed Finnishness in forenames. The inhabitants of the rural central Finland, who in those days were mainly illiterate, seldom fought actively for the right to use their own language in administrative documents. At first, the Finnicising of names was linked rather with the rise of nationalistic ideas and the improvement of the status of Finnish than with the wish of the population to have an influence on the ways of writing personal names. At the lower social level a stand was nonetheless actively taken on the language policy, but on the whole the Finnish-speaking rural population had little power to control the way their names were written, even though they could otherwise choose names for their children quite freely. Only the increase in the number of elementary schools and the spreading of literacy gave them some control. People had always used Finnish forenames, but language legislation made these traditional vernacular practices visible and gave people a right to written Finnish-language names. Which carries better the identity of a person, then, a native language name or one written in an administrative language? In everyday life, the Finnish names described more authentically

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the native identities of the rural people, even though, before the first decades of the 20th century, they all also had a Swedish symbol of their personal identity, at least in the written records. In local name cultures, there were overlapping identities and identifications, vernacular and administrative. The language policy of personal names was quite permissive, but legislation made the vernacular names the most important ones in the long term. In Finland’s case, one can notice that it was possible to influence the vernacular use of personal names only slowly, with the help of language legislation. In contrast, political ideologies and current fashions very quickly influenced names. It is interesting that the aim of ‘real’ Finnishness was reflected in everyday language use, particularly personal names. They were significant symbols of personal identity, and reminded people every day of the nation the name-giver belonged to or wanted to belong to, as it concerned a forename or surname that had been chosen by the person him- or herself. Introducing fresh methodological solutions to historical research on language policy is necessary because they can reveal the complicated relation­ship between micro-level language policies and macro-level legislation. Multilevel research of local communities shows how national, regional and local policies intersected and affected each other. The records of baptisms (indeed, church records in general) can provide detailed information on the language and politics of the administration. Their empirical examination reveals a gradual change in attitudes to the vernacular language, as well as regional cultural differences in naming practices. The data indicate that, as regards personal names, multilingualism was part of everyday life towards the end of the 19th century. The spelling of names had not yet been established. Forenames were written the way the parents chose to pronounce them. This can be perceived from the fact that the same name was written in several different ways. There were also in use, at the same time, names written in both a Finnish and a Swedish way, especially among older people. The comparison between the two local communities presented in this chapter shows that the national language policy was carried out in very different ways at the micro level, depending on the resources available and even individuals’ activities in each area. The change was not as straightforward and clear as the investigation of only the macro or meso level might indicate. The analysis of some local examples, utilising the concept of historical body and the collective biographical method, proves that personal experiences affected the goals, purposes and implementation of the language legislation to a considerable degree. The empirical analysis of these experiences helps to reveal the diversity in the language and names, and to create a new kind of methodology for research into the history of language and especially of onomastics.

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Notes (1) ‘Vernacular language’ means here the native language (mother tongue), Finnish, of the local Finnish common people living in rural Finland. (2) This chapter is connected to my postdoctoral research project (funded by the Academy of Finland), ongoing during the years 2011–14: ‘The benefits of literacy in everyday life: The impacts of improved literacy on the opportunities for social advancement in remote local communities (c. 1800−1930)’. (3) Kivijärvi was a chapelry in the parish of Viitasaari until 1858. In the early decades of the 20th century, the parishes of Kinnula and Kannonkoski seceded from Kivijärvi. Since 2007, Kannonkoski and Kivijärvi have been chapelries of the mother parish of Saarijärvi. (4) More specifically, the sources were the parish registers held in the provincial archives of Jyväskylä (JyMA): archives of the parish of Kivijärvi (KSA), records of baptisms 1737–1959, records of parish and church meetings 1816–1913; and the archives of the parish of Saarijärvi (SSA), records of baptisms 1788–1910. The genealogical database (SUKU) records collective biographical data concerning the Hakkarainen and ­Kotilainen families, who lived in the Kivijärvi area. The data were compiled mainly from documents in the archives of the parishes of Kannonkoski, Kinnula, Kivijärvi and Viitasaari. These comprise records of baptisms, marriages and funerals; confirmation records and records of unconfirmed children; migration records and demographic statistics. The oldest archives of the parishes of Viitasaari and Kivijärvi are stored in the Provincial Archives of Jyväskylä. The research extends from c. 1730 to 1960. Compiled by Sofia Kotilainen. (5) Suometar was published from 1847; it was meant for educated members of the upper classes but also rural people, and it aimed to promote Fennoman ideas and to educate the common people.

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Haavio, H. (1952) Matti Taipale 1825–1868. In E. Aaltonen et al. (eds) Suomen talonpoikia Lallista Kyösti Kallioon. 74 elämäkertaa (pp. 397–407). Porvoo – Helsinki: Wsoy. Häkkinen, K. (1994) Agricolasta nykykieleen. Suomen kirjakielen historia. Helsinki: Wsoy. Haupt, H.-G. and Kocka, J. (2004) Comparative history: Methods, aims, problems. In D. Cohen and M. O’Connor (eds) Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-national Perspective (pp. 23–39). New York: Routledge. Hellemaa, L.-I., Jussila, A. and Parvio, M. (eds) Kircko-Laki ja Ordningi 1686. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia 444. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hult, F.M. (2010) Analysis of language policy discourses across the scales of space and time. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 202, 7–24. Jansson, T. (2011) I vad mån förlorade Sverige och Finland varandra efter 1809? In M. Sjöberg and B. Svensson (eds) Svenskfinska relationer. Språk, identitet och nationalitet efter 1809 (pp. 33–52). Stockholm: Nordiska museets förlag. Jokipii, M. (1993) Wolmar Schildt – lääkäri, lehtimies ja suomalaisuusmies. In M. Jokipii (ed.) Wolmar Schildt, ‘tieteen ja taiteen isä’ (pp. 9–32). Jyväskylä: Atena Kustannus. Jussila, O. (1999) Finland as a Grand Duchy, 1809–1917. In O. Jussila, S. Hentilä and J. Nevakivi, From Grand Duchy to a Modern State: A Political History of Finland Since 1809 (pp. 3–98). London: Hurst. Kallio, R. (1972) Vanhan Saarijärven historia. Karstulan, Konginkankaan, Kyyjärven, Pylkönmäen, Saarijärven ja Uuraisten kunnat ja seurakunnat. Helsinki: Gummerus. Kotilainen, S. (2011) The genealogy of personal names: Towards a more productive method in historical onomastics. Scandinavian Journal of History 1 (36), 44–64. Kotilainen, S. (2013a) From religious instruction to school education: Elementary education and the significance of ambulatory schools in rural Finland at the end of the 19th century. In M. Buchardt, P. Markkola and H. Valtonen (eds) Education, State and Citizenship (pp. 114–137). NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research 4. Helsinki: Nordic Centre of Excellence (NordWel). Kotilainen, S. (2013b) Rural people’s literacy skills in the remembrance of the departed: The writing of personal names on sepulchral monuments at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mortality 2 (18), 173–194. Kotilainen, S. (2013c) An early spokesman for a vernacular literature: Matti Taipale, farmer, librarian and a promoter of Finnish culture in nineteenth-century Finland. Scandinavica 2 (51), 225–243. Kotilainen, S. (forthcoming) Naming practises as a social control. The continuity and change of morals in local peasant communities (c. 1850–1960). In O. Matikainen and S. Lidman (eds) Morality, Crime and Social Control in Europe 1500–1900. Studia Historica. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kotivuori, Y. (2012a) Ylioppilasmatrikkeli 1640–1852: Josef Vilhelm Durchman. At http:// www.helsinki.fi/ylioppilasmatrikkeli/henkilo.php?id=13893 (accessed 4 August 2012). Kotivuori, Y. (2012b) Ylioppilasmatrikkeli 1640–1852: Karl Kristian Stenius. At http:// www.helsinki.fi/ylioppilasmatrikkeli/henkilo.php?id=15400 (accessed 18 December 2012). Kroskrity, P. V. (2003 [2000]) Regimenting languages: Language ideological perspectives. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language (pp. 1–34). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey. Kuvaja, C., Rantanen, A. and Villstrand, N.E. (2007) Språk, självbild och kommunikation i Finland 1750–1850. In O. Kangas and H. Kangasharju (eds) Ordens makt och maktens ord (pp. 33–114). Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 682:4. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet.

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Lampinen, A. (1997) Ristimänimien valinta ja nimenannon uudennokset Jyväskylässä 1766–1930. Unpublished licentiate thesis, University of Turku, Department of Finnish Language and General Linguistics. Lindgren, A.-R. and Huss, L. (2007) Antingen – eller eller både – och? Språklig emancipation i Finland och Sverige. In O. Kangas and H. Kangasharju (eds) Ordens makt och maktens ord (pp. 187–216). Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 682:4. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet. Lindgren, K. and Lindgren, A.-R. (2006) Suomen suuriruhtinaanmaan säätyläisten kielenvaihto. In G. Bladh and K. Kuvaja (eds) Kahden puolen Pohjanlahtea I. Ihmisiä, yhteisöjä ja aatteita Ruotsissa ja Suomessa 1500-luvulta 1900-luvulle (pp. 326–396). Historiallinen Arkisto 123:1. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Nurmio, Y. (1947) Taistelu Suomen kielen asemasta 1800-luvun puolivälissä. Helsinki: WSOY. Paikkala, S. (1997) Etunimet sukututkimuksessa. Sukutieto: Sukutietotekniikka ry:n jäsenlehti 1 (14), 19–24. Paikkala, S. (2004) Se tavallinen Virtanen. Suomalaisen sukunimikäytännön ­modernisoituminen 1850-luvulta vuoteen 1921. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia 959. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Pajula, P. (1960) Suomalaisen lakikielen historia pääpiirteittäin. Helsinki: WSOY. Palmén, E.G. (1911) Kirjoitustavasta historiallisissa teoksissa. Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 10, 37–45. Paunonen, H. (1976) Kotikielen Seura 1876–1976. Virittäjä 80, 310–428. Repo, V. (1990) Punainen kirstu. Helsinki: WSOY. Rommi, P. and Pohls, M. (1989) Poliittisen fennomanian synty ja nousu. In P. Tommila (ed.) Herää Suomi. Suomalaisuusliikkeen historia (pp. 69–119). Kuopio: Kustannuskiila. Sarhimaa, A. (2010) Kielipolitiikan vaiheita Baltian maissa kansallisromantiikasta euroaikaan. In H. Lappalainen, M.-L. Sorjonen and M. Vilkuna (eds) Kielellä on merkitystä. Näkökulmia kielipolitiikkaan (pp. 52–96). Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia 1262, Tiede. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Smith, M.G. (1998) Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 80. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Street, B. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taipale, M. (1859) Saarijärveltä 13 p. Syysk. Suometar, 23 September. Taipale, M. (1860) Muistoja matkalta Haminasta viime heinäkuussa. Suometar, 17 August. Thomas, G. (1991) Linguistic Purism. Studies in Language and Linguistics. London: Longman. Vikør, L.S. (1993) The Nordic Languages: Their Status and Interrelations. Nordic Language Secretariat Publication 14. Oslo: Novus Press. Vilkuna, K. (1969) Suuri nimipäiväkalenteri. Helsinki: Otava. Wright, S. (2004) Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

7 Making the case for the mother tongue: Ethnic activism and the emergence of a New policy discourse on the teaching of Non-Swedish mother tongues in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s Mats Wickström In the autumn of 1975 the recently crowned monarch of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, entertained the long-time President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen, with a gala banquet in the President’s honour in Stockholm. The two heads of state, who occupied very different roles in the political system of their respective countries, with the semi-autocratic Kekkonen acting almost as a king of old in the Republic of Finland and Carl XVI Gustaf functioning as a symbolic figurehead of the constitutional monarchy of Sweden, delivered the usual courtesies in their banquet speeches, but this time a new subject of bilateral interest was included, namely migration and migrants. King Carl XVI Gustaf (1975), acting as a semi-formal mouthpiece of the Swedish government, told President Kekkonen that the ties between Sweden and Finland had been strengthened by Finnish labour immigration to Sweden and that the countries shared a mutual interest in keeping the Finns Finnish: It is very important for both Sweden and Finland that the immigrants are able to maintain and develop their own traditions and their own culture during the time they stay here. [Emphasis added. All quotes in the chapter have been translated into English by the author] 171

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Det är mycket viktigt för både Sverige och Finland att invandrarna får möjlighet att bevara och utveckla sina egna traditioner och sin egen kultur under den tid de stannar här. The king conceptualised the retention of ‘Finnishness’, which presumably included language maintenance, as something that would enable the return of the Finns to Finland. Kekkonen (1975) responded in kind and made known Finland’s satisfaction with the way Sweden handled Finnish emigrants: We know that Sweden takes exceptionally good care of the emigrants and that the absolute majority of the Finns living here have adjusted well. Tiedämme, että Ruotsissa huolehditaan esikuvallisella tavalla siirtolaisista, ja että ehdoton enemmistö täällä asuvista suomalaisista on sopeutunut hyvin. The pleasantries exchanged during the banquet also diplomatically resolved the complaints that President Kekkonen, who almost single-­ handedly steered the foreign policy of Finland, had made as late as 1974 when he strongly criticised Sweden for its mistreatment of Finnish immigrants. Kekkonen had even made a non-official visit to Sweden in order to meet and acquaint himself with those immigrants. During this trip Kekkonen (1974a, 1974b) publicly voiced his concerns over the problems facing the immigrants and their children. One of his main points of critique was the lack of mother tongue teaching in and of Finnish and the emerging semi­lingualism of a ‘lost generation’ (kadotettu sukupolvi) of Finnish children in Sweden (Kekkonen, 1974b). However, eight months before Kekkonen dined with the king, a new policy on immigrants and minorities had been introduced in Sweden, which not only confirmed but also discursively enacted a new set of policies on cultural and linguistic maintenance for non-Swedish groups. This new policy discourse was echoed in the king’s speech in 1975. He let Kekkonen know that the Swedes were well aware of and appreciated his active engagement on behalf of his countrymen. The new policy discourse incorporated the demands and arguments for mother tongue teaching in Finnish that had been made by, among others, Kekkonen. Kekkonen (1975) therefore had good reason to offer the king his compliments for the way the Finnish immigrants were taken care of as of now, that is, at the end of 1975. The aim of this chapter is to explore the discursive, conceptual and political history of mother tongue teaching in Finnish (and other nonSwedish languages) that framed the speech acts of President Kekkonen

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and King Carl XVI Gustaf. The two heads of state affirmed new policies on immigrant integration and a new policy discourse on mother tongue teaching that, at least seemingly, satisfied all concerned parties. The gala dinner of 1975 marks the endpoint of this chapter in time, while it also functions as its narrative and analytical starting point. How had the conceptual basis for the importance of immigrant language retention, articulated at the gala banquet, been formed and formalised? I argue here that the conceptual basis of the policy discourse on non-Swedish mother tongue education that came together and was affirmed on this occasion is to be found in a process that began with the politicisation of mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages by ethnic activists in the mid-1960s. The initial claims articulated by the activists were countered and delimited by the Swedish political elite, but some of the activists’ arguments for mother tongue teaching were incorporated into the semi-formal policy discourse on mother tongue teaching that was starting to take shape in the Swedish administration by the end of the 1960s. The conceptual exclusions and inclusions made in this claims-making phase in the policy process framed the way in which the multiculturalist policy-makers of the 1970s could legitimise the introduction of mother tongue teaching. The absolute limits on, for instance, minority schools, which had been set by the Social Democrats, meant that any successful introduction of a policy of mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages needed to be fitted within the ideological boundaries of the universal and assimilationist Swedish welfare state (on the boundaries in the 2000s, see Chapter 2). Mother tongue teaching was therefore not conceptualised as language policy per se by those who wanted a policy of mother tongue teaching to be introduced and implemented; it was conceptualised as a form of social and migration policy in the policy discourse that was formalised in the mid-1970s. Kekkonen and Carl XVI Gustaf did not affirm the introduction of multiculturalism; they hailed the introduction of policies that would enable the successful social adjustment of the Finns in Sweden and their eventual return to Finland. The bilateral affirmation also shows how mother tongue teaching functioned as a foreign policy measure. The articulation of policy discourse at the banquet shows how multi-sited the, at this point, formalised discourse on mother tongue education was; it was incorporated into a wide spectrum of policy fields in Sweden as well as in Finland. The policy discourse on teaching non-Swedish mother tongues that was established in the mid-1970s included, to be sure, multiculturalist elements, as the idea of multiculturalism had strong support among key policy-makers (Wickström, 2013b), but the vision of a truly multiculturalist and multilingual Sweden could not in itself politically legitimise the, in a

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historical perspective, radical multiculturalist reforms that were introduced in Sweden in the mid-1970s. I finally offer a tentative assessment on how the political and discursive consequences of the idiosyncrasies inherent in the policy discourse on mother tongue teaching formalised in the mid-1970s profoundly affect language policy and policy discourse in both Finland and Sweden today.

Analysis of the configuration of policy discourse on mother tongue teaching This chapter begins with an analysis of the configuration of the new policy discourse on mother tongue teaching in the mid-1960s, when mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages became politicised in Sweden due to a combination of claims-making by (primarily) ethnic activists of Finnish, Estonian and Jewish descent and the social effects brought on by large-scale labour immigration to Sweden (see Chapters 5 and 8), and ends with the speech acts of the gala banquet in 1975. Thus it covers a period of about 10 years, roughly coinciding with a time in Swedish, and Western, post-war history that brought about profound cultural (e.g. a general liberalis­ation of values) and societal changes (e.g. new welfare reforms and institutions) in many countries. The rise of the new policy discourse on mother tongue teaching in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be traced through an analysis of speech acts, beginning with the claims-making speech acts performed by ethnic activists in the public arena. The analysis will then shift to the articulated response of the Swedish government to the demands for new policies on language and the politicisation of the ‘problem’ of immigration and immigrant ‘adjustment’ (anpassning was the most commonly used Swedish term, carrying assimilatory connotations – see Wickström, 2013a). The analysis of the initial process of claim-response on the question of mother tongue teaching during the mid and late 1960s will be followed by an analysis of a concept, semilingualism, that, I argue, profoundly changed the way in which mother tongue teaching was conceptualised and could be politically legitimised. The analysis of semilingualism as a political concept is followed by an analysis of Finnish policy discourse on mother tongue teaching in Sweden, in order to highlight the multi-sited (in a transnational sense) history of this discourse. Swedish policy discourse on mother tongue teaching was not confined within the borders of Sweden, as immigrants from Finland, a country with strong historical ties with Sweden (see Chapter 1), constituted by far the largest group. Language policy debates in Finland and Sweden have remained transnational (see Chapter 2).

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The analytical concept of policy discourse is understood here in line with the multifaceted definition given by Halonen, Ihalainen and Saarinen in Chapter 1. Policy discourse is understood as the different discursive operationalisations and meanings that are constructed on and around policies by different policy actors operating in ever-changing historical and political contexts. Policy discourse is multi-sited both in an abstract sense (overlapping levels of rhetorical and political activity that cross each other both horizontally and vertically) and in a material sense (language as embodied experiences that shape the way in which language is ‘felt’ and acted upon politically). The analysis of conceptual change and the configuration of policy discourse located in the various speech acts analysed in this chapter is furthermore underpinned by the theoretical perspectives of the Cambridge school of contextualist history of political thought: concepts do not arise or change by themselves; they are introduced and modified through their deployment in political discourse by actors seeking societal change (Pocock, 2009; Skinner, 2002). This chapter employs the analytical concepts of the activist and the historical body, the latter adopted from the nexus analysis theory of Scollon and Scollon (2004). The activist is defined as a political actor seeking recognition of the need for mother tongue education and the implementation of reforms satisfying this need. According to this definition, anyone who at some point advocated mother tongue teaching in a minority language, even indirectly, can be said to have been an activist. However, even if this general definition of activism is needed in order to analytically designate a general category for the actors involved in advocating mother tongue teaching, a more precise analytical category is needed to make clarifying and important distinctions between the different actors seeking legitimisation for mother tongue education: the ethnic activist. The ethnic activist, who usually selfidentifies as a member of a (minority) ethno-cultural group, is a political actor who regards the question of ethnic identity and ethno-cultural group recognition as primary political questions upon which to act. The ethnic activist generally regards the teaching of the language of a minority group, or groups, as a pivotal political goal (for a general discussion on the ethno­ politics of different minority groups, see e.g. Kymlicka, 2007). Like every other actor, the ethnic activist enters social and political action with his or her historical body. Scollon and Scollon (2004: 19) define the historical body as ‘the life experiences of the individual social actors’. The historical body is not only constituted by the life experiences of actors, but also includes ‘their goals and purposes, and their unconscious ways of behaving and thinking’ (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 46). Following the Scollons, Blommaert and Huang (2009:

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273) outline the way the historical body comes into play analytic­ally: ‘Whenever people enter into social action, they bring along their own skills, ex­periences and competences, and this “baggage”, so to speak, conditions (and constraints) what they can do in social action’. Historical bodies have been formed in particular social spaces and they embody linguistic ex­perience. The way concepts are defined and used in action is, then, at least partly conditioned by the historical bodies of the actors who use them. Or, to put this in the idiom of historiography, the personal history of actors matters, which, in the context of this chapter, means that analytical attention will be paid to the embodied linguistic experiences of the ethnic activists. The analysis of the historical bodies of the key actors featured in this chapter will add another layer to the exploration of the multi-sitedness of language policy in this volume, as the historical bodies of the ethnic activists were to a high degree constituted by experiences that lay outside the territorial borders of post-war Sweden. The primary sources for the claims-making phase consist of debate articles by the ethnic activists published in Sweden in the 1960s. Articles written by the leading Finnish activist Artturi Similä are primarily used, with the larger corpus of activists’ texts forming an inter-activist and intertextual context on which the analysis of Similä’s texts rests. The statements of the Working Group on Immigration, the first Swedish governmental agency tasked with immigrant adjustment, and formal statements by the government and the ruling Social Democratic Party (in principle different bodies but in terms of political power roughly the same thing) provide the sources for the following part of the analysis, the response phase, involving Swedish experts and the Social Democrats. The concept of semilingualism is examined by making use of the seminal book on the subject by Professor of Sami Nils Erik Hansegård, Tvåspråkighet eller halvspråkighet? (1968) and contemporary works by linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and sociologist Pertti Toukomaa. The concept’s impact on policy discourse is explored on the basis of the final report of the Commission on Immigration (which laid the conceptual and political foundation for all the ‘multiculturalist’ reforms that took place from the mid-1970s onwards, including the introduction of mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages in the comprehensive school system) and parliamentary plenary debates from first half of the 1970s. The analysis of the Finnish government’s and President’s conceptualis­ations on the teaching of Finnish in Sweden is based on the first report of the Advisory Board on Migration Affairs, published in 1972, and on statements made by President Kekkonen concerning the situation of the Finns in Sweden in the early 1970s.

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Politicising language: The activist case for mother tongue teaching in Finnish and other Non-Swedish languages Finnish immigration to Sweden recurs throughout recorded history but reached unprecedented levels in the 1960s as a result of the economic differences between the countries, with the Common Nordic Labour Market (established in 1954) acting as a facilitator of intra-Nordic migration. In 1960 about 100,000 persons born in Finland resided in Sweden, and by the end of the decade their number had more than doubled (Reinans, 1996: 87). By 1966 the political discussion on the ‘problem’ of immigrant adjustment had grown in salience as the general topic of immigration entered the mainstream of public discourse. The issue of mother tongue teaching for the children of immigrants constituted a sub-question to the larger ‘immigrant question’ in the public sphere and was also intertwined with that of minority schools. Artturi Similä, the de facto leader of the Finnish community, argued both in the daily Dagens Nyheter and the weekly of the Finns in Sweden, Ruotsin-Suomalainen, for which he was the editor-inchief, for the introduction of mother tongue teaching in and of Finnish for Finnish children in Sweden. Similä was not alone in voicing these demands; other ethnic activists with whom Similä collaborated also made claims on language policy at this time (Wickström, 2013b). However, as the leading spokesperson of the Finnish-speaking Finns in Sweden, Similä potentially possessed more political clout than the other ethnic activists who made claims in the name of much smaller groups or for all non-ethnic Swedes without any formal mandate for the latter. The historical body of Artturi Similä that entered into social and political action in Sweden was different from those of his co-activists, such as Estonian-born refugee Voldemar Kiviaed and Jewish Holocaust survivor David Schwarz (Wickström, 2013b). After serving in the Finnish army as a military meteorologist during the Second World War, Similä moved to Sweden in his mid-30s to work for the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. In contrast to many of his compatriots in Sweden, Similä was a non-socialist and ideologically close to the agrarian-based centre-right party of Finland (Tarkiainen, 1996), whose most prominent member at this time was President Kekkonen. The claims-making potential inherent in the historical body of Similä was not only tied to the size of the group he (ostensibly) represented; it was also connected to the origins of the group and his own history. Finland was not just any emigration country located on the European periphery: it was the former eastern half of the Kingdom of Sweden, and this gave Similä’s claims

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a historical and political dimension that the demands from the activists for other minorities lacked. Similä also emphasised language to a much greater degree than his fellow activists, due to his historical body. The question of what (true) Finnishness was had primarily been constituted as a question of language by the Fennoman movement that toppled the hegemony of the Swedish language in Finland from the late 19th century onwards (see Chapter 1 and 6), and the ideological heritage of the Fennoman movement lived on in the Agrarian League (which Similä sympathised with), which changed its name to the Centre Party in 1965. The fact that Similä was a Finnish-speaking Finn from Finland thus made it possible for him to make arguments that other activists could not make, at least when considering the kinds of historical bodies they entered the public arena with. One such argument was the disparity argument, highlighting of the disparities between the educational situation of the Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland and the Finnish-speaking Finns in Sweden. Similä (1966a, 1966b, 1967) made the case that, compared with the monolingual educational institutions of the Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland, the Finnish-speaking Finns in Sweden had next to nothing, even though the population sizes of the respective groups were approaching equivalence in absolute terms. Similä claimed, based on his own estimate, there were about 250,000 Finns living in Sweden (he did not mention that perhaps as many as 20% of these Finns were Swedish-speaking Finns) compared with a little over 300,000 Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland. Similä (1966a, 1967) also predicted that the number of Finns in Sweden would reach half a million sometime in the 1970s. Similä made the point that what he, speaking in the name of a growing group, demanded was miniscule compared with what the diminishing group of Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland had (for related comparisons, see Chapter 2). Similä (1966b) proposed the following policy reforms: in the first three years of schooling, a Finnish child should be taught mainly in Finnish. After three years of teaching in and of Finnish, Swedish would become the language of instruction but Finnish would remain as a subject. This reform could, according to him, be implemented within the frame of the Swedish comprehensive school system, as the Finns in Sweden did not demand the establishment of a complete educational structure from elementary school to university that catered for all the pupils and students of the group, such as the one that had been established for the Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland. The disparity argument followed the logic of nationalism in the way it subordinated judicial traditions and political sovereignty to the political primacy of the linguistically constituted nation. The Swedish (nation-)state

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should reciprocate the goodwill shown by the Finnish (nation-)state in providing language maintenance for Swedish-speakers in Finland (Finnish citizens but linguistically members of the Swedish nation) by providing language maintenance for the linguistic members of the Finnish nation now residing in large numbers on Swedish territory. The disparity argument thus rested on the historical interconnectedness between Finland and Sweden. Even though the two countries were formally independent, they shared an entangled history that was manifested in the language policies of Finland, and this history should be considered in the new circumstances of largescale Finnish immigration to Sweden. Similä (1966a, 1966b) maintained that all the Finns in Sweden asked for was that their children could be bilingual in Finnish and Swedish when they exited the educational system, and he again emphasised that this was a small request when one looked at the status of Swedish in Finland. The concept of bilingualism formed the basis of Similä’s demands and underpinned his main arguments for teaching in and of Finnish. One of these was the ‘family cohesion argument’. Similä (1966b) argued that bilingualism was a prerequisite for the cohesion of the Finnish immigrant family, as many adult Finns would never learn Swedish to a level necessary for close communication between parent and child – if the child became mono­ lingual in Swedish, the family members would become insulated from each other. Another danger was a negative form of bilingualism, with the child mastering neither Finnish nor Swedish. Similä (1966b, 1966c) did not use the term halvspråkighet (semilingualism), but he emphasised a core tenet in the emerging theory of semilingualism when he argued, with reference to bilingual high school students in the Finnish-speaking parts of northern Sweden who did not completely master either Finnish or Swedish, that learning a second language too early could disrupt linguistic development. His claim that there existed negative forms of bilingualism marks the first use of the semilingualism argument by the ethnic activists. Similä’s reference to scientific observations on the phenomenon of semilingualism also shows that he was familiar with the works of Professor of Phonetics Bertil Malmberg (1964) and Nils Erik Hansegård (1966), both of whom had written on the problem of semilingualism among Finnish-speakers in northern Sweden before the term (introduced as a scientific term by Hansegård in the early 1960s) became commonly known at the end of the 1960s. Similä (1966b) could also refer to an international scientific authority, namely UNESCO. A UNESCO report published in 1953 had proclaimed that every child should be taught in and on his or her mother tongue, ideally for the duration of schooling. Bilingualism also guaranteed freedom of choice in

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the future for the immigrant child who had grown up in the new homeland to return to the ‘fatherland’ (fäderneslandet), if he or she so wished (Similä, 1966b). The linguistically constituted ‘fatherland’, to which a speaker (or a potential speaker) of a particular language is inextricably bound, is not a unique feature of Finnish nationalism, but rather a fundamental tenet of Herderian nationalism (see Chapter 4). Similä made his ‘freedom of choice in the future’ argument in general terms without referring to Finns and Finland. The reason for this was probably the apparent problem of this argument in the context of his writing. With his references to the status of Swedish in Finland, made in order to make and strengthen the disparity argument, Similä (1966a, 1966b, 1966c, 1967) had offered ample evidence of the strong institutional backing for the Swedish language in Finland. If one followed Similä’s own description of Finland, there was no reason why a linguistically Swedified Finn could not move back to Finland and live there using Swedish, but then she or he would return only to the territorial state of Finland, not to her or his ‘true’ fatherland. Finland was therefore ill-suited as an example of a country to which the (now adult) immigrant child could not return due to lack of language skills, and therefore Similä probably avoided referring to Finns. The argument also shows the Fennoman heritage in Similä’s thinking; national membership was not constituted by genes or citizenship but by language. The bond between a nation and its member, in this case a child with immigrant parents, would be broken if the language of the fatherland was ‘lost’. Similä (1966a, 1966b, 1966c) also presented economic arguments, based on the contribution of Finnish labour to Swedish growth. Teaching in Finnish would alleviate the stress suffered by uprooted school-age children when they entered a new school in an alien language environment, which forced many Finnish families to move back to Finland. This constituted a serious loss to the Swedish economy, which was in need of Finnish labour. He further argued (1966b) that Sweden would find it increasingly difficult to recruit foreign labour if the conditions for immigrants were not improved. According to him (1966a), increasing bilingualism in Sweden would benefit the Swedish economy in the future and strengthen cooperation between Finland and Sweden. The introduction of teaching in and of Finnish in the Swedish school system was not only good social policy; it was also good foreign and economic policy. Migration between Finland and Sweden would become easier and their economic and political ties strengthened. Similä’s arguments for mother tongue education were not derived from a human rights or minority rights discourse, for instance, that the Finnish children should be given instruction

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in Finnish because they had an unquestionable right to their mother tongue, but he argued that the children, their families, Sweden and Finland would be better off for it. In this respect, Similä differed somewhat from the most active advocate for multiculturalism in Sweden, David Schwarz, who more frequently argued in terms of rights – the right to be different, the right to minority institutions and so on (e.g. Schwarz, 1971). Conceptualising language primarily as a resource or as a right is a common and contentious issue in modern struggles on language ideology (see Chapter 3). The ethnic activists shared a common goal in the preservation of the minority groups in Sweden, and their differing rhetoric was probably related to their ­historical bodies. Similä’s emphasis on the national interests of both Finland and Sweden, and his concern about Finnish immigrant children’s severed ties to the nation-state of Finland, seems to stem from his historical body that entered into political action in the mid-1960s. Born in 1911, Similä graduated from secondary school in 1930 and was elevated to the rank of captain in the Finnish armed forces in 1944 (Huovinen, 1978: 902). In light of this, and the fact that he was a supporter of the Centre Party, it is hardly surprising that Similä used the logic of nationalism when making his case. All the activists utilised key concepts of the predominant political language of Sweden (Wickström, 2013a, 2013b). State support for the preservation of language and culture (i.e. that which made an ethnic group distinctive) was not framed merely as a ‘right’ by the ethnic activists, but as a societal resource (see Chapter 3 for a discussion on languages as resources); it was concomitant with making Sweden more equal, more harmonious, future-oriented, and ‘richer’ economically, culturally and in international reputation. That the activists argued in this way is hardly surprising; all actors seeking untoward political change must anchor their calls for change in the prevailing political discourse, even when they ultimately seek to change this discourse (Pocock, 2009; Skinner, 2002). In the context of the Sweden of the 1960s, where the light of modernity was self-evident and pursued without doubt (Berggren, 2004), references to the past were of little value in justifying collective identity pursuits, as the Swedes themselves constructed their collective identity on the ability to progress towards an ever more modern society. Consequently, the activists seldom referred to the past. Similä (1966a), for instance, spoke of a Finnish gift to Sweden, but what he referred to was not a historical gift provided through Sweden’s ‘colonisation’ of Finland or by Finland’s ‘defence of Sweden’ during the Second World War: he referred to the money presently lost by Finland because Finnish workers produced goods in Sweden instead of in Finland. What, then, was the Swedish (Social Democratic) response to these demands for teaching in and of non-Swedish languages, and how did the

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civil servants and the experts responsible for policy and policy discourse conceptualise mother tongue teaching in the policy field of immigrant adjustment (‘integration’ in contemporary idiom) that was established in the late 1960s?

Role of the experts: The social and economic benefits of mother tongue retention Language was from the beginning a central issue for the Swedish civil servants tasked with facilitating the adjustment of the labour immigrants. The Working Group on Immigration, the precursor of the Immigration Board, was the first governmental body tasked exclusively to deal with immigrant adjustment. The first act of the Working Group was to initiate information campaigns targeted at the immigrants in their own languages (Öberg, 1981). The need to provide the immigrants with essential information on Swedish working life and society in their own language was deemed a priority, but the learning of Swedish was also considered to be of utmost importance for the adjustment of the labour immigrants, who, after all, were now formally regarded as potential citizens or at least permanent residents of Sweden and not simply ‘guests’ (Wickström, 2013b). The focus on facilitating the acquisition of Swedish followed the prevalent language ideology: language policy was ‘Swedish policy’, that is, it was concerned with improving language skills in Swedish. During this initial stage of ad hoc policy measures the question of mother tongue education for immigrant children was explicitly linked to the social adjustment of the immigrant family. According to the Working Group (Swedish Government, 1968: 47), the immigrant family was in a vulnerable situation, and immigrant mothers were often the most isolated and monolingual of the family members. Immigrant children had in general no difficulties in learning Swedish but herein also was a danger: if a child forgot the mother tongue it could severely hamper intergenerational communication, which could have disastrous social consequences. The lack of communication between the generations, due to a confusion of tongues, could lead to a disruption of family ties. This would be devastating, not only for the adjustment process of the parental generation, but for the psychological and social development of immigrant children (see Chapter 8 for an ethnographic analysis of the embodied experiences of language in Finnish immigrant families, that is, the social reality of the ‘problems’ the experts wanted to solve). The disintegration of the immigrant family due to language divisions could ultimately lead to social instability among the

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immigrant children. On this basis, the Working Group argued that the prevention of family disintegration was the most important reason for developing measures to support the maintenance of the mother tongue of the immigrant children. The Working Group did not argue that the learning of Swedish would be hampered without teaching in the mother tongue. The immigrant children would become fluent in Swedish even without mastering the language of their parents, but they could become socially handicapped if their social environment was disrupted due to the strain caused by linguistic (and cultural) estrangement from their parents (Swedish Government, 1968: 47). The Working Group on Immigration conceptualised and presented mother tongue teaching and maintenance foremost as a preventive social policy measure, or, more narrowly, progressive family policy in the field of immigrant policy. Their stance was in line with the arguments that had been presented by Similä and the other ethnic activists. The Working Group accepted the general thesis of these activists that mother tongue teaching was essential for successful adjustment and made this thesis its own, although the group did not subscribe to the concept of semilingualism. The idea that mother tongue teaching could function as a social policy tool was not the only argument the Group adopted – the economic argument for mother tongue teaching was also used to justify its support. Kjell Öberg (1968), the head of the Group, argued that bilingual citizens would benefit both the international business interests of Sweden and diplomatic relations. The Working Group on Immigration did not, at the end of the 1960s, base its arguments for mother tongue education on the psychological need to support the ethno-cultural identity of the immigrant child, nor on a normative need to indefinitely preserve the minority languages of a new multicultural Sweden, nor on the disparity in language legislation between Finland and Sweden. The need for mother tongue education was linked with the immediate social needs of the immigrant families, that is, the ‘family cohesion’ argument. For the future families of the second, bilingual and ‘Swedish’, immigrant generation the need for mother tongue retention as a way to stabilise a socially fragile immigrant family would, if we follow the reasoning of the Group, have ceased to exist. In these families all members, whatever their origin, would be fully functional in Swedish. Mother tongue teaching and maintenance was primarily needed to facilitate the social adjustment of the first- and second-generation immigrants, not to facilitate the retention of minority group identities of the ‘non-Swedish’ residents of Sweden. The Working Group assumed that most immigrant children would become fully proficient in Swedish through linguistic immersion in early childhood, an assumption at odds with the theory of semilingualism.

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The Social Democratic position on mother tongue teaching The Working Group on Immigration was a semi-formal organis­ation of an ad hoc nature possessing no formal decision-making power. The immigration and integration reforms undertaken by the Swedish government in 1968 were patterned on the overarching political aim of social equality and unity pursued by the Social Democrats. Although the Social Democrats already in the mid-1960s acknowledged the scientific, social and moral case for expanding non-Swedish mother tongue education, the principle of educational uniformity that, after many years in the making, finally had materialised through the establishment of the comprehensive school system in 1962, was to take precedent over all other considerations (Ecklesiastik­ departementet, 1966: 258). In a formal answer to a motion made primarily by David Schwarz at the 1968 congress of the Social Democratic Party, the party leadership categorically rejected the idea of a multicultural and (permanently) multilingual Sweden (Schwarz, 1971). One concession to the demands for mother tongue education was, however, made in 1968: the national curriculum of 1969 would allow a local education authority to include teaching in a non-Swedish mother tongue for a maximum of two hours per week (Arbetsmarknadsdepartementet, 1974: 250). The Swedish government made it legally possible for the municipalities to offer mother tongue teaching and could henceforth refer to this new stipulation when faced with claims of neglect and assimilationist aspirations. The new provisions were also accepted as an adequate reform by the Working Group for Finnish Immigrant Questions (Arbetsgruppen för finska invandrarfrågor, 1971), the Finnish reference group of the government made up of Social Democrats who had ousted Similä and his supporters from the leadership of the Finnish community in 1970. From a Social Democratic standpoint, education in and on non-Swedish languages was a virtual Pandora’s box of ethno-cultural and institutional pluralism: it could lead to the isolation and segregation of immigrants, and this could endanger the endeavours towards equality in Sweden, especially if this teaching was carried out in (non-Swedish) monolingual settings. The only ‘good’ policy on language was one that ensured the social and linguistic homogeneity of Sweden, on which the ‘people’s home’ of ever more ‘equal’ citizens ultimately rested (Wickström, 2013b; see Chapter 2 for contemporary articulations on linguistic homogeneity in Sweden, and Chapter 5 on the people’s home). At the end of the 1960s, policy discourse on teaching in and of minority languages had taken shape with the emergence of immigration and immigrant adjustment as political topics. However, even if the policy discourse of the

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Working Group on Immigration seems to have been partly influenced by the arguments and claims-making of the ethnic activists, neither the Working Group nor the ruling Social Democratic Party accepted the main thesis that Sweden should embrace its multicultural and multilingual future with affirma­tive policy reforms. The Party was even hesitant to buy into the arguments for bilingualism and conceded only to a nominal introduction of teaching in minority languages in Swedish comprehensive schools. However, by changing the national curriculum to include the possibility of teaching in minority mother tongues, the government acknowledged that there was a demand for it. Even if this minuscule reform was an evasive manoeuvre on the part of the Social Democratic government, it was a move that, at least to some extent, legitimised the claims of the activists. A small ideological breach had been made in the monolingual wall of mother tongue education in Sweden, but it took a new scientific concept to make it permanent and obligatory.

Semilingualism: A game-Changing concept in the struggle to legitimise mother tongue teaching Equality was the overriding political concept for the Swedish labour movement (Esping-Andersen, 1992) and it was also used to legitimise monolingualism. Political concepts can, however, be used in different ways – what if the Social Democratic position on language education, which espoused monolingualism, could be shown to undermine the principle of (social) equality? The concept of semilingualism did exactly that and provided a way to scientifically legitimise a new discourse on language policy. ­Hansegård’s Tvåspråkighet eller halvspråkighet? was published in 1968 and the book changed the way in which mother tongue education was publicly discussed in Sweden (Paulston, 1983: 43). Hansegård’s book did not mark the introduction of the concept nor its first use in public discourse, but it was only after the book’s publication that the concept of bilingualism moved centre stage in the debate on mother tongue teaching in Sweden. Hansegård was a linguist and from 1968 onwards his concept of ‘double semilingualism’ gained more and more political and public legitimation (the prefix ‘double’ was usually dropped in public discourse) until it was accepted as a scientific truth on which the educational reforms on mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages initiated in the mid-1970s would ultimately be based. After its breakthrough, the scientific merits of the concept of semilingualism were debated with gusto by Swedish, Finnish and international linguists, with the debate ostensibly culminating in its

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being discredited as a theoretical concept (Cummins, 2000: 104–105). The debate among linguists will not concern us here, as the concept became accepted as a ‘fact’ in Swedish public discourse from the beginning of the 1970s and therefore carried the political weight of a recognised ‘truth’. The establishment of semilingualism as a politically affirmed scientific truth on which policy could (and would) be based was neither an accident nor an idealistic case of ‘speak truth to power’. It was a man-made phenomenon which attained officially affirmed political (and therefore scientific and vice versa) legitimacy when key policy-makers discursively operationalised the concept (see Saarinen, 2007) to enable and legitimise the introduction of the idea of multiculturalism in general and the introduction of homelanguage teaching in particular. One of the key political strengths of the concept, or theory, of semilingualism was its predictive power. Hansegård (1968) argued that poor language policies in the north of Sweden had produced semilingual citizens who on all important parameters were now in an inferior position to their fellow citizens who were monolingual in Swedish and thus fully functional in Swedish society. The harmful effects of semilingualism on the identity and psyche, together with an incomplete mastery of Swedish, made the semilingual person socially handicapped in comparison with the monolingual Swede. Hansegård (1968) claimed that semilingual persons suffered from diminished opportunities in life due to their undeserved condition and furthermore argued that this could be described as unacceptable in a society which had made the concept of equality its guiding principle. Referring to Hansegård, the advocates of mother tongue teaching could thus argue that the social phenomenon of semilingualism, which had bred inequality in the north, now threatened to doom a whole generation of immigrant children to social inequality in their new homeland. The theory of semilingualism, as it was used by policy- and opinionmakers, stated that full mastery (at the level of the mother tongue) of a second language was impossible without first reaching linguistic maturity in the mother tongue, or ‘home language’ as it was designated. According to the theory, immigrant children could not become the linguistic equals of their Swedish-speaking peers if they did not first learn their mother tongue. And a prerequisite for social equality and equal opportunities in the people’s home was, of course, linguistic equality in the use of Swedish. The theory stood hitherto conventional wisdom on its head: it was dangerous for the immigrant child to adopt Swedish as quickly as possible. The proponents of the theory argued that mother tongue teaching was vital for the learning of Swedish, which, in turn, was vital for social harmony and progress, that is, the equality of Sweden. The proponents of the concept argued that without

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the introduction of mother tongue teaching, preferably as much teaching as possible, an ethnified under-class of resentful second-generation immigrants with poor language skills would be created, to the detriment of all, but especially the Social Democrats (see e.g. Skutnabb-Kangas, 1972). The scientific claim that mother tongue teaching was a necessary prerequisite for the learning of Swedish was the politically most potent argument that followed from the theory of semilingualism. In 1973, semilingualism had made its way into the plenary debates of the Swedish parliament when Karin Nordlander (Swedish Parliamentary Debates, 1973: 79, 147), an MP for the Left Communist Party, used it in the following way: One now speaks of semilingual pupils – a concept that those in responsible quarters are worried about, because even if the pupils can read in both Swedish and in their mother tongue they might not understand what they are reading. Man talar nu om halvspråkiga elever – ett begrepp som man på ansvarigt håll är bekymrad över därför att även om eleverna kan läsa både på svenska och på modersmålet kanske de inte förstår vad de läser. No one in the plenary session objected to this use of semilingualism as a legitimate scientific concept or remarked on the curious way in which the speaker defined reading ability. Three years later, when new legislation on mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages was proposed, the concept of semilingualism had become government approved and also received the approval of the parliament (Municio, 1987: 39). The successful elevation of semilingualism from a disputed hypothesis to a state-sanctioned scientific truth was largely the work of a handful of influential activists-cum-experts and policy-makers. Linguists such as Hansegård and Skutnabb-Kangas and sociologist Pertti Toukomaa (the latter two being Finnish citizens) were the primary actors in promoting the scientific validity of semilingualism. Toukomaa’s research results from the early 1970s on Finnish school children in the Swedish municipality of Olofström were often cited by those who advocated mother tongue teaching, for instance the secretariat of the Commission on Immigration (Arbetsmarknadsdepartementet, 1974). In order to convince the parliamentary members of the Commission of the need for a more expansive policy on mother tongue teaching (i.e. what was to become the home language reform in 1976), head secretary Jonas Widgren brought the MPs of the Commission together with language experts and activists. The MPs were convinced by

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the case made by the activists-cum-experts, and thus Widgren and the secretariat acquired the political approval needed to make a proposal for home language reform in the final report of the Commission in 1974 (Jacobsson, 1984: 78). This proposal, in line with the multiculturalist policy goals of ‘equality’ (between immigrants and Swedes) and ‘freedom of choice’ (to retain ethno-cultural identity), introduced in 1975, formed the conceptual basis for the Home Language Act of 1976. According to the new immigrant and minority policy of Sweden, non-Swedes living in Sweden should have a real, policy-enabled opportunity to retain their ethnic identities. Language was seen as an essential part of ethnic identity and the principle of the freedom of choice, which was added to Sweden’s 1974 Constitution in 1976 (through law SFS 1976:871, ch. 1, article 2, para. 4), would have appeared hollow if the provisions on minority language teaching from 1968 had not been reformed. The principle of equality could also be interpreted in favour of mother tongue teaching when connected to the theory of semilingualism. It is possible that the home language reform of 1976, which made it obligatory for local school authorities to offer mother tongue education to pupils coming from homes where a non-Swedish language was used (hence the newly coined administrative term ‘home language’, hemspråk) and provided earmarked monetary support from the state for this provision, would have taken place in one form or another without the theory of semilingualism, especially when considering the relationship between Finland and Sweden and the universality of the Swedish welfare state. The integration of the concept of semilingualism into formal language policy discourse was, however, not accidental or merely an ad hoc justification of the reforms introduced out of consideration for the concerns of Finland for its emigrants. The concept of semilingualism provided the activists and policy-makers in the field of immigration and integration with a scientific concept that could turn the Social Democratic concept of equality from a barrier to a bridge in the quest for more mother tongue teaching in non-Swedish languages. The concept legitimised the whole home language reform, from the stage of claims-making to that of implementation in the name of equality. The conceptual history of semilingualism thus shows that changes in language policy discourse can be initiated from the periphery of (formal) political power – it was experts and ethnic activists, in this case primarily Finnish activists, together with policy-makers (e.g. Widgren) and politicians (e.g. Kekkonen), who successfully made semilingualism an accepted, if controversial, part of public and political discourse. There were, however, limits to what could be politically achieved even with a concept like semilingualism. The home language reform was, at the time, a radical break from the language ideology and policies that

Making the Case for the Mother Tongue  189

had been in force, and enforced, in Sweden since the latter half of the 19th century, but it did not break the post-war ideology and policies of Swedish Social Democracy. In fact, it deflected the threat of minority schools being established, by offering a suitable alternative to such schools, an alternative intended to satisfy the vocal ethnic activists and the majority of the immigrant parents with an interest in the matter. A new language policy discourse was certainly established in Sweden in the 1970s, as well as a new immigrant policy discourse, but the Social Democratic demarcation on the limits of linguistic pluralism was never breached, even if it was stretched. The home language reform was conceptualised not only as preventive social policy but also as a proactive policy measure in the field of migration policy. And during this time of large-scale immigration from neighbouring Finland this meant that language education also became an important issue in the bilateral relations of Sweden and Finland, and continues to be so to this day (see Chapters 2 and 5).

Finnish conceptualisations of teaching Finnish in Sweden The ‘keep them connected with the country of origin’ rationale was part of language and migrant policy discourses in both Sweden and Finland, but more so in the emigration country of Finland. Finnish emigration to Sweden had, at the turn of the decade, grown to alarming proportions from a Finnish standpoint. Not only did Finnish industries experience labour shortages, the sheer number of people leaving for Sweden could be seen (and indeed was seen) as weakening the Finnish nation. Thus, reforms and policy measures were needed to prevent emigration from Finland and to encourage migrants’ return. The first official initiatives from Finland on mother tongue teaching in Finnish in Sweden took place at the beginning 1960s. In the middle of that decade, Finland brought up the question in the Nordic Council, which led to the establishment of the bilateral Finnish–Swedish Educational Council in 1967. One of the stated purposes of the Educational Council was to consider and suggest measures that would maintain contact be­tween Finland and the Finns in Sweden and facilitate the readjustment of returning Finns (Arbetsmarknads­ departementet, 1974: 254). Similä be­came the first Secretary of the Council and remained in this post until 1978 (Tarkiainen, 1996). After what would be the peak of Finnish immigration to Sweden around 1970 the Finnish government set up its Advisory Board on Migration Affairs as a permanent body on 19 November 1970.

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Similä was made a permanent expert of the Commission at the beginning of 1971, which, together with his role as Secretary of the Finnish–Swedish Educational Council, shows his continued importance as an actor in the configuration of the policy discourse formalised in the mid-1970s, even after he was removed from his leadership position in the Finnish community in Sweden. At the end of 1972 the Advisory Board on Migration Affairs presented four principal aims to steer Finnish migration policy. The first three concerned information issues, the state of the Finnish labour market and policy measures to prevent emigration. The fourth was that the necessary conditions for the uninterrupted development of the identity of Finns living abroad must be secured (Siirtolaisasiain neuvottelukunta, 1972). Finnish identity meant, in this context, the national/ethnic identity of the Finns, not Swedish identity or some vague notion of a cosmopolitan identity. Finnish migration policy strove to keep the Finnish immigrants and their children Finnish and attached to their homeland. Mother tongue teaching in Finnish in Sweden was therefore one way to facilitate return immigration – the Advisory Board on Migration Affairs did not conceptualise mother tongue teaching as minority policy, which would have implied that post-war Finnish settlement in Sweden was of a permanent nature. The conceptual link between mother tongue teaching and migration policy had also been made by the ethnic activists who had argued that minority recognition could either facilitate or prevent re-immigration. The focus on maintaining Finnish identity was not a new feature of Finnish politics towards expatriate Finns; the question of keeping Finns abroad attached to Finland had been a hot political issue during the first decades of the republic (Engman, 1987). In a way, the Advisory Board on Migration Affairs revived the idea of the transnational preservation of the Finnish nation tied to the ‘fatherland’ of Finland, but without the explicit nationalistic rhetoric of the inter-war period (see also Chapter 4). Urho Kekkonen, who served as President of Finland from 1956 to 1981, did, however, embody a direct link between the Finnish concerns over ex­patriates in the 1920s and 1970s. In the 1920s, Kekkonen, as an active member of the right-wing Academic Karelian Society, had called for measures to preserve and defend Finnishness wherever it existed, for instance in Sweden (Engman, 1987). In the 1970s Kekkonen would again voice his concerns about the preservation of Finnishness in and through the historical bodies of the Finns in Sweden, albeit this time as the most powerful politician in Finland and without using his rhetoric of the 1920s. Nationalism was a part of Kekkonen’s historical body and it underpinned his expressions of concern for the well-being of his fellow Finns, but he

Making the Case for the Mother Tongue  191

did not make the case that the fate of the expatriates was tied by blood to the fate of the Finnish nation. Voicing his rediscovered concerns about Finns abroad under the pen-name Liimatainen in the Finnish journal Suomen Kuvalehti, Kekkonen (1971) claimed that Finns in Sweden were treated as ‘part-time negroes’ (osapäiväneekereitä), in the sense that the Swedes cared only for their labour input and did not wish to include them in their ‘white welfare society’ (valkoisessa hyvinvointiyhteiskunnassa), which made use of the discourse of the civil rights movement initiated in the United States and observed in Sweden as well. The Finnishness of the labour immigrants and their children needed to be defended in the same way as Finnishness in the ‘diaspora’ had needed protection in the 1920s, but Kekkonen no longer argued that the preservation of Finnishness in Sweden was pivotal for the Finnish nation. The maintenance of Finnishness was needed for social reasons (Kekkonen, 1974a). Semi­ lingualism was a key concept in demands for policy reforms in Sweden, and it figured prominently in the speech to the Finns in Sweden that Kekkonen (1974b) made in Stockholm on 17 March 1974. By drawing on the concept of semilingualism, Kekkonen could appeal to science, which carried an additional weight in modernistic and ‘rationalist’ Sweden. And by appealing to science, the advocates for mother tongue teaching in Finnish also offered the Swedes, especially the Social Democrats, a way out of the conundrum of seemingly breaking with the Social Democratic universalism if mother tongue teaching in a non-Swedish language was introduced. Kekkonen (1974b) linked all the (supposed) educational and social problems of the Finns to language, thus making the case, like Similä, that the way to social equality between Finnish immigrants and Swedes was via strengthen­ing of the Finnish language. The policy discourse and arguments of the ethnic activists were thus echoed by Kekkonen, the official voice of Finland.

In the name of social equality and national interests: Mother tongue teaching legitimised as a measure of social, migration and foreign policy A new policy discourse on ethnic diversity in general and on mother tongue teaching in particular was established in Sweden during the last phase of post-war labour immigration, which came to include the old domestic language minorities. The process that led up to the introduction and legitimis­ation of mother tongue instruction in the Swedish school system was not discursively contained in any one policy field nor conceptualised as language policy or minority policy, policy fields that hardly

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existed in a political or administrative sense in Sweden at the time because of the naturalised and hegemonic status of Swedish and Swedishness. The new policy discourse on mother tongue teaching that emerged from the mid-1960s on developed in an inter-Nordic and international context; Finnish immigration was facilitated by the common Nordic labour market, and migrant and minority rights were issues whose salience generally, albeit slowly, grew in the West in the post-war period. However, the efforts of a dedicated group of activists certainly facilitated the introduction of policies supporting non-Swedish languages in Sweden in the mid-1970s, and thus seem to have been at least a necessary factor for the reconfiguration of policy discourse on language. The scope of the reforms and the way in which they were discursively operationalised still show the limits of language politics in post-war Sweden – both domestic policy goals as well as bilateral considerations converged for a set of reforms that, even if they constituted a break with the monolingual model, were placed firmly within the universalistic welfare state model and its perceived interests. The new policy discourse on mother tongue teaching shows how the new policies could be legitimised in different, even contradictory ways in order to satisfy various political demands and ideological motives. The ‘finalised’ policy discourse fulfilled the demands of President Kekkonen and the Finnish government, but it also ensured that the ideological postulates of the Swedish Social Democrats were not transgressed, while at the same time granting official affirmation to the idea of a multicultural Sweden. The policy discourse on language maintenance was configured in such a broad way that it could be used to please a nationalistic Finn like Kekkonen (the Finns in Sweden will not be assimilated and hopefully return to Finland), a nationalistic Swede (the immigrants will maintain their language and hopefully return home), a Social Democrat like Prime Minister Olof Palme (the immigrants will become equal citizens) and a multiculturalist like Schwarz (the immigrants will develop into national minorities). King Carl XVI Gustaf ’s statement to President Kekkonen during the gala dinner was therefore in line with prevailing policy discourse, as was Kekkonen’s answer. The retention of the Finnish language among the ­ Finnish immigrants was, in the now officially established discourse, to everyone’s advantage: the Finns would adjust well to Sweden and remain ready for their eventual return to Finland. The two hours per week of statesponsored and mandated home language classes, the new policy on teaching in minority languages, that were to ensure language retention among the immigrant children, was a radical reform from a historical perspective, but what was perhaps more important was its political implications and the way discourse could be conducted on and around the policy. The home language

Making the Case for the Mother Tongue  193

policy made it possible for the political elite in both Sweden and Finland to neutralise criticism of the way Sweden treated its language ­minorities, while the discourse on the policy, with its seal of approval from the leaders of all concerned parties, subsumed all the arguments on the issue, both pro and contra. Even the concept of semilingualism, which had been used to great effect in legitimising calls for reform, had now, due to its incorporation in the policy discourse, lost its political potency. Activists such as Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976: 80), who clamoured for more profound reforms on the basis that true bilingualism could not be secured and semilingualism avoided without the introduction of monolingual teaching in and of the non-Swedish language and until the migrant child was 9–10 years old, could from now on be countered with the argument that the potential social threat of semilingualism had been averted. In a way, the reforms of the mid-1970s was a Pyrrhic victory for the activists: they won the battle for official ­affirmation of the new multicultural and multilingual Sweden on a rhetorical level, but in the end lost the war for a truly multilingual Sweden when it mattered the most, when the children of the post-war immigrants came of age in Sweden (see Chapters 2 and 5 for the developments from 1980s onwards). The ‘home languages’ taught in school were never conceived of as anything more than just that: languages of the private sphere. The way in which the new, seemingly radical, policies of the mid-1970s came to be legitimised mattered profoundly in the end. Language policy was not prioritised after having been reduced to a supporting role in the fields of social, migration and bilateral policy. The aspirations of the labour immigrants to pass on their mother tongues to their children were, so to speak, embraced to death by a political field that professed to multiculturalism and multilingualism in consensual unison, but in the end supported these goals only when they were enacted in Swedish and within the strict institutional limits of the Swedish welfare state. The understanding of Swedish as the common language of Sweden was neither undermined nor challenged by the introduction of mother tongue teaching in the mid-1970s, and this continues to be a feature in contemporary Sweden, despite the fact that language policy issues since the early 2000s have entered the political agenda in their own right and not just as sub-issues to other policy issues, even though the economic and social aspects continue to be emphasised. The discrepancy between official rhetoric on minority rights and multi­ culturalism and de facto resistance to making Sweden a multilingual country has also not been challenged by the Finnish government in any imperative manner. The path-dependent echo of the symbolic bilateral affirmation of the new policy discourse in the speech acts of the King and the President on 21 October 1975 still reverberates today in both Sweden and Finland.

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References Arbetsgruppen för finska invandrarfrågor (1971) De finska invandrarnas problem. Stock­ holm: Prisma. Arbetsmarknadsdepartementet (1974) Invandrarutredningen 3. Invandrarna och minoriteterna (SOU 1974:69). Stockholm: LiberFörlag/Allmänna Förlaget. Berggren, H. (2004) The forward-facing angel: Nationalism and modernity in Sweden in the twentieth century. In K. Almqvist and K. Glans (eds) The Swedish Success Story? (pp. 67–79). Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation. Blommaert, J.M.E. and Huang, A. (2009) Historical bodies and historical space. Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 (3), 267–282. Carl XVI Gustaf (1975) H.M. Konungens tal vid galamiddagen för president Kekkonen den 21 oktober 1975. In possession of the author. Cummins, J. (2000) Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ecklesiastikdepartementet (1966) Skolgång borta och hemma. Utlandssvenska barns skolgång – skolinackordering – skolgång för vissa minoriteters barn (SOU 1966:55). Stockholm: Emil Kihlströms Tryckeri AB. Engman, M. (1987) Ulkosuomalaisuuden synty. In R. Alapuro et al. (eds) Kansa liikkeessä (pp. 108–122). Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä. Esping-Andersen, G. (1992) The making of a social democratic welfare state. In M. Misgeld and K. Åmark (eds) Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden (pp. 35–66). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hansegård, N.E. (1966) Finskt i Tornedalen – en glömd minoritet. In D. Schwarz (ed.) Svenska minoriteter: en handbok som kartlägger invandringspolitiken och befolknings­­minoriteternas ställning inom det svenska samhället (pp. 162–182). Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Hansegård, N.E. (1968) Tvåspråkighet eller halvspråkighet? Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Huovinen, P. (ed.) (1978) Kuka kukin on: henkilötietoja nykypolven suomalaisista 1978. Helsinki: Otava. Ihalainen, P., Saarinen, T., Nikula, T. and Pöyhönen, S. (2011) Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi. Kasvatus & Aika 5 (3), 18–38. Jacobsson, B. (1984) Hur styrs förvaltningen? Myt och verklighet kring departementens styrning av ämbetsverken. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kekkonen, U. (‘Liimatainen’) (1971) Osapäiväneekereitä. Suomen Kuvalehti no. 50 1971. At http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/9580 (accessed 20 March 2013). Kekkonen, U. (1974a) Tasavallan Presidentin Ruotsin televisiolle myöntämä haastattelu 21.3.1974. At http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/11871 (accessed 20 March 2013). Kekkonen, U. (1974b) Tasavallan Presidentin puhe Ruotsissa toimivien suomalaisseurojen järjestämässä tilaisuudessa Tukholmassa 17.3.1974. At http://www.doria.fi/ handle/10024/9164 (accessed 20 March 2013). Kekkonen, U. (1975) Tasavallan Presidentin puhe Ruotsin kuninkaan juhlapäivällisillä Tukholmassa 21.10.1975. At http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/8047 (accessed 20 March 2013). Kymlicka, W. (2007) Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press Malmberg, B. (1964) Språket och människan: tankar om språk och språkforskning. Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Municio, I. (1987) Från lag till bruk: hemspråksreformens genomförande. Stockholm: Centrum för invandringsforskning.

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Öberg, K. (1968) Anpassningens villkor och mål. In A. Redemo (ed.) De nya svenskarna. En debattskrift om den svenska invandrarfrågan (pp. 7–20). Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Öberg, K. (1981) Invandrarpolitik och invandrarforskning. In E.M. Hamberg and T. Hammar (eds) Invandringen och framtiden (pp. 13–25). Stockholm: Publica. Paulston, C.B. (1983) Forskning och debatt om tvåspråkighet: en kritisk genomgång av svensk forskning och debatt om tvåspråkighet i invandrarundervisningen i Sverige från ett inter­nationellt perspektiv: en rapport till Skolöverstyrelsen. Stockholm: IoD-projektet, Skolöverstyrelsen. Pocock, J.G.A. (2009) Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinans, S.A. (1996) Den finländska befolkningen i Sverige – en statistisk-demografisk beskrivning. In J. Lainio (ed.) Finnarnas historia i Sverige, del 3. Tiden efter 1945 (pp. 63–105). Stockholm: Finska Historiska Samfundet, resp. Nordiska Museet. Saarinen, T. (2007) Quality on the Move: Discursive Construction of Higher Education Policy from the Perspective of Quality. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Schwarz, D. (1971) Svensk invandrar- och minoritetspolitik 1945–1968. Stockholm: Prisma. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Siirtolaisasiain neuvottelukunta (1972) Siirtolaisasiain neuvottelukunnan mietintö I: Selvityksiä ja toimenpide-ehdotuksia. Helsinki: Valtioneuvosto. Similä, A. (1966a) Finnarna som minoritet i Sverige. Dagens Nyheter, 23 March. Similä, A. (1966b) Finnarna i Sverige. Dagens Nyheter, 18 July. Similä, A. (1966c) Sverige-finnarna. Ord och Bild 75 (3), 293–294. Similä, A. (1967) Finnarna i Sverige – Svenskarna i Finland. Ruotsin suomalainen: Ruotsin suomalaisseurojen keskusliiton äänenkannattaja 4, 1–3. Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics. Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1972) Forskning, ideer och debatt om tvåspråkighet och barnens skolspråk. In B. Loman (ed.) Språk och samhälle 1, Språksociologiska problem (pp. 135–151). Lund: LiberLäromedel. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Toukomaa, P. (1976) Teaching Migrant Children’s Mother Tongue and Learning the Language of the Host Country in the Context of the Sociocultural Situation of the Migrant Family. Tampere: University of Tampere. Swedish Government (1968) Kungl. Maj.ts proposition till riksdagen angående riktlinjer för utlänningspolitiken m.m. (Prop no. 142). Swedish Parliamentary Debates (1971–) Riksdagens protokoll. Stockholm: Riksdagen. Tarkiainen, K. (1996) Sverigefinska infrastrukturer. In J. Lainio (ed.) Finnarnas historia i Sverige, del 3. Tiden efter 1945 (pp. 143–184). Stockholm: Finska Historiska Samfundet, resp. Nordiska Museet. UNESCO (1953) The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Monographs on Fundamental Education, VIII. Paris: UNESCO. Wickström, M. (2013a) Conceptual change in postwar Sweden: The marginalization of assimilation and the introduction of integration. In P. Kivisto and Ö. Wahlbeck (eds) Debating Multiculturalism in the Nordic Welfare States (pp. 110–139). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wickström, M. (2013b) The difference white ethnics made: The multiculturalist turn of Sweden in comparison to the cases of Canada and Denmark. In H. Vad Jønsson, E. Onasch, S. Pellander and M. Wickström (eds) Migrations and Welfare States: Policies, Discourses and Institutions (pp. 25–58). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Nordic Centre of Excellence (NordWel).

8 Everyday language policies: Embodiment of languageRelated experiences of Finnish women in Sweden Hanna Snellman

After the Second World War the whole of Europe was an arena of migrants flowing south to north, east to west. In her oral history study, Caroline Brettell (1982) has described this phenomenon as experienced by Portuguese women migrating to Paris. At the end of the 1950s, a new and quite dramatic movement of people took place. This movement was based essentially upon the same interaction of needs between sending and receiving societies that had characterised the earlier phases of Portuguese emigration: the industrialised countries of northern Europe needed workers to do the jobs that their own nationals were no longer prepared to do, and the countries of southern Europe were willing to export their surplus population. French, German, Swiss and Belgian enterprises began to rely on an army of foreign workers, who would not demand higher salaries or better working conditions, to satisfy the demand for increased production and larger profits. Immigrant workers accepted lower salaries, longer and irregular working hours, were prepared to do dangerous jobs, and did not require more than substandard living conditions. According to Brettell, within 20 years some 10 million workers made the great trek to the more industrialised countries of north-western Europe, to build their buildings, clean their streets, houses, and hotel rooms, and to advance their manufacturing industries. Brettell’s gaze does not stretch further north, to Sweden, which also was a receiving country of immigrants. Supply and demand also coincided in Sweden. The country needed workers and the rural regions of Europe had plenty of workers but no jobs. As discussed, for example, by Junila and Westin (2006), Lainio (1996) and Rahikainen (2007), in 1965 almost 196

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50,000 persons migrated to Sweden to work. Almost half of them came from Finland, some 4000 from Yugoslavia, almost 3000 from Greece and as many from Germany and Denmark. Brettell claims that the peak year of Portuguese emigration was 1970, when more than 100,000 Portuguese migrated to France. The same year also witnessed a peak in emigration at the other extremity of Europe, from Finland to Sweden. The highest peak was in 1969–70, when net immigration amounted to 100,000 persons. In 1972 Sweden temporarily stopped further recruitment of foreign workers. As discussed by Ahrne et al. (2000: 89, 150) and Lainio (Chapter 5), from 1975 onwards immigration became subject to stricter control, and Sweden started to follow an integration policy based on cultural pluralism. Immigrants were given the opportunity to keep their ethnic identity or adopt a Swedish identity if they wished. They were granted the same rights, duties and opportunities as those who had been born in Sweden. The municipalities were, for example, obliged to offer education in home languages other than Swedish (see Chapter 7). Those who had resided in Sweden for three years were granted the right to vote in municipal elections. Identity-builders such as museum curators responded to the new societal demands. For example, in 1972, a curator at the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) in Stockholm, Göran Rosander, pointed out that there were no artefacts in the collections that belonged to the Roma or to the immigrant labourers arriving in Sweden after the Second World War from Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. ‘These groups are just as much members of the Swedish people as the Swedes themselves, and their lives needed to be documented’, Rosander wrote in the yearbook of the museum (see Silvén, 2004: 215). According to Rosander, it was natural to begin the documentation with Finnish immigrants because they constituted by far the biggest immigrant group in Sweden and one that could be characterised as a minority. Soon an extensive research project was launched, Migration Finland Sweden, which resulted in several publications and 60 binders of fieldwork material filed at the Nordic Museum. The Migration Finland Sweden research project echoes the same discourse Mats Wickström refers to in Chapter 7: the ties between Finland and Sweden had been strengthened and the countries had a mutual interest in Finnish immigrants. However, as Snellman (2010a) points out, the museum and the collaborating universities (Department of Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Department of Geography, University of Umeå, Sweden) were not so much interested in language as in Finnish traditions such as food customs and in how new Swedish traditions had been accepted by immigrants. To what extent the change in immigration policy affected the launching of the Migration Finland Sweden project is

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not known, but it may be assumed that the ongoing sociopolitical debate had a positive effect on the decision to fund the project. Inspired by the concept of the ‘historical body’ introduced by Scollon and Scollon (2004) my aim in the following is to add the post-war female experience to the study of Finnish migrants in Sweden, an experience that memory organisations have largely neglected (Snellman, 2010b). The focus of this chapter is on the everyday life experiences and practices of immigrant women with a Finnish background living in Sweden, on how they entered the labour market of their new homeland, Sweden, and how they made use of the educational possibilities their new homeland had to offer. With the help of my own data I discuss how their historical bodies were formed in this particular social space and how they embodied linguistic experiences, following Wickström’s definition of the concept in this volume. Blommaert and Rampton (2011: 6) state that, in addition to language, people apprehend meaning in gestures, postures, faces, bodies, movements, physical arrangements and the material environment, and these in different combinations constitute the context shaping the way in which utterances are produced and understood. The following sheds light on how daily lives are sites of language policy discourses, and how Finnish female immigrants lived their everyday lives in an environment the cultural choreography of which they were not familiar with from the start, and on how they were continuously reading multi-modal signs to make sense of their circumstances.

Recollections of everyday life as data The experiences of immigrants and especially immigrant women are hard to trace from contemporary surveys. Todd (2005: 18) even states that in migrant studies interviews are often the only way to obtain information about lifestyles and everyday life in particular. For ethnology, participant observation and narratives collected either orally or in a written form have always been an important and perhaps the most typical kind of source material, as it is in this chapter. This study is mainly based on ethnographic interviews (Davies, 2002: 40–41, 95) I conducted in 2005 in Västerås, Sweden. Because there are no official records in which one could look up names for Finnish women living in Västerås, I decided to try to contact some via the Finnish association of Västerås. When I called the association, I asked for names of Finnish women active in the association and other forums as well. I was lucky to find a person who looked for names and telephone numbers for me. As I did the interviews, I asked for more names, in accordance with the principles of snowball sampling.

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The interviews followed a similar pattern. I contacted the interviewees by phone and agreed on a time for the interview. I always started the interviews by describing the research project. After that we more or less simply discussed the interviewee’s life history in Sweden. Often a lot of time was given to drinking coffee and leafing through old photo albums. The interviews were conducted in Finnish by me, taped and transcribed word by word by research assistant Veera Kinnunen (Lapland University). The material will be donated to the Provincial Archives of Oulu, to which I have previously donated interview material. In total, 15 interviews were conducted. The interviewees were born between 1928 and 1955 and had migrated to Sweden between 1960 and 1979, between the ages 18 and 38. Seven of the 15 interviewees had children already at the time of migration. Some had divorced before migrating to Sweden. Two of the interviewees had also been in Sweden during the Second World War as War Children, a project described by, for example, Virkamäki (2005). Three of the interviewees had returned to Finland after a few years in Sweden, but eventually returned again to Sweden. ‘Pendel migration’ (Geddes, 2005: 178) such as this is a typical phenomenon for migrants looking for better working and living conditions. The interviews I am using for this chapter are intimate and deal with personal experiences of the interviewee. Therefore the use of the material is ethically sensitive. How to protect the privacy of the interviewees is a question which has to be solved first. As a researcher I am not only responsible for the promises I made to my interviewees, but I also have to keep the promises of other interviewers who did their work much earlier. The simplest way to solve the ‘privacy problem’ is to use pseudonyms for names and locations (names of town, neighbourhoods, etc.), especially as the interview data were collected in a small city with a small number of individuals (Davies, 2002: 51). According to Davies (2002: 6, 71), the hallmark of participant observation is long-term personal involvement with those being studied, including participation in their lives to the extent that the researcher comes to under­ stand the culture as an insider. I have visited Sweden regularly since the year 2000, and in 2006 I lived there for a couple of months. Consequently, I started out with a research setting where I was studying a minority group which I myself did not belong to, a research setting which made me somewhat uneasy. When I was given an opportunity to work at the University of Stockholm, at a single stroke I became, although only tem­porarily, a part of that minority. My then 13-year-old son went to the Finnish school in Stockholm and we lived in nearby Huddinge, which has a large Finnishspeaking population. Whenever I went to the shop near our house or to

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the swimming pool nearby I heard Finnish spoken. At work I very often consulted a colleague who had immigrated to Sweden from Finland about how to do things in the Swedish way. I became more confident with my research topic when I learnt that there are degrees of familiarity. The process of adjustment among newly arrived immigrants and their offspring has interested scholars for generations. According to Cohen (1993: 2), immigrant studies done in the mid-20th century were heavily influenced by social scientists’ acceptance of modernisation theory: Premodern people who confront a modern world, according to this theory, undergo mental transformations, adopting modern values as they come into contact with an industrial world that is characterised by rational, impersonal market relations. To adjust to the new environment, people from traditional societies must leave behind their group loyalties and family ties. The change may begin slowly, but eventually urbanisation, industrialisation, and mass communication overwhelm and transform the premodern world; ultimately people abandon the old and embrace the new mentality. Cohen takes her examples from the United States, and specifically from a group of Italian immigrants, but her discussion is relevant in a Nordic context as well. According to her, scholars of American immigration, assuming that modernisation theory was correct, emphasised the extent to which adjustment to American urban life meant abandoning Old World traditions of family loyalty for the new creed of individualism and personal autonomy. The studies that focused on families depicted the breakdown of solidarity that accompanied the transformation in values. However, our understanding of the immigrant experience is no longer based on the assump­tion that it inevitably involves a breakdown and disorganisation of basic institutions in the community. Instead, immigrants make use of their traditions in adapting to modern industrial life. Change and continuity are key words when studying first-generation immigrants. In the Swedish Finnish context, this has been discussed by Lukkarinen Kvist (2006). My research questions are products of a combination of personal factors, disciplinary culture, as described in Löfgren (1996: 75–87), and external forces in the broader scientific climate. Selecting a topic for this study was easy, as was selecting ethnography as a way of doing it. I understand ethnography as Davies (2002: 4–5, 27) has defined it, referring both to a particular form of research and to its eventual written product: I adopt a broad interpretation of ethnography as a research process based on fieldwork using a variety of (mainly qualitative) research

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techniques but including engagement in the lives of those being studied over an extended period of time. The eventual written product – an eth­nography – draws data primarily from this fieldwork experience and usually emphasises descriptive detail as a result. Ethnography is usually at its best when the voices of interviewees are heard as much as possible. Even though the quotes from the interviews lose some of their flow in translation, in the following I use quotes as often as I can. This choice is motivated, on the one hand, by referring to the ethnographic writing tradition and, on the other, by the fact that the interviewees are the best analysts of their lives. Following Mason (2001: 4–5, 27) and for the sake of readability, I have not always included the questions I have posed in the text. This small gesture – I hope – emphasises the importance of the voices of the interviewees. I can only agree with Davies (2002: 113, 220), who states that it is impossible to carry multiple meanings into another language, and linguistic play is usually lost in translation. Because of that, I have included the original Finnish narratives in an appendix, in the order in which they appear in the text. This is also an ethical decision (Davies, 2002: 227), because the people this study is about, the research collective, can get an idea what this book is about even if they did not understand English.

Women’s immigrant occupations All the women I interviewed ended up in Västerås, a medium-size town by Lake Mälaren in the province of Västmanland, 115 km west of Stockholm. At the beginning of 1960s Västerås had approximately 75,000 inhabitants, of whom a great number were of Finnish descent. According to Koiranen (1966: 61, 75), who published the first PhD thesis on Finnish immigrants in Sweden, 9% of the Finns working in Sweden were living in the province of Västmanland in 1964. However, women who were not employed outside the home, a significant group in numerical terms, cannot be found in the statistics. At the time of Koiranen’s study the Finns in Västerås were mainly employed by metal industry, ASEA and Svenska metallverket. The majority were working in manual labour, as was the case with Finnish migrants in general. However, ASEA had also recruited several Finnish engineers and technicians, which made Västerås a little special. Koiranen (1966: 91) lists various co-overlapping reasons to immigrate of 234 women who had immigrated to Sweden in 1945–59 and whom he had interviewed. Of these women, 45% gave financial reasons, such as unemployment in Finland or better working prospects in Sweden, a higher standard

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of living in Sweden and bad housing conditions in Finland. Further­more, 22% gave studying, 19% family reasons, 14% love of adventure and 5% political reasons as their reason to immigrate to Sweden. Another 3% had other reasons or could not suggest their reasons to emigrate. Often financial reasons were combined with family reasons. One named coincidence as a reason to migrate. In her study, also based on material from Västerås from the 1970s, Haavio-Mannila sketches typical features of Finnish women working in Sweden. The physical circumstances of work were easier compared with those of men who worked outdoors. However, women more often worked on an assembly line, which was monotonous. Furthermore, Finnish women in Sweden seldom worked in positions where they could control their work, have subordinates or even need specific occupational skills. Women also felt more physically and mentally strained after a day’s work than men. According to Haavio-Mannila (1979: 34–35, 37, 40), women earned about half of the amount men earned. Many of them were working part time or they were not working outside the home. However, even those who were working full time earned about 80% of the amount men did. In her study of female migrants in New York, Foner (2001: 4) shows that a number of Haitian and Hispanic aides in the New York nursing home she studied in the 1980s had been full-fledged nurses when they emigrated, but their qualifications were not recognised in the United States and language problems stood in the way of passing requisite licensing examinations to practise nursing in New York. Language problems were a reality for Finnish nurses working in Sweden as well. The only nurse in our sample of women was recruited in Sweden primarily because she was a trained nurse. In the beginning she was dressed like a nurse at the hospital but was paid a lower rate mainly because of language problems: And then I arrived in Stockholm. I had a sister already living in Stockholm, she had come a little earlier with her husband, a younger sister, they were working near Stockholm, and then … I started, I got a place to stay in Roslaxtull, the hospital had arranged a place in a dormitory. But it was difficult, because I noticed immediately, and so did others as well, fellow workers and the director, that I couldn’t manage, that is, I could not succeed in being a nurse because of language. Then we made an agreement that I will work as an auxiliary nurse until I learn the language. And I remember how difficult it was … how difficult it was to be an auxiliary nurse and for all that … there was an authoritarian head nurse who was fond of the Finnish nurse’s uniform and she wanted me to wear the uniform even though I did not do a nurse’s work.

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In the material there is also an example of how Finnish nurses hid their Finnish background: Yes, I had to have [an interpreter with me when visiting a doctor] when I was with children. Here we come again to that time when I was at the hospital in Enköping and I did not understand the question that had my bowels moved or not, had I pooped or not. I said that I don’t understand the question. And there was this nurse standing nearby and she shouted, she yelled that ‘paska’ [‘shit’ in Finnish] [laughing] and then I realised what the question was. Then the doctor looked at the nurse and looked very angry and asked whether the nurse understood Finnish. He was angry at her, because for such a long time he had been trying to ask me the question and I had not understood, and she could have helped. Things like this happened all the time. A nurse understood Finnish, but did not help.… She could [speak Finnish], but did not help. They were ashamed I think, or they wanted to be so Swedish already.… A Finn, yes. And I saw the doctor became angry.… If you know the language, you should interpret. Recognition of Finnish qualifications in Sweden was by no means automatic. When Heljä, for example, applied for a job in ABB in Västerås, she had to take a test to prove her ability in machinery drawing. In the interview she did not criticise this but it is obvious that she found it somewhat degrading. Actually, it was the fact that she had the necessary education that made it possible for her to apply for a course in order to become qualified for the job: In 1971 went to work at ABB. But for that I had to, even though I had two years’ training, I had to do a test there. There were 60 candidates, Swedes, and were there two or three Finns in the group. We had to do a test in order to be able to work in just that office [drawing electric motors]. And for my part the test went of course well even though I did not speak Swedish very well, because I had just studied the same thing in Finland. And I got the job…. ABB had its own fast training to become a draughtsman there, and that way I could get a job at ABB right away. So I took the course first and got a job at the office afterwards. For Heljä, a vocational training in Finland clearly meant a good start in Sweden. At the time there were about 600 employees at ASEA, 36% of them of Finnish origin. Heljä was the only Finn working in the office at the time. It naturally meant nicer working conditions, and also meant working at daytime and not in three shifts, as they did in the factory.

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Sisko, who had completed the same education in Finland, also got a job as a machinery draughtsman at ASEA, but for her it was not her first job in Sweden. For the first four years after migrating to Sweden she held diverse jobs, for example in a restaurant fixing cold dishes, which did not require vocational training, at least not the training she had received. In addition to not automatically getting a position one was trained and qualified for, a typical feature in entering the labour market of the new homeland was changing jobs several times. During her first six years, Heidi lived in three small industrial communities within 150 km from Västerås. It was her husband’s work that had been behind the decision to move. But according to Heidi, it was generally easy to find a new job. Even the job interview was not a problem, because the same questions were always asked: It is a funny story when … when the boys, [names], my husband and his friend, they went to ask for jobs for us in the factory. They went there together, because they had friends there. They went there, and they [employers] asked, can those girls speak Swedish. ‘Yes, yes’, they had answered. We hardly understood any Swedish, but enough so that we could answer when we were asked our names and that sort of thing, that they ask when you apply for a job. The boys taught us that when you go to the interview, they will ask you this, and this and this.… We went there, and the questions were exactly the same the boys had told us. I could answer perfectly and could start working the following day. And the best part is that after two weeks, the boss came to me and asked me to interpret. And I did not know a word of Swedish. But I, okay, this is nothing, they ask the same things again for sure. And so it was, they asked the same things. Was Heidi or anyone who could at least to some extent navigate in both language environments ‘an activist’ in the sense Wickström is defining the concept in Chapter 7? Heidi was moving to different places not only together with her husband but with another Finnish couple. This is not an exception. Friends and relatives frequently sought work in groups. Todd’s (2005: 113) analysis of English working-class youth’s occupational mobility shows a similar trend: ‘Friends were particularly significant in prompting mobility between jobs, which did not usually constitute social mobility.’ Job changers were, however, not ‘drifting’: there was certain logic in their mobility. Interviewees in this material changed jobs usually in order to get a better salary or better working conditions, or just to be able to get some change in the dull and physically hard work.

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Marja was the only interviewee with a grammar school certificate; in addition, she had a diploma from a commercial college, both from Finland. However, she started her career in Sweden from the lowest step of the ladder. Her first job was as a cleaner. Initially, she had not even tried to look for work in which she could use her education because of her lack of competence in Swedish. She also felt that the pay was very good in manual labour. ‘Cleaning has always been the work of immigrants; you don’t have to talk when you clean’, said another interviewee. Marja was not a cleaner for long though, because she got a job at a factory. But she did not stay there for long either, as they needed someone in the office of the Finnish Association, and Marja got the job partly because of her commercial education and partly because of her Finnish background. Later she sought work at ASEA. After she had children, the most convenient way of earning a living was to mind other people’s children, another typical immigrant occupation. As far as macro-level politics were concerned, Sweden was supposed to be a model for equality, but the examples above show how different the reality often was. Even though the ideal was a multicultural Sweden, without exaggeration one can say that a Finnish woman was likely to hide her Finnishness, at least if she was in a white-collar occupation, or to seek an occupation that did not demand good communication in Swedish. Women’s everyday reality was a meeting point for macro and micro politics. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 7) and their concept of rhizomes, one can say that no such things as macro and micro exist, there are just events and incidents – or personal experiences, as in this study – where the macro and micro meet or become visible. The macro is regulating the micro, and the micro is maintaining or challenging the macro all the time, thus becoming a mycelium meeting at different policy levels.

Juggling One’s life For many Finnish women with small children, working as a cleaning woman was a practical decision because of the flexible working hours: they could work in the evenings and at nights, and thus they could take care of the children in the daytime, while somebody else did so at night, usually the father or a neighbour (Snellman, 2005: 158). They could also take on more and more cleaning tasks as their children grew older. How much this arrangement was a burden on older children (cf. Todd, 2005: 79), especially daughters in the family, I cannot say. One can assume that this was so in many cases: when going through the Migration Finland Sweden material, Snellman (2010a) noticed that when the interviewers of the National Cultural Museum of Sweden looked for Finnish interviewees in Upplands

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Väsby in 1974, the apartment door was often opened by a rather young child who was alone at home with younger siblings while the parents were working. In Gothenburg, the interviewees explained (Snellman, 2005: 158) that when parents were working different shifts, there usually was an hour or two during the day when one parent was going to work and the other was returning home, and older siblings were minding the younger ones. Weckström (2011: 145–146) studied young people with a Finnish background in the Mälaren bay area and interviewed women also in Västerås. Her Västeråsian interviewees talked about their parents’ working lives in Sweden and most mothers had at some point worked as domestic house cleaners. All the interviewees whose mothers were or had been cleaners spoke at length about the image of Finnish people being clean and tidy, and especially women having a reputation of being ‘the best cleaners’ one could find. Many interviewees had helped their mothers with cleaning jobs; some worked as cleaners themselves at some point. A widow and a mother of six children followed a typical pattern. Her daughters were responsible for taking care of their brother: When I was working in the shop, I worked for six days a week, and Sunday was for laundry and preparing meals for the following week. I put the meals in the fridge, so the children could just warm them up…. I wrote a list saying who does what each day. It was always there on the sink. And when I came home in the evening, the first thing I did was to sit in the kitchen and listen to who had been mean to who, who had done what, who had hit who…. My son was in the kindergarten, but he did not want to be there. I had to take him away, my eldest daughter always … daughters were taking turns in taking care of him. Children usually learnt Swedish quite quickly and therefore often interpreted both language and culture for their parents. Blommaert (2010: 8–9) points out that language tasks in immigrant families often involve collabor­ ative work. People may call on others, or others may volunteer to translate and assist in communication. Very often that person is the child, who, as a result of immersion in a formal language learning environment, has access to more elaborate varieties of standard and local vernacular language and will often have to assist the mother and the teacher in communication. Whatever occupation the interviewee had, she usually remembered the time when she was working physically hard. One of the interviewees recalled her work in a textile factory: I worked long hours. In the morning I had to be at work at 6:45 and the working day ended at five o’clock, or was it five to five when the factory

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siren whistled. And after that I went to a grocery store and bought groceries for the family, and then prepared the meal. After that I was too tired to do anything. When you work a piece rate, it is tough, you know. In a hot room with a lot of dust; the fabrics are dusty, you know. One was too tired to do anything else than work. Work was not just physically extremely taxing but it sometimes caused nausea or headaches as well. An interviewee who had no knowledge of Swedish had to seek work in a potato factory where no language skills were required: I threw up and sat there … we were like chickens in a row and the potatoes went by, and they stank awful … and I had to pick them up … and I was throwing up. It was strange for me of course, because back in Finland I had worked in business. Another interviewee also remembered the headaches: ‘Every morning I woke up with a headache, when I was thinking that I had to go to work again. Because I did not know the language…. For me it was so difficult.’ For her, a mother of six children, even buying groceries was difficult: It was funny when you think of it afterwards. My husband [who died when the interviewee was 36 years old] could speak Swedish a little, he had learnt at school, but I could not say a word. Once I did not remember the word in Swedish when I wanted to say that I will bake. I thought, how on earth can I explain this, because there was no self service at that time. I went to the grocery store and gestured with my hands that I would bake. They [asked] that do I want one or two, and I, that one and they brought me two pieces of yeast. You can do nicely when you try. Hands came also handy at work when one was learning what to do: There were not many Finns at the mill at that time. Always there were some things I did not understand. If there was something I did not understand, I showed it with my hands and they told me what it is. For example, a man responsible for the machine, took a glass in his hand and said ‘glass’ in Swedish. That is how I learnt Swedish. But sometimes not even gesturing helped. A very typical migration story deals with childbirth ‘in Swedish’. Most often they deal with janitors and

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cleaners with a Finnish background being asked to help in the childbirth if the patient did not understand the instructions, or with the helplessness of the mother when she could not get her message through: And my first childbirth, that was something, too. I came to Sweden in November and had my first child in April. They gave me medicine to start the childbirth artificially and I was bedridden from early in the morning. At ten o’clock at night they gave me more medicine, I had not eaten but I could drink water … I tried to tell them that I need to pee … they were feeling my belly and I was wondering how on earth they did not realise that I need to pee. I tried to sat that I need to pee. Kissa [‘a cat’ in Finnish; which is katten in Swedish] is to pee [in Swedish] and it is so close to vatten [‘water’ in Swedish; whereas katten, in Finnish kissa, is near to Swedish vatten], and I kept on saying that, ‘vatten’. And they brought me water! And I tried ‘kasta vatten’ [direct translation from Finnish]! When the delivery started, the first thing that happened was that I peed, and then they understood what I had tried to tell them. Extreme bodily incidents like this, associated with frustration and humiliation, are key experiences for Finnish women in Sweden during their first years as immigrants. The extract also shows how some competence in Swedish – which some Finns already had, having studied it in school in Finland – even if extremely limited, may cause even more problems rather than solve them and potentially be even more shameful because many Finns know some Swedish, unlike many other migrant groups. Furthermore, the topic is so sensitive that experiences like this are not shared with co-workers during coffee breaks or laughed at. Feelings of disgrace had not vanished even though the actual event had taken place decades ago. After childbirth one had to take care of official paperwork and deal with the authorities, all in Swedish. In my data there is nothing about deciding and negotiating a name for the newborn, but surely the naming of a child is a conscious act motivated by the historical body of the actors. Ågren (2006: 108) has shown what implications a Finnish first name had in Sweden. When she interviewed people of the same age as her also residing in Gothenburg but with a Finnish background, she became conscious of her Finnish-sounding first name. An interesting point of comparison can be found in Sofia Kotilainen’s research on children’s names in Chapter 6. Based on material filed at the Nordic Museum (Snellman, 2006a) and my earlier interviews conducted in Gothenburg (Snellman, 2006b), I have a presumption that experiences such as the one cited above were so intense that women wanted to save their own children from similar experiences.

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That in turn resulted in what is known as the permanence of tempor­ality (Snellman, 2005: 134–135), meaning that migrant women made their everyday life decisions based on the assumption that they would return to Finland. Another strategy could be to give one’s child a Swedish first name. As far as I know the latter has not been studied empirically. Furthermore, deciding which school one’s child is to attend is again a social action, and especially so when one must also consider language issues, as Boyd and Palviainen have discussed in Chapter 3. Following Boyd and Palviainen on the road paved by Scollon and Scollon (2004), one can see immigrant women’s historical bodies loaded with personal experiences, beliefs, attitudes and hopes when giving birth, choosing a name for their child, making these decisions – often at the cost of a long trip – about day-care and school, and even buying groceries for the family. Not only did they live their everyday lives in a world at least partly orchestrated by the policies of the state but their lives were also affected by the world changing around them. The grocery store is a good example. From supermarkets one could buy what one wanted to, not just items one knew by name and could pronounce correctly.

Reflections of education policies on everyday life None of the interviewees were fluent in Swedish when they first settled in Sweden. They all though had subsequently taken Swedish language courses and by the time of the interview almost all of them felt comfortable speaking Swedish. For them, the language courses had been a passage to Swedish society. Studying Swedish, especially when they were not forced to do so in the evenings after work, seemed like an opportunity, especially for those who had not been able to go to school in Finland for as long as they would have wanted to. Emigration enabled them to climb over the barrier Finnish selective secondary education had created (cf. Todd, 2005: 105–106). Heljä had studied the most. After eight years in Sweden she started further studies at the age of 29. First she studied mathematics and some other subjects in order to be able to start grammar school. After graduating from four years of technical college she had a degree in electrical engineering. Before, she had been the only Finn working in her department in the ASEA factory, and now she was the only female engineer employed in her department in ASEA. Later she even continued her studies in electrical engineering for three years at the university in Västerås. All that time, she was able to keep her position at work, and was even paid for the time she spent studying. University studies did not immediately change her position at work, but she was better paid and more qualified. For a year she worked

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as a foreman for 36 men. Being a woman, an immigrant and coming from an office background made the situation so difficult that Heljä decided to resign: And I was a woman, and I was an immigrant and I was … what else was I? I had come from the office. The fact that I had come from the office was not good. It was the worst thing that I had come from the office to work in the workshop. And then … they did not really approve of it. There were those who were working in the workshop, there were us doing the job, and there were those who were just pushing papers. The roles were divided that way. And there were no other women they would have seen in the workshop ever … it was a big workshop. That was that for me. Also Hannele, a nurse with Finnish qualifications, studied further in Sweden: after a few years of work she gained competence-based qualification as a nurse in Sweden, and specialised in psychiatry. Marja, who had a degree from a commercial college in Finland, also studied further but not in the same field. In Västerås she had worked as a ‘day-mother’, taking care of small children. When her youngest child was about 10 years old, she took leave and studied for an official qualification. Since then she has been working in a kindergarten. Hellevi ended up in a good position at ASEA, later ABB, after graduating from grammar school. She had had a good work experience as the only employee in a small post office in Finland, and she knew that white-collar jobs would not be open for her in Sweden without studying. First she attended language courses arranged by the association for public servants, and then studied at a commercial college for adults and got a degree in accounting. When Maija started looking for work in Västerås, the employment authorities instructed her to take language courses and courses that would support her vocational training in Finland: So I didn’t have a job here when we migrated. In the beginning … neither of us could speak Swedish, of course we … then I went to a Swedish course and did all kinds of…. I was cleaning a shop a while, in the evenings and … I took all kinds of courses. Eventually I got a job as a draughtsman at ASEA. It was language courses and … what was it that I took? I did go to a workshop course, another course and … [laughing]. And then I was on a drawing course for a while even though I had the training already from Finland, but it was necessary to learn the terminology in Swedish, technical terminology.

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Later on Maija also studied for some years in technical college. She, too, continued to work at the ABB factory but in more demanding and independent tasks. Heta could also return to the occupation she had had in Finland through a programme where immigrants were offered education in the occupation they had before migrating. After studying for one and a half years Heta could open a hairdressing salon. For her, returning to her old vocation was like returning home. Pirkko recalled that when she came to Sweden in 1964, different associ­ ations arranged Swedish courses in the evenings, and she had taken several of them. After working as a cleaner for many years she started working in a central kitchen that delivered meals to the homes of the elderly. Her employer sent her on many courses, and in the end she was working as the head cook. Hilkka was trained as a cook in a high school in Sweden, but she did not want to work in that trade and continued working as a cleaner and then later started at ASEA in spooling. Those who had started studying but had to quit usually did so for a particular reason. For instance, Paula had a good start, but had to quit because of health problems: I went to a Finnish-speaking comprehensive school, one they had here in Sweden. You see, many had gone to school in Finland only for six years and they had this comprehensive school for two years here. I was one of the last ones who could study in Finnish, after they took it away, too. I went to that school for two years. It was wonderful. I was so glad not to go to work, and I read, too. We had a nice class, too. After that it was not in Finnish, high school, but I went to the Swedish-speaking one. At that time it made no difference. But it started to be difficult with health and I had to quit. Paula had to retire at the age of 53. Similarly Pälvi had started studying but had to quit because of health problems; she retired at the age of 39. Helmi started the comprehensive school in Finnish in 1978, but had to quit because she became pregnant. Later, she started studying again, but had to quit because she could not afford it. Her dream would have been to study further and work in a home for the elderly. She also had health problems, and was forced to retire at the age of 45. Almost every interviewee’s migration story follows the same pattern: the first few years (or even decades) in Sweden were spent in ‘immigrant occupations’, doing physically taxing and monotonous work, usually cleaning at least at some point; then there had been an opportunity to study and subsequently to work in easier, white-collar occupations. However, the

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years in hard manual labour took their toll. Every interviewee had retired relatively young as a result of work-related injuries.

Packing up in Finland and beyond In the big picture, the people studied in this chapter represent post-war female European migrants, who have toiled in the households of working families, alleviating the suffering of the sick, taking care of children and comforting the elderly in hospitals and homes for the elderly in different places all over the world. They have also been working in different branches of industry, commerce, nurture and education. The peak years for this migration were over four decades ago, but the fates of these people are a crucial part of the historical bodies of migrants in their respective lands. As a result of the global financial crisis in the 21st century, mass migration to wealthier countries is happening again, though the sending and receiving countries have somewhat changed. Again, there are people among us – in growing numbers – who are living in environments (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 155) where they have to find ways to get by in their everyday lives. Something could perhaps be learnt from the experiences highlighted in this chapter dealing with everyday situations where the person has been thinking and moving about in her mother tongue, Finnish, but done that in a Swedish-speaking environment. She, also, has been a target of several policies, one of the most important being that Sweden as a host society wanted immigrants to be able to cope, at least to some extent, in the Swedish language. Also, at times when there were more workers than work to be done, it was a common policy to direct a person to a paid language course or adult education rather than to unemployment schemes. The concept ‘historical body’ has here been understood as metaphorical life baggage brought along from Finland and further developing in Sweden, but also as hopes and dreams of what life could be. This chapter has been about everyday language policies concerning the way individuals navigated their everyday routines in a world where their everyday practices were – without them necessarily being aware of it – influenced by state and local language policies. The issue of Finnish immigrants in Sweden as targets of various educational and labour policies is discussed, on a macro level, by Lainio in Chapter 5. In my study, the focus is on what could be called everyday language policies. These policies are rhizomatic, using the concept introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 22). Policies formulated ‘up’ were shaped ‘below’; sometimes they met, but not always. As Blommaert and Rampton (2011: 1) put it, ‘globalization has altered the face of social and linguistic diversity in societies all over the world’.

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According to them, the multiculturalism of an earlier era, captured mostly in an ‘ethnic minority’ paradigm, has been gradually replaced by what has been given the name ‘superdiversity’. Therefore, even though daily lives as sites of policies are discussed here in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, one must remember that the interviews were made in the context of the superdiversity era, in 2005. The interviewees’ experiences from the 1990s and the beginning of 2000 were part of their histories, even though they were describing social actions of their early years in Sweden, in the 1960s and 1970s. The interviewees describe events in their lives which they had entered with their historical bodies of experiences. In the interviews they described their early years in Sweden, when they were gradually learning the cultural choreography of the new country. They were constantly aware of their limited scope of action: when interviewed for work they did not necessarily understand the questions, but their countrymen had prepared them for the job interview in a way which made them credible. Giving birth to a child or seeing a doctor was frequently a humiliating occasion when the patient could not get her message through and felt totally helpless. Not even daily chores such as buying groceries was an easy task if one was supposed to be able to use Swedish at the stores, which was a reality in the 1970s. Talented people, even those with education, escaped to ‘immigrant occupations’, where there was no need to talk. Gradually they became familiar with the choreography – usually with the help of their children and Finnish emigrés who had migrated earlier – and as a result of different education and labour policies, they were also able to educate themselves further and enter less physically taxing occupations. The women interviewed for this study were, however, a little exceptional because when they were chosen for interview, they were expected to have been active in society. Individual activism such as theirs has also been discussed in this volume by Kotilainen (Chapter 6) and Wickström (Chapter 7). Scollon and Scollon (2004: 160) discuss actions as moments in time and space in which historical bodies and the interaction of people and the discourses in place intersect. According to them, ‘each of these can be thought of as having history that leads into that moment and a future that leads away from it in arcs of semiotic cycles of change and transformation’. Furthermore, they write about the action itself giving further impetus to the cycle, like a pumping station along an oil pipeline, or deflecting or altering the cycle, like an electron passing through a magnetic field. If, as Scollon and Scollon claim, the life histories of people, places, discourses and objects can be seen only through these moments of freshened or directional change and transformation, for the formation of the historical bodies of women

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inter­viewed for this chapter the crucial moments are those of discomfort and uncertainty. The ethnography of this study sheds light to the multisited nature of language policies and policies in general. Personal experiences are in focus, but at the same time the experiences women describe are affected by different levels of policies, for example language policies and workplace routines.

Acknowledgements I want to thank Dr Mia Halonen, University of Jyväskylä, and Dr Lotta Weckström, UC Berkeley, Scandinavian Department, for valuable comments on a draft of this chapter. This chapter is a part of my Academy of Finland funded project (decision no. 137923).

References Ågren, M. (2006) ‘Hello, my name is Pirkko and I am…’. In M. Lähteenmäki and H. Snellman (eds) Passages Westward. (pp. 99–111). Studia Fennica Ethnologica 9. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Ahrne, G., Roman, C. and Franzén, M. (2000) Det sociala landskapet. En sociologisk beskrivning av Sverige från 50-tal til 90-tal. Göteborg: Korpen. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2011) Language and superdiversity. Diversities 13 (2), 1–22. At http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/resources/ periodicals/diversities/past-issues/vol-13-no-2-2011/language-and-superdiversity (accessed June 2014). Brettell, C. (1982) We Have Already Cried Many Tears. Cambridge: Schenkeman. Cohen, M. (1993) Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies A.C. (2002) Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Foner, N. (2001) Benefits and burdens: Immigrant women and work in New York City. In R.J. Simon (ed.) Immigrant Women (pp. 1–20). New York: Transaction. Geddes, A. (2005) The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe. London: Sage. Haavio-Mannila, E. (1979) Sukupuolten elintasoerot Ruotsin siirtolaisten keskuudessa. Sosiologia 1, 31–41. Junila, M. and Westin, C. (2006) Inledning. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter. Om migration, makt och mening (pp. 13–43). Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Koiranen, V.A. (1966) Suomalaisten siirtolaisten sulautuminen Ruotsissa. Sosiologinen tutkimus Ruotsiin vuosina 1945–1959 muuttaneiden suomenkielisten siirtolaisten kulttuurin muuttumisesta. Helsinki: WSOY. Lainio, J. (1996) Finskans ställning i Sverige och dess betydelse för sverigefinnarna. In J. Lainio (ed.) Finnarnas historia i Sverige 3. Tiden efter 1945 (pp. 255–310). Stockholm: SHS & NM.

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Löfgren, O. (1996) Ett ämne väljer väg. In B. Ehn and O. Löfgren, Vardagslivets etnologi. Reflektioner kring en kulturvetenskap. Stockholm: Natur & kultur. Lukkarinen Kvist, M. (2006) Tiden har haft sin gång. Hem och tillhörighet bland Sverigefinnar i Mälardalen. Linköping Studies in Art and Science No. 372. Linköping: Linköpings universitet. Mason, S. (2001) Strategier på träckbänken. In B. Lundgren and L. Martinsson (eds) Bestämma, benämna, betvivla. Kulturvetenskapliga perspektiv på kön, sexualitet och politik (pp. 17–45). Lund: Studentlitteratur. Rahikainen, M. (2007) Anticipating the globalisation of labour: Finnish women as immigrant and offshore labour for the Swedish economy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (1), 95–112. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S.W. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. Silvén, E. (2004) Samtiden eller för framtiden. Om ett kunskapsbygge i senmoderniteten. In C. Hammarlund-Larsson, B.G. Nilsson and E. Silvén (eds) Samhällsideal och framtidsbilder. Perspektiv på Nordiska museets dokumentation och forskning (pp. 140–219). Stockholm: Carlssons. Snellman, H. (2005) The Road Taken. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi. Snellman, H. (2006a) Going to school in a diaspora. In M. Lähteenmäki and H. Snellman (eds) Passages Westward. (pp. 79–98). Studia Fennica Ethnologica 9. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Snellman, H. (2006b) Lapplandsborna i Göteborg. In M. Junila and C. Westin (eds) Mellan majoriteter och minoriteter. Om migration, makt och mening (pp. 103–123). Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Snellman, H. (2010a) Performing ethnography and ethnicity. An early documentation of Finnish immigrants in Nordiska museet. Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology 40 (2), 47–59. Snellman, H. (2010b) ‘I just left’: Narrated female migration experiences. Bibliotheca religionis Popularis Szegediensis 26, 838–846. Todd, S. (2005) Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weckström, L. (2011) Representations of Finnishness in Sweden. Studia Fennica Linguistica 16. Finnish Literature Society: Helsinki. Virkamäki, S. (2005) ‘Att få ett got hem’ … in Finska krigsbarnsadoptioner I Stockholm 1946–1947. Webraports No. 7. Migrationsinstitutet: Turku. At http://www. migrationinstitute.fi/pdf/webreports.htm (accessed June 2014).

Appendix. Interview Extracts in the original Finnish Ja sittenhän minä tulin Tukholmaan. Mulla oli sisko Tukholmassa jo, oli vähän aikaisemmin tullut miehensä kanssa, nuorempi sisko. He olivat Tukholman lähellä töissä ja sitten … aloin, menin sinne Roslaxtulliin asumaan, sinne oli asunnotkin järjestetty sellaisessa asuntolassa niinkö, ja sehän oli aika vaikeeta sitten se, ku mä heti huomasin, ja huomas varmaan sielä … työtoveritki ja johtaja, että enhän minä pärjänny, siis se ei onnistunut se sairaanhoitajana oleminen ku oli niin huono kielitaito, ja sitten sovittiin, että minä olin niinkun, niinkun apuhoitajan

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paikalla kunnes kielitaito sitten parantuu. Ja muistan vielä, miten kauheen musta oli … vaikeeta ku piti olla apuhoitajana ja silti … siel oli oikeen semmonen auktoritärinen vanhan tyylin osastonhoitaja, joka sitten tykkäs, että se oli niin hieno se suomalainen sairaanhoitajapuku ja tykkäs, että mun oli kuitenkin pidettävä sitä sairaanhoitajan pukua ja sit mä olin kuitenkin apuhoitaja. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 22 June, 2005) Oli. Oli pakko olla tulkki lasten vuoksi, joo, että oli. Ja sitten justiin tässä tullaan nyt taas siihen tukokseen, ku mä tuota Enköpingin sairaalassa ja tuota minä en ymmärtänyt, että onko mulla toiminu avförinki, että olenko mä kakannut … ja mä sitten sanoin, että mä en oikein ymmärrä sitä niin tuota siellä seiso hoitaja ja se hoitaja huutaa … karjaisee sieltä, että ‘paska’ [naurua]. No silloinhan mä ymmärsin, että mitä lääkäri tarkoitti … niin niin. Ja mä sanoin sitte, että vähän … niin, että vähän on tullut. Niin se lääkäri kuule katahtaa sitä naista siinä ja sanoo, että kan du svenska… finska, oikein niinkö vihaisesti sitä, että me jauhettiin niin pitkään sitä niin ku minä en ymmärtäny … että hän ei voinu auttaa aikaisemmin. Että näitä tämmöisiä tapauksia tuli paljon, että hoitajat ymmärsi suomea, mutta he ei auttanu.… Osas [hoitajat suomea], mutta ei auttanu, joo, joo. Ne niinkö häpesi vissiin, tai halus olla niin täydellisesti ruotsalaisia jo.… Suomalainen [oli], joo, joo. Ja mä näin, että se lääkäri suuttu.… Niin. Ja toinen kerta ossaa, niin ois tulkannut sen. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 21 June 2005) Mä menin seitkytyks, mä menin ABB:lle [parin vuoden Ruotsissa asumisen jälkeen]. Mut siihenki mun piti, vaikka mulla oli kahen vuoden koulutus, niin mun piti tehä semmonen koe, ja siellä oli kuusikymmentä hakijaa, ruotsalaisia oli ja oliko meit kaksi vai kolme suomalaista siinä ryhmässä. Meijän piti tehä semmonen testi vielä, että me päästiin just tälle konttorille piirtämään. Ja tuota … no minun kohalta meni tietenkin se testi hyvin, vaikka minä en ruotsia kunnolla osannutkaan, koska mää tiesin niistä kysymyksistä, ku mä olin just lukenu Suomessa ne aikaisemmin. No tota mä pääsin sitte … ABB:llä oli semmonen oma pikakoulutus niinku sinne piirtäjäksi, ja mä pääsin sitä kautta sitte suoraan sitte kiinni ABB:lle. Että mää kävin semmoisen kurssin niinku ensiksi ja mä pääsin sieltä suoraan johonkin konttoriin töihin. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 18 June 2005) Se oli muuten jännä juttu kun ne … pojat oli … se oli [2 names], minun mies, niin ne meni hakeen sitä työtä sinne. Ne meni kahdestaan sinne

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Hjutorpiin, koska hänellä oli kans siellä tuttuja… joo. Ja menivät sinne ja ne oli kysyny sitte osaako nämä tytöt niinku suomee, eiku ruotsii. ‘Juu’, juu’, oli sanonu. Ei paljon osattu, mutta sen verran, että osas , että osas nimen sanoa, henkilö-, kaikki semmoset mitä ne kysyy, niin. Ne opetti, että nyt ko te meette sinne, ne kysyy tätä ja tätä ja tätä. [...] No [nimi] osas [ruotsia]. Hän osas ruotsia aika hyvin, koska hän oli ollu täällä… just joo. Ja mun mies oli lukenu, niin että kyllä seki vähän osas, joo. Koulussa. Hän oli käynyt ammattikoulun siellä Helsingissä. Niin tota, me mentiin sinne ja se oli sama… just samat kysymykset kysy… mitä nämä just oli sanonu. Mää osasin ihan hyvin [naurahtaa], niin. No eihän, seuraavana päivänä sai töihin alkaa, joo. Ja se oli kaikista parasta, mä olin kaks viikkoo ollu siellä töissä niin tämä pomo tuli sanomaan, että mun pitää tulla tulkiksi [naurua]. Enkä osannu yhtään ruotsia. Mutta mää, että ei se mitään, se kysyy samat asiat kuitenki ku multaki. Niin oli. Kysy samat asiat. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 7 February 2005) Silloin ku minä olin voileipäputiikissa, minä tein kuus päivää viikossa töitä ja sunnuntai oli pyykkipäivä. Pyykkipäivä ja ruuanlaitto, viikon ruuat, että pakasteeseen, että sitten lapset ei kun lämmitti vaan. Minä kirjoitin listan kuka tekee minäki päivänä mitäki työtä. Aina tuossa tiskipöydän päällä oli lista. Ja kun tuli iltasella, ensimmäinen työ oli istahta keittiöön ja kuunnella, mitä kuka oli kelleki ollu ilkee, mitä ne oli tehny, kuka oli ketäki lyöny.… Poika oli tarhassa, mutta se ei viihtyny yhtään. Minä jouduin ottamaan sen pois sitten, vanhin tyttö aina … tytöt vuorotteli sitä hoitoo. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 27 June 2005) Ei kun kato se ol se työaika kun men niin pitkäks, että noin aamul piti olla varttii vail seittemän töis ja sit viieltä lopetettiin, vai viittä vaille viiskö se pilli soi. Ja sit ku käy kaupas ja osti sen ruokansa ja teksi sen, ei sit kuule jaksanu enää lähtee. Siel kato urakal paino menemään, se ol nii rankkaa, joo. Kuumas salis ja pölyses ja kato kankaathan pölyää hirveesti. Ei sit jaksanu silloin ollenkaan. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 23 June 2006) Joo mä olin sillain, että minä menin illoilla perunatehtaalle.… Oksensin ja istuin siellä … ko oli niinko kanat orrella näin ko ne perunat meni ja ko ne haisi pahalle. Nokin pois niitä ja minä oksensin. Se oli minulle outoa tietenki, ku mä oon liike-elämässä ollu. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 2 June 2005)

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Se on hauska ko miettii jälkeen päin. Mun mies osas hiukan, oli koulussa sitä kuullu, mutta minä en yhtään. Ja sitten kerrankin, minä en muistanu sannaa ja mää sanoin että pullaa leivon, mä että millä ihmeen tavalla ku ei sillon ollu itsepalveluja eikä mittään. Mää menin kauppaan ja näytin ensin ne... näytin tällä tavalla, että mää leiposin ni ne, että yks vai kaks ja minä että kaks ja se toi mulle kaks hiivaa [naurua]. Kyllä sitä aika pitkälle pärjää ku yrittää. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 27 June 2005) Siellä ei ollu paljon suomalaisia siinä tehtaassa sillon. Ja se oli niin hyvä, että kun … mä muistan kaikki nämä, jotka hoiti niitä koneita, mun mies oli siellä niin kun … koneenkorjaajana ja … se oli iso tehdas, ja aina jos joku asia ei ollu, että mä en tienny, mä näytin ‘sano’. Ne otti käteen esimeks lasin ja näytti ‘tämä on lasi’. Niin sillain mä … siis käytännössä mä opin kaikki ruotsin. Hirveesti opin. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 7 February 2005) Voi kuule ensimmäinen synnytys, siinä oli kanssa toinen [nauraa] … Mä marraskuussa tulin tänne ja huhtikuussa sain ton tytön ja minulla tota … minut pantiin … tekopoltot … ku se ennää selkä kestäny ja minä aamusta makasin … sitten puoli kymmenen illalla siinä petissä ja ne pani niitä tippoja ja enhän mää pystyny syömään mutta mää join vettä ja mää koitin niille sanua, että [nauraa], kuuntele nytten, kiva sun kirjottaaki, koitin sanoa, että tota … ja he kävi koittelemassa, että eikö ne ajatellu, että mulla on virtsarakko niin täysi ja minä koitin sitten snua, että mua pissattaa. Ja kissa on pissa, niin sehän on aika lähellä, että vatten, niin ne toi mulle vettä. Ja minä yritin, että ‘kasta vatten’ …niin [naurua], että minä sitä sannoin, kyllä minoon ajatellu…. No, mää sain pittää kunnes ne rupes tekkee synnytyksen niin pissa tuli ensin, niin, niin. Kai he siinä ymmärsi sitten, että mitä mää oon tarkottanu.… Niin. Sitä tuli sitten ennen ko … tyttö pääsi tulemaan. Niin kyllä minä olen monta kertaa jälkeen päin aatellu, että herra jumala, eikö ne pissasta ja pissa ja kissa ku ne on melkein sma ku monta kertaa sanotaan, että ‘är du pissnötig’ niin, eikö se olis pitäny ymmärtää, että mun … ja ku he toi vettä, vettä vaan juotavaksi, että eikö heijän pitäis ymmärtää, että pitäshän mun laskee se alaski. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 21 June 2005) Ja mä olin nainen ja mä olin ulkomaalainen ja mä … mitähän mä olin vielä? Mä olin tullu konttorista. Se, että minä olin tullu konttorista sinne työpaikalle, niin se ei ollu hyvä asia. Se oli kaikista pahin asia,

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että mä olin konttorityöntekijä, joka tuli verstaaseen. Ja sitten … ne ei oikein niinkö hyväksyny sitä. Siinähän se oli niinko, että ne jotka on verstaassa tössiä niin se on me, jotka tekee tämän homman ja net ovat vain paperinkantajia. Että se oli sillain niinko semmonen osajako, että … ja ei muista naisia ensinkään nollu varmaan nähnykkään elämän kuuna päivänäkkään siellä verstaalla … soli iso verstas ja sitten … ei mulla oikeestaan siinä muuta ollu. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 18 June 2005) No täällä mulla ei ollu töitä kun mää muutin tänne. Mutta siinä alussa sitten … eihän me osattu kieltä kumpikaan, tietenki me … sitte menin kielikurssille ja teki aina jotaki … minä olin kaupassa siivoamassa hetken aikaa, aina iltasella kävin ja … kävin kaikenlaisia kursseja siinä sitten Ja lopuksi sain sitten pirtäjän paikan ASEA:lta. [Mikälaisia kursseja sä kävit siten?] No se oli kielikurssia ja … mitähän minä kävin sitten? Minä kävin kuule verstaskurssin, mä kävin sorvaajakurssin ja [naurua]. Sitte mä kävin vähän aikaa piirtäjäkurssiakin kyllä, vaikka mulla piirtäjäkoulutus oliki jo Suomesta, mutta siinähän tulee niitä, tarvii niitä ruotsalaisia termejä, se tekniikan sanasto. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 18 February 2005) No mie kävin noin ensittäin sen suomenkielisen peruskoulun, sen mitä näil Ruotsis ol suomen kielel … täälähän se … kato, ko moni Suomes ol lukenu vaan sen kuus vuotta, niin se ol sellain peruskoulu tääl kaksvuotinen. Nii mie olin viimeisii … viimesii luokkalaisii, jotka sai sen suomenkielel. Sehä otettii pois seki. Mie kaks vuotta kävin sitä kouluu. Oikein kivaa oliki. Mie olin niin mielissään, ku ei tarvinnu mennä töihin ja mie luinki ja olin niin … meil ol niin kiva luokkaki, että. Sit ei ollu enää suomenkiel sit … sit lukioo. Mie menin kyl ruotsnkieliseen sit, mut se nyt on sama mitä … mulle kummassako mie sit luin, mut ko se meni niin hankalaksi toi terveys niin [jouduin lopettamaan kesken]. (Interview by Hanna Snellman, Västerås, 26 June 2005)

9 ‘Listen, there’ll Be a pause after each question’: A Swedish lesson as a nexus for multi-sited language education policies Mia Halonen, Tarja Nikula, Taina Saarinen and Mirja Tarnanen

This chapter is concerned with an educational context – the Swedish language classroom – as a site in which language education policies, discourses about language education and language ideologies are produced, reproduced and implicated in micro-level classroom activities. In other words, we explore how larger policies, policy discourses and (political) cultures related to language education can explicitly be shown and seen in micro-level classroom activities. We thus approach the theme of this volume – the multi-sitedness of language policy discourses – from a perspective that focuses on language education, and Swedish in Finnish general education, in particular. Rather than analysing an extensive data set, we use a single extract to illustrate how various policies surface in the classroom, basing our discussion on a dialogue of policy documentation, earlier research and discourse analysis. The interconnectedness of local practices and larger policies is by no means a novel observation. For example, Bernstein (1996) argues that there is a link between the micro level of interactions between teachers and learners in the classroom and the macro-level policy and state control. In other words, there is an inherent interconnectedness of policies and grassroots practices, each being constitutive of the other. Despite Bernstein’s work, this link has not been widely studied from a policy perspective, although recent ethnographic research in classroom situations has suggested interesting 220

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policy implications, such as detailed analyses of situated practices indexing education policies (e.g. Creese & Blackledge, 2011; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Hult, 2010). Analysis of a single classroom event can offer important insights about the nature of this connection and the extent to which different policies-inaction converge or diverge in their directions when enacted in and through classroom activities. In concrete terms, we approach the multi-sitedness of language education policies by analysing momentary actions and relating them both to existing studies concerned with language education and classroom interaction, and to written policy documents, such as the core curriculum, as well as to more general language policy and policy discourses. Much of the discourse concerns relations between Finland and Sweden as well as Finnish and Swedish, highlighting the independence of the nations and the unrelatedness of languages. The discourse seems to totally ignore, even deny, the long shared history of the two countries and seems to construct Swedish as a foreign language despite its official national status. Related to this, we also discuss classroom practices in the light of the historical trajectories of the relationships between Finnish and Swedish and between Finland and Sweden, also presented in the other chapters in this volume. We hence suggest and experiment with an approach towards classroom data in which local practices are related to larger societal and historical processes and discourses, while acknowledging the limitations that the focus on a single data extract puts on an empirical account of the totality of trajectories involved. This chapter has its origins in our cross-disciplinary working seminar (Halonen, 2011) in which we explored the connections between microlevel interactional details and macro-level policies, using data from a class teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Our preliminary observations in that particular analysis (for the seminar) suggested that situated actions in a classroom can be interpreted as reflections – and naturally, at the same time, constructions – of language policies, for example in the curriculum, in teacher education traditions or in general discourses around (language) education. For example, the arrangement of teachers asking questions and pupils answering them serves and preserves the teacher-led educational tradition. Additionally, teachers dividing their use of language between the target language (the language that is taught) and that of instruction (which can vary between the common language of all the pupils, in our case Finnish, and the target language) can be a means to either highlight the functional view of the curriculum or to construct the status of the language as ‘foreign’ (cf. Nikula, 2007.) Both strategies are in line with the documented language (education) policies. Thus, what is happening in a

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classroom is thoroughly political and connected with broader social, societal and institutional factors. For the purposes of this volume, we wanted to apply a similar approach to Swedish lessons in Finland, using classroom recordings provided by a colleague. We decided to focus on a single event in this chapter, as our previous experience with the EFL data had already suggested that a brief extract can serve the purpose of pointing to ways in which macro-level language education policies – whether explicit written ideals or more implicit regularities on a practical level – come about, and are shown and reproduced in the reality of a language lesson. When searching for an extract for scrutiny, our aim was to find an instance that would contain talk between the teacher and the students, rather than instructional monologue, so that both learners’ and their teacher’s conduct and the way it indexes language education policies and discourses could be observed. At the same time, our own ethnographic knowledge and research results (e.g. Nikula, 2007; Tarnanen & Huhta, 2008), together with the research results of others (e.g. Kääntä, 2010; Niemi et al., 2012), suggest that the extract examined here is a very representative piece of data from schools in Finland. In what follows, we examine the same phases of interaction in different parts of the chapter to illustrate the multilayered nature of the phenomena explored and the complexity of indexical links between local interactional and policy dimensions. More specifically, the data extract we explore derives from a seventhgrade Swedish lesson (pupils aged 13–14 years) in a Finnish lower secondary school in the metropolitan area of the capital, Helsinki. The class is taught by a male teacher and there is also a teaching assistant present in the classroom, who occasionally provides support for individual learners. The pupils are in their first stages of learning Swedish as a foreign language – in Finland’s context, the second official domestic or ‘national’ language (see Chapter 2) – as they have been studying Swedish during the time of the recording for approximately six months. The extract is from a situation where the class is involved in a teacher-led activity that includes reading and listening comprehension tasks and pupils writing down answers to questions and reporting on them.

Language lesson as a nexus for multi-sited and rhizomatic policies As discussed above, local classroom interaction is here explored against the formal policies represented by the curricula and policy documents, and

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reproduced by, for instance, teaching materials, the teaching profession and teacher training, and the physical environment. We see these different policy traits as rhizomes, as rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Honan, 2004) networks of language education policies that are represented and reproduced in their multiple and ceaseless connections (Honan, 2004: 269) in classroom interaction. In ethnography, the idea of connecting time and space, rather than micro and macro, has been brought up, for example, by Monica Heller (e.g. 2011: 40) and Jan Blommaert (2010: 147), who both express their gratitude to historian Braudel and his notion of longue durée (1980 [1958]); Heller also leans on the concept of structuration developed by Giddens (1984), a soci­ ologist. Both of these notions emphasise history happening in times and spaces and in individuals’ moment-by-moment life experiences. A similar view is also present in Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) nexus analysis, where the times and spaces or the micros and macros come into the nexus at some specific moment in social action (see e.g. Hult, 2010; Pietikäinen, 2010). With regard to the field of international education policy studies, we follow similar ideas of ‘time and space’ applied for example by Hornberger and Johnson (2007) and Hult (2010), by understanding policy as a multilayered, multispatial and locally informed process where people produce and reproduce policies in interaction with each other and with the (formal) policy processes. These studies have addressed micro- and macro-level policies – or, more accurately, macro policies − in relation to interactions, namely interviews of the agents involved, mainly teachers (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007), or pedagogical instructions for future teachers (Hult, 2010). However, the above-mentioned studies are mainly based on the analysis of some type of meta-level discourses concerning policies, not situations where the policies are acted. They are, thus, more like reflections and reports of – perhaps ideal – ways of acting. What we, instead, wish to be able to add to this approach is to cross over from the meta-level discussions to a take on policies that seeks to combine macro-level policy considerations with instances of actual interaction in classrooms: the way education policies and discourses are acted in language use. Our view on the relation between various levels of actions is informed, in addition to the above-mentioned literature, by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, where social (inter)action is seen as the cornerstone of all human activity (e.g. Heritage, 1984; Schegloff, 2006). In interaction, the levels come together and merge; the ‘macro-level’ often referred to by the concept or term ‘context’. The idea of the levels coming together and being multi-sited in the actual interaction is illustrated in the following quote by Schegloff (1987: 219):

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It is not, then, that some context independently selected as relevant affects the interaction in some way. Rather, in an interaction’s momentto-moment development, the parties, single and together, select and display in their conduct which of the indefinitely many aspects of context they are making relevant, or are invoking, for the immediate moment. In the context of language education, this contention implies that acting is simultaneous and entwined with policies. On the one hand, acting can reflect and enact the ideals written down in the formal documents concerning education. On the other, as such it creates and preserves various (ideological) practices and discourses – and thus also has the ability to change them: change in action will immediately break down some instance of ideological hegemony and show concretely ‘an alternative way’. For example, if a whole class decided to act differently by assigning students an authoritative role in turn-taking, it would be a concrete counter-policy in education practices and could, if repeated, change the ways of understanding a learning situation, and eventually also change its recommended courses of action, the documents directing the activity. We also address issues in interaction to which the participants themselves do not orient or that are not at any rate shown on the surface of the interaction, but are related to practices that have been studied in previous research on classroom interaction and education policies. In this way we aim to show how the policies and the practices are all the time present, ‘omni­ present’ (cf. omnirelevant; Sacks, 1992 [1966]). Our attempt is thus to offer an empirical alternative view to the top-down/bottom-up and micro/macro discourses, which still are prevalent in language and education studies, by showing the simultaneous and rhizomatic nature of policies on the various levels of language education. Language education policies – whether explicit written ideals or more implicit practice-level regularities – are rhizomatically formed, shown and reproduced in the reality of a language lesson. In this undertaking, the idea of a nexus (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) is useful in that classrooms – and in our case a single classroom extract – can be approached as a nexus point in which all the activities and material artefacts involved in policing language come together. As regards the traditional macro perspective, top-down approaches without any attention to the level of educational practice in policy fail to give a full picture of the realisation of that policy. For instance, if we look at how language curricula have been realised, but look only at policy action directly (textually, as given) linked with those curricula, we will fail to see all the other aspects affecting the whole multi-sited and temporally affected system of education. On the other hand, if we look only at the

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realisations of that curriculum in classroom interactions at a micro level, without connections to broader societal levels, we will equally miss their political background and motivation.

Historical background: Swedish as a subject in the Finnish school system To contextualise the classroom data we are drawing on in the dis­cussion on multi-sited language education policies, a few words are in order on the somewhat controversial position of the Swedish language in Finnish society (see Chapters 2 and 3; see also Salo, 2012) and how this has been reflected in the position of Swedish in the Finnish school system (Geber, 2010; Piri, 2001). Both Finnish and Swedish have a relatively short history as languages of education. Swedish begun to replace Latin from the late 18th century on, but Finnish, particularly at higher levels of education, not until the 19th century. As a school subject, Swedish became compulsory for the whole Finnish-speaking age cohort with the 1968 comprehensive school reform. Until then, only students attending grammar school (oppikoulu, the elite strand of the binary school system) had studied Swedish on a compulsory basis. Thus, learning Swedish had traditionally been reserved for the elite portion of the age cohort, as studying in these schools led to matriculation and university education. During the comprehensive school reform of the 1960s, however, arguments of educational equality were brought forward, as learning languages was seen as a vehicle for social mobility. In the end, language education in the new comprehensive school system was maintained at the level of the grammar schools, rather than lowering the language requirements to the level of the vocationally oriented secondary moderns (kansalaiskoulu). This made Swedish a compulsory subject for the whole Finnish-speaking age cohort, and similarly Finnish a compulsory subject for Swedish-speaking pupils. Also, regional equality became a factor in the debate. The decision to make Swedish compulsory was also founded, particularly during the Cold War, on cultural policy arguments of Nordic cooperation and the desire to cherish cultural tradition, as well as on securing the officially endorsed national bilingualism. As a counterargument, it was stated that learning the second domestic or ‘national’ language in addition to a foreign language would be too strenuous for some students (Ihalainen et al., 2011). To the Swedish People’s Party, this was something of a question of political survival in the form of government

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participation. The school system, however, remained an example of parallel monolingualism, in that Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools remained separate. (See Chapters 2 and 3, especially on the political strategies of the Swedish People’s Party.) Nowadays, in politically oriented web discussions and other popular forums, compulsory Swedish is often referred to as pakkoruotsi (‘forced Swedish’), and forms the kernel of discussions and disputes relating to Swedish and Swedish-speaking Finns, often drawing on feelings of irritation (see Saukkonen, 2011). The term, however, became popular only after the formal policy account by the government to parliament in 1990. The language ideological debates on the role of Swedish in the education system have also had repercussions for the everyday realities of teachers, in that Swedish teachers frequently cite negative attitudes and the problems associated with such attitudes as the most depressing aspect of their work (Salo, 2009). One phase in the struggle over the position of Swedish in general education was the renewal of the matriculation exam in 2004, in which only the mother tongue remained a compulsory subject, with the consequence that the number of students taking Swedish in the matriculation exam diminished considerably, from 89.2% in 2005 to 63.6% in 2011. It appears that while the political elite has been more or less unanimous about the position of Swedish in Finnish education, the situation in media discussion and at grassroots level has been more varied when considered from historical perspectives, as we have seen for example in Chapters 2, 3 and 6 (see also Ihalainen et al., 2011). From the point of view of our chapter, the often contradictory position of Swedish in Finnish society provides interest­ing background for the study of multi-sited policies in an educational setting.

The Curriculum: Its status and values The Swedish classroom under scrutiny in this chapter is contextualised in decentralised Finnish education policy, in which centralised steering and planning have, since the 1980s, given way to regionally and organisationally decentralised decision-making. In return for the increased decision-making powers at the local level, schools are expected to subject themselves for evaluation and to report more on their activities (Laukkanen, 1998). The national core curriculum is implemented by the local authorities; for example, the municipalities are responsible for the practical arrangement of schooling and for composing the municipal curriculum based on the national core curriculum. Furthermore, each school is able to draw up its own curriculum based on both the national core curriculum and the municipal document.

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According to the Basic Education Act (1998/628), the purpose of basic education is to support the growth of pupils towards ‘humanity and ethically responsible membership of society’, as well as to ‘give them the necessary skills and knowledge in life’, and ‘to promote equality in education’. These purposes echo the basic functions of education as integration, qualification, selection and storage, as for instance Antikainen et al. (2006) have defined them. The national core curriculum for basic education (2004) is based on the Basic Education Act. The curriculum has been formulated on the basis of a conception of learning as both an individual and a shared process of building knowledge and skills. Through this process, cultural involvement is created. Several of the stated purposes of both basic education and the core curriculum fall into the categories of socialisation (integration) and instruction (qualification). In the curriculum, these goals are expressed both from the point of view of society, that is, increasing societal educational capital as well as societal equality, and that of individuals, by giving them the opportunity to have a general education and to complete compulsory education. In other words, the purposes of integration into societal values – such as equality and democracy – and qualifications – getting the skills and knowledge and completing compulsory education – are explicitly expressed. Thus, the purpose of the curriculum is, on the one hand, to provide young people with the chance to acquire general education and complete their educational obligations and, on the other, to furnish society with a tool for developing educational capital and enhancing equality and a sense of community (National Board of Education, 2004: 12). The cultural maintenance function of the curriculum emphasises the transferal of cultural traditions from one generation to the next, augmenting knowledge and skills, and increasing awareness of the values and ways of acting that form the foundation of society. The aim of this is to ensure social continuity and to build the future. In this sense, the curriculum guides us towards not only maintaining traditions but also reform and innovation, both individualism and inclusion, and predictable behaviour and roles. However, since we look at the various actions as multi-sited, thus rhizomatic and simultaneous, it means that whatever actions we empirically find in the classroom interaction, they are considered to be carrying these functions – independent of what is explicated in the curriculum. Activities in the classroom can construct, maintain or change hegemonic cultural traditions. Thus, they also have an effect on how Finnish children learn to perceive Sweden and Swedish in a ‘Finnish way’. Our whole data excerpt is an example of a situation where educational, (i.e. integrational) and instructional (i.e. qualification-related) functions

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coexist. For instance, the integrative nature of classroom interaction is depicted in the way in which teachers position themselves as initiators of the asymmetric interaction in the classroom. This could be illustrated by almost any turn in the excerpt. The following shows a case where the teacher assumes as self-evident that the pupils have done as expected – in this case, read the text. In the transcript (here and below), the medium roman font indicates utterances spoken in Swedish, bold roman utterances in Finnish; English translations are in italics underneath the original texts in Swedish and Finnish. nu har ni läst hoppas jag (.) .mt eh om Micke? alltså de now you have read I hope (.) eh about Micke? so it Another example shows a passage where socialisation into routinised classroom activities presents itself in the teacher directing the pupils’ activities: men hur åkte han dit. ni får lyssna ja pausar (.) de blir but how did he travel there. you may listen I will pause As a whole, turns and actions such as these reflect the fact that socialis­ ation in school involves learning the rules and norms of the school and classroom interaction in which the teacher has an undisputable dominant role in issuing pattern-like instructions and students are expected to provide pattern-like answers. There is no unexpected behaviour in the excerpt; thus integration, generally speaking, appears to have been accomplished. As regards the double task of the curriculum to both reform and maintain traditions, it seems that the maintenance function receives more support in classroom practice. As mentioned above, these practices seem to indicate the traditional pedagogical culture of language teaching, which emphasises teacher-centred information transmission models rather than pedagogical cultures with an emphasis on learning as a cognitive and social process. This is shown by the importance placed throughout the extract on linguistic competence, by the central role accorded to the textbook and exercise book in teaching Swedish, and the preference for disconnected types of activities, such as completing sentences with single words or producing single sentences as responses to the teacher’s questions (cf. Butzkamm & Caldwell, 2009; Kaufman, 2004; Luukka et al., 2008). The following extract serves as an illustration of both the prevalence of teacher talk and control (in line with other observations on language classrooms in Finland, e.g. Nikula, 2005) as well as the teacher guiding students towards a specific

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correct answer that should be shared by all and that is to be found in the materials (cf. line 40 did you get it the same way (.) you can check here). 09

här e Göteborg. (.) så hur åkte Micke till (.) ti Åland nu e han på Åland. here is Göteborg (.) so how did Micke travel to (.) to Åland now he is in Åland 10 men hur åkte han dit. ni får lyssna ja pausar (.) de blir but how did he travel there. you will listen I will pause (.) it will be 11 några pauser här jag pauserar några gång a couple of pauses here I will pause a couple of times 12 Girl: mm 13 Teacher: ee okej? (.) tulee vaan yhteen kertaan pienet paussit ee ok? (.) there’ll be short pauses only once 14–39 ((The class listens to the example; there are short pauses already integrated in the listening text but the teacher also pauses the text by himself a couple of times; after the listening he goes to a couple of pupils to see and ask how it was. One says in Finnish ‘I didn’t know how to do it’; many seem to have got the answers.)) 40 Teacher: är det lätt..joo. gott. fick ni på samma sätt. ni kan kolla här. was it easy. yeah. good. did you get it the same way. you can check here. 41 först, ni går till Borås. first, you go to Borås. From a curriculum policy point of view, the data extract in its entirety suggests that practitioners continue to adhere to traditional pedagogical practices in the language classroom – that the public pedagogical and educational goals of inclusion, empowerment of students, constructing knowledge and diverse working modes, and progressive educational policy goals as represented in language curricula, policies and political documents do not necessarily bear much weight in micro-level pedagogical practices (Egbo, 2005; Ramanathan, 2002). This resonates with the argument that pedagogical cultures with power relations and pedagogical practices seem to change more slowly than does educational policy (see e.g. Fullan, 2003; Shepard, 2000). There may be a number of reasons for teachers not seeing themselves as agents but rather as mere recipients, without power to transform practices. They may also find it more important to maintain order and discipline than to experiment with and provide new methods, and they may simply not

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find policy accessible, due to lack of communication between policy-makers and practitioners. According to Bernstein (1996), pedagogic discourse which marks the social relationship between teacher and learner constructs not only the knowledge and skills to be acquired but also the specific social identities and orientations to meaning for learners. And, after all, the focus in pedagogic discourse is on what teachers need to teach and what learners have yet to learn rather than on what they know already. Further, classrooms operate with clear rules about behaviour and presentation, while awareness of the situated nature of learning, teaching and institutional context will not be of interest to learners. This observation is also supported by several previous studies (e.g. Luukka et al., 2008; Pohjola, 2011; Saario, 2012).

Penetrating materiality of classroom interaction As mentioned above, the core curriculum is implemented by local authorities and each school can draw up its own curriculum, based on both the national core curriculum and the municipal document. In other words, there is a culture of trust in Finland on teachers’ and headmasters’ pro­fessionalism in judging what is best for students, which also shows in the fact that, in contrast to many other Western countries, Finland has not adopted a strong version of consequential accountability, with national testing, and schools’ standards are relatively open to local flexibility and diversity, with a strong emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy con­current with wide-ranging education for all (Kupiainen et al., 2009; Tarnanen & Huhta, 2008). Furthermore, Finnish teachers appear to be exceptionally free to make choices regarding teaching practices and materials. However, paradoxically, the first and only national standardised test, the matriculation examination that takes place at the end of general upper secondary level, seems to have a wash-back effect on that freedom of choice. The influence of the matriculation examination, as of any large-scale test, can be negative (or positive) on teaching – including the selection of teaching materials – and learning (cf. Spratt, 2005), not only at upper secondary level but even at lower secondary level. The stances teachers have towards the matriculation examination vary. Those who are against the examination think it prevents development in teaching. They also point to the contradiction between the learning theory included in the curriculum and the effects of the matriculation examination on pedagogical practices (Häivälä, 2009). It thus seems that while there is, in principle, a great deal of flexibility and diversity offered by the Finnish curriculum system, the practices, discourses and cultures at the level of classroom interaction are remarkably

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persistent and unchangeable, no doubt partly due to this influence of the matriculation examination. The unchangeable nature of practices is shown especially in the use of textbooks: these seem to be kind of a nexus or obligatory passage point (Callon, 1986) to which all the actions can be traced. The textbook as a nexus brings forth controversies between different policy levels. On the one hand, the curriculum gives teachers freedom, for example to make use of whatever material they see as relevant, and also suggests creativity and diversity in working practices, advising teachers to take into account the differences in pupils’ abilities and backgrounds (Vitikka, 2010). On the other hand, however, teachers do not seem to take this power offered to them but trust in the textbooks and other material as the ‘authority’ in the learning situation and space. The unquestionable key role of textbooks in governing activities in Finnish language classrooms has been referred to in previous studies (e.g. Luukka et al., 2008; Pitkänen-Huhta, 2003) and the data under scrutiny here form no exception. The following excerpt illu­strates how classroom talk in our data extract depends on textbooks (realised as reference to a specific page in the workbook, line 3) and other materials that mediate learning (realised as a pointing gesture towards the overhead): 03 vi gör det så ska ni slå upp sida ett hundra femti nie arbetsboken we’ll do so that you will turn to page one hundred fifty-nine in the workbook 04 [sida etthundrafemtinie [page one hundred fifty-nine [((Writes down the number on the blackboard.)) 05 arbetsboken. (.) Micke åkte (.) Åland å nu får ni skriva eller rita in the workbook (.) Micke travelled (.) to Åland and now you may write or draw 06 [hur åkte han dit (.) hur åkte Micke [how did he travel there (.) how did Micke travel [((Points to the overhead.)) The power of textbooks reaches every aspect of classroom interaction: it also very much models what knowing a language means. For instance, in our data extract tasks and exercises of ‘completing sentences’ highlight the importance accorded to vocabulary and formal skills (like inflection), and the importance of materials, which has important implications for how language gets constructed and conceptualised in classrooms. This is illu­ strated by the following extract where the teacher both insists that pupils find the instruction in the materials (line 84) and invites them to ‘fill in’ gaps in the sentences written on the overhead (line 90, 92).

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82 Boy: [mitä (.) mitä on suomeks mitä pitää tehdä [what (.) what is it in Finnish that should be done 84 Teacher: de står där it is said there ((Refers to the overhead projector.)) 85 Boy: no mut suomeks yea but in Finnish 86 (.) 87 Teacher: står här på finska it is here in Finnish ((Taps on the overhead picture.)) 88 Teacher: ser du inte Panu don’t you see Panu ((the name of the pupil)) 89 Panu: (n)ej ((Shakes his head a little.)) no 90 Teacher: fyll i fill in 91 Pupils: (heh) (heh= ((Shared silent laughter.)) 92 Teacher: täydennä puhuttua(h). de står på finska. jovisst. complete what’s been spoken. it is in Finnish. yes it is. 93 Teacher: okej. nummer ett. okay. number one. However, the extract also suggests that the teacher is adhering to the core curriculum and its objective to help pupils understand everyday text and talk by keeping to the target language Swedish even when a pupil switches into Finnish (lines 84, 87–88) – he thus seems to invest in the flow of communication rather than insisting that the pupils use the target language. His keeping to Swedish also indexes more general educational discourses that see the consistent use of the target language as an ideal for language education (e.g. Chambers, 1991). Various policies can thus be implied simultaneously, which highlights the rhizomatic relationship between macro-level policies and micro-level practices that we have brought out above. A further observation is that, in addition to grammar, the emphasis in our data extract lies specifically on listening and reading, that is, receptive skills in Swedish: 10 Teacher: 11 12 Girl: 13 Teacher:

men hur åkte han dit. ni får lyssna ja pausar (.) de blir but how did he travel there. you will listen I will pause (.) it will be några pauser här jag pauserar några gång a couple of pauses here I will pause a couple of times mm ee okej? (.) tulee vaan yhteen kertaan pienet paussit ee ok? (.) there’ll be short pauses only once

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Such emphasis on receptive skills is in line with the national core curriculum for teaching Swedish as far as the reference to ‘understanding text and talk related to everyday activities supported by the context’ is concerned (National Board of Education, 2004: 123), even though a case could be made for a potential mismatch between whether contextual information is to be understood in more social terms, as reference to social situations to be practised (curriculum), or in more textual terms, as reference to textbooks as the context (classroom practices). A tenser relationship between policy-in-curriculum and policy-in-­practice governs the kinds of opportunities there are for students to practise oral skills, related to either materials or some meaningful function of language use for the students themselves. According to the core curriculum, the main objective for teaching Swedish at lower secondary level is for students to attain ‘the basic skills in Swedish based on oral interaction’ and ‘the skill to communicate in Swedish in ordinary everyday situations’ (National Board of Education, 2004: 126). However, as shown above, the classroom practices illustrated in our extract rely heavily on students producing bits and pieces of language, often in order to ‘complete’ or ‘fill in’ a sentence. In other words, despite the oral production of such items by students, the reference point is in the forms of written language rather than in language as a means of oral communication. Such an orientation to language as a repository of itemised bits and pieces probably reflects language classroom practices more generally as well, which suggests that the historical bodies of Finns as language learners – through the processes of socialisation into schooling no doubt – tend to be oriented to genres and discourses relating to exercises, examinations and the ‘correct’ answers (Palviainen, 2012: 15–18, 25, 29–31). Another consequence of the strong hold of materials is a division of labour between the mother tongue and target language, where the former is used to accomplish social actions while the latter largely remains the property of the materials; thus, the aim stated in the core curriculum that students learn to communicate in Swedish (National Board of Education, 2004: 119) is not really met at the level of classroom realities, suggesting a tension between macro-level policies and local practices. While it can be argued that the use of the mother tongue may have positive effects on, for example, the construction of scaffolded assistance and collaborative dialogue and so provide opportunities for language acquisition, the negative consequences include scarce opportunities for target language intake and communication in the target language (Carless, 2008; Swain & Lapkin, 2000). In the following extract, two boys are engaged in meaning negotiation with the teacher but do so entirely in Finnish, with Swedish remaining

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bound to the textual material whose meaning is talked about but not put to use by the boys: miten se sano Uppsala. how come he said Uppsala. ((A city mentioned but not on the route.)) 52 Teacher: joo. Miks se Uppsala sano. yea. Why did he say Uppsala. 53 Boy 2: se sano myös Malmö. He also said Malmö. ((Another city mentioned but not on the route.)) 54 Teacher: åå-å. yea. 55 Boy 3: et se on käyny siellä. that he’s visited it. 56 Teacher: miks just Malmö. but why specifically Malmö. 57 Girl: sen veli tuli sielt. his brother came from there. ((Raises his hand and answers at the same time.))

51 Boy 1:

Such prevalence of the mother tongue has also been observed in previous studies. These include the study by Nikula (2005) on students’ preference for Finnish in interpersonally involved dialogues in an EFL classroom, and Pörn and Norrman’s study (2011) of teachers of Finnish for Swedish-speaking students using mainly their mother tongue (Swedish) in the classroom. In the latter, teachers were worried about being able to speak fully accurate Finnish and hence might feel more secure in relying on teacher-led teaching and using mainly their mother tongue in a second-language classroom. Furthermore, textbook production constitutes a market of its own, with competition between publishers and their textbook series. In that sense, the ‘textbook panopticon’ is not only a curriculum question but also a question of economic power structures. Our classroom situation analysis shows, however, that education does not only integrate pupils into the values of equality and democracy – the explicitly stated goals of education according to legislation and the curriculum – but also into hierarchies and particular implicit and explicit power structures. As an overall conclusion to this section, it can be argued that the teaching materials have an all-encompassing role in regulating what is happening in the Swedish classroom, their influence thus penetrating the entire discursive space. It is the nexus for all the other practices: the central role of

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the teacher as the gatekeeper of the use of the materials and the general ‘correct answer’ culture or policy. The teacher-led use of the textbook is thus something of a reversed panopticon (Foucault, 1977). While the design of prisons or schools enables the guard or teacher to be positioned in a way that makes it possible for the controller to see everyone at all times, the textbook works in a reverse way: everyone in the classroom is compelled to see it at all times and consequently be controlled by it. In other words, the textbook very much controls and governs the classroom situation.

Defamiliarising Swedish into a ‘Foreign’ language Above, we have discussed the role of Swedish as a subject in Finnish schools and also touched upon the historical background of societal bilingualism in Finland. The position of Swedish as the second domestic or ‘national’ language is made visible in the core curriculum, where the general objectives for teaching Swedish as the second domestic language are formulated as follows: Swedish language teaching should provide learners’ readiness for interaction and cooperation with the Swedish-speaking population of our country and for Nordic cooperation. The task of teaching is to make students accustomed to using their language skills and to educate them to value Finland’s bilingualism and the Nordic way of life. (National Board of Education, 2004: 118) This broad overall framing seems to indicate that teaching Swedish is geared towards values such as appreciating and promoting bilingualism in Finland. This type of a construction is very much in line with the legislative and parliamentary constructions of the Finnish constitutional bilingualism (see Chapter 2). At the same time, the way the curriculum depicts the more detailed aims set for teaching Swedish as regards language skills, cultural skills, types of learning strategies and central content matter to be acquired is very similar to the way these are described for ‘foreign languages’ in the curriculum. In other words, the meanings associated with Swedish vacillate between that of a domestic language that school children ought to learn to value and a foreign language that they should learn in ways similar to (other) foreign languages. Against this background, it is interesting to observe how, of the two available discourses relating to Swedish, it seems to be the latter – Swedish as a foreign language – that gets recycled in the classroom extract. More specifically, this relates to a sense of ‘defamiliarisation’ of the Swedish

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language. Firstly, this is evidenced by the classroom setting itself, where a map of Sweden and Swedish flags pinned on the walls clearly position the language in Sweden rather than in Finland. Secondly, that the topic under discussion concerns the Åland Islands locates Swedish in a geographical space that is outside the lived reality for most Finnish school children and hence probably as ‘foreign’ for them as Sweden. The Åland Islands form an autonomous and demilitarised territory of Finland in the archipelago between Finland and Sweden, and, unlike the rest of the country, it is recognised as monolingually Swedish by the Constitution. The status of the Åland Islands has been a topic of some controversy ever since Finnish independence, as the League of Nations finally settled in 1921 that the Islands were to become a part of Finland instead of Sweden. Based on the demographics of the Islands and their strategic position in the Baltic Sea, however, they were given a particular position in the Finnish Constitution not only in regard to language but also as a demilitarised and largely autonomous region in several administrative sectors. Analysis of classroom interaction as policy inevitably requires a focus on the topics. Nikula (2005, 2007), in her comparison of EFL and content-based, so called CLIL classrooms, has pointed out that talk in the former tends to be interpersonally detached, as it tends to deal with characters in books rather than the immediate here-and-now of the social situation or the participants’ lived experiences, reducing the sense of personal investment. The same applies to our classroom extract, where pupils talk about the imagined character ‘Micke’ and how he travelled from Göteborg to the Åland Islands. This is in contradiction with what is suggested in the core curriculum about the importance of drawing on students’ personal experiences. 01 Teacher: 02 03 04 05

nu har ni läst hoppas jag (.) .mt eh om Micke? alltså de now you have I hope read (.) eh about Micke? thus it va text åtta. Så ni får läsa mera om Åland men innan was text eight. So you’ll read more about Åland but before vi gör det så ska ni slå upp sida ett hundra femti nie arbets­ boken we do that will you turn to the page one hundred and fifty-nine in the workbook [sida etthundrafemtinie [page one hundred and fifty-nine [((Writes down the number on the blackboard.)) arbetsboken. (.) Micke åkte (.) Åland å nu får ni skriva eller rita in the workbook (.) Micke travelled (.) Åland and now you may write or draw

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06 07 Teacher:

[hur åkte han dit (.) hur åkte Micke [how did he travel there (.) how did Micke travel [((Points at the overhead.)) ni kommer ihåg Micke bor ju i Göteborg you remember Micke lives in Gothenburg

Furthermore, the focus on the Åland Islands from the vantage point of Sweden (‘Micke’ travels from Göteborg, Sweden, to the Islands – see lines 7–9) steers pupils away from the curriculum aim of learning to value bi­ lingualism in Finland, but does align with the aim of familiarising students with the Nordic way of life more generally. Depicting Swedish in the context of Sweden and the only fully Swedish-speaking area of Finland, the Åland Islands, is thus implicitly emphasising and constructing their ‘foreignness’. If we return to the purposes of education and in particular to the function of socialising students into societies and their belief systems, it is interesting how this extract can be interpreted as depicting an attempt to socialise Finnish students into perceiving the Åland Islands, and the Swedish language, as ‘foreign’ rather than an essential ingredient of the Finnish way of life. This is particularly illuminating considering the everyday presence of Swedish as the second domestic language in the Helsinki region, where the seventh-grade students observed came from. Defamiliarising Swedish and the Åland Islands as ‘foreign’ works, in other words, as a ‘hidden curriculum’, as conceptualised by Broady (1986). That Swedish becomes constructed as a ‘foreign’ rather than ‘domestic’ language is a tell-tale sign of the relationship between the two language groups in Finland: bilingualism at societal level is seldom realised at individual level, and the lack of contact with Swedish renders it de facto a foreign language as far as its learning is concerned (see also Salo, 2012). Interestingly, to language ideological debates outside the classrooms an opposite orientation seems to apply; Swedish is not foreign – or at least not international – enough. In internet discussions analysed by Ihalainen et al. (2011), participants argue against Swedish teaching because it is the national language ‘only’ in Sweden and for a small fraction of Finns, and one which cannot be made use of ‘in Europe’ and beyond. This, combined with Finns’ apparent lack of self-esteem with regard to their skills in the Swedish language as indexed by the discussants’ contributions (Ihalainen et al., 2011: 33), paints a rather dreary picture of Finns’ historical bodies as users and learners of Swedish, which may be an explanatory factor for practices – in classrooms and elsewhere – that defamiliarise Swedish to a foreign language rather than highlight its domesticity. This defamiliarisation of Sweden is possibly supported by the fact that school children in Finland are not very

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familiar with Swedish history, as only one in four pupils learn the early modern history of Sweden, the time when Finland was part of it, at the general upper secondary level (Ihalainen et al., 2011; van den Berg, 2007). It might also be that the defamiliarisation of the Swedish language has purely economic, material motivations. Palviainen has shown that the frequency of the use of Swedish and thus the ability to use – or at least a chance to hear – Swedish has a strong influence on the attitudes pupils have towards studying the language (Palviainen, 2012: 20). Consequently, pupils’ attitudes towards and opportunities to use Swedish differ dramatically between different parts of Finland. But ‘alienating’ Swedish and making it a foreign language – also in the areas where Swedish is spoken and heard – or ‘the language of the Åland Islands’, could serve the purpose of making the same textbook and other teaching materials usable for pupils in the whole country. Also, in our case example, originating from the capital area in Finland that is one of the centres – or indeed the main centre – of the Swedish-speaking communities, the language is not presented as something familiar, close to the pupils and something they could start using straight away or at least make observations of, but as something that belongs to Sweden or, at the very nearest, to the Åland Islands.

Conclusions: Language education as policy In this chapter, we have shown that even a short snippet of classroom interaction can serve as a nexus that indexes not only contextual factors of the situation itself but also policies, discourses and traditions extending both spatially and temporally beyond the classroom walls. The classroom extract has been shown to reflect and affect, for instance, curricula, course books, pedagogical cultures, teacher professions and institutions, these in turn linking with other policies, discourses and traditions and resulting in a web of interconnected instances of policies in action, or a system of continuously connected and reconnected rhizomes (Honan, 2004). In particular, questions of curriculum, classroom materials and the position of Swedish construed as ‘foreign’ emerged from our data excerpt. Thus, we have made visible multi-sited policy trajectories in the exchanges between the teacher and students and in the material artefacts mediating the interchange. The classroom is hence always a meeting point for a wide range of influences from various other policy levels as shown in Figure 9.1. It shows our wider understanding of the whole network of relations between agencies, time, space and (policy) actions, with the ones we have focused on in this chapter highlighted in grey.

A Swedish Lesson as a Nexus for Multi-sited Language Education Policies  239

Figure 9.1  Situated classroom interaction as a nexus of language education policy

The national core curriculum for basic education has multiple meanings and tasks as a political, educational and instructional document. Despite the teachers’ professional autonomy and latitude, it is an important document as it defines the common guidelines along which all municipalities and schools have to organise their work. However, there are ideological, economic, social and cultural effects throughout the process of implementing the curriculum at national, local and particularly classroom levels. Thus, it is interesting to observe that the micro-level practices we have witnessed in our data extract do not seem to take into account pupils’ diverse learning styles, individual needs and abilities or interests on a broader spectrum, as the spirit (and the letter) of the core curriculum would suggest. While the explicit aim of the educational system is to promote learners’ agency, the power relations and hierarchies in the classroom do not seem to support this goal. While the national core curriculum (2004) and its amendments (2010) include the general ethos of highlighting student empowerment and participation and of calling for more student-centred approaches (Luukka et al., 2008; Pohjola, 2011), our data excerpt supports the observation (e.g.

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Alexander, 2008; Leiwo et al., 1987; Nikula, 2005) that the opportunities for student participation in fact remain quite restricted and highly regulated by the teacher. The prevalence of form-focused practices suggests policiesin-action putting emphasis on learners’ linguistic rather than social or interactional competence: language becomes constituted, first and foremost, of entities such as ‘words’ and ‘sentences’. This also contributes to these being constructed as the proper objects of learning and illustrates the crucial role of textbooks in classrooms, shown also in previous studies done in the Finnish school context (e.g. Luukka et al., 2008; Pitkänen-Huhta, 2003). These observations tally also with earlier studies that have made observations about teachers’ adherence to traditional pedagogical practices in the language classroom (Corson, 2001; Kaufman, 2004; Luukka et al., 2008). We have shown above that the practices in the classroom observed include features that are typical of foreign language classrooms in general, that is, the status of Swedish as a domestic language does not seem to bear on classroom practices. On the contrary, Swedish is mostly constructed as ‘foreign’. This may reflect the wish to leave schools outside the political debates about the status of Swedish in Finland, by treating it as a foreign language among other languages. In the socio-historical context of Finland, however, keeping Swedish at arm’s length may also be a way to protect and assert the language identity of Finnish-speaking Finns and carry on construing a specific national identity in a 19th-century sense. Alternatively, assigning Swedish a foreign language status in classrooms and teaching materials by locating it mainly outside the borders of Finland may also be a way to make it more exotic and thus increase its attractiveness for students. It must also be acknowledged that as the areas with a Swedish-speaking population are mainly located in the southern and coastal areas of the country, there are regions in Finland where, if measured by everyday contacts and with opportunities to use the language, Swedish remains practically a foreign language. A comparison with Russian would be interesting, as the visibility of Russian in Finland has increased in many areas over recent years, due to tourism and immigration (cf. Chapter 4). Finally, the nature of teaching materials and pedagogical practices may also reflect the ethos of equality in Finnish education in ensuring that, regardless of their place of residence, pupils are offered similar instruction. An important observation concerning the traditional pedagogical practices is the inherent power asymmetry between teacher and students, brought on by the institutional setting of classrooms. Teachers hence have the power to orchestrate classrooms and the responsibility to transmit the values and norms of the institution. This in-built power hierarchy between

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teacher and students as regards their interactional rights and obligations was clearly visible also in our extract as the instructional cycle (I-R-F: initiation, response, follow-up; Saario, 2012; Sinclair & Brazil, 1982) where the teacher asks questions, pupils answer them and the teacher evaluates the answers. This micro-political relationship is framed not only by interactional asymmetries but also by the physical structures of classrooms, including the positioning of teachers and pupils, as well as the construction of classroom furniture, as described by Hornberger and Johnson (2007). The strong focus on the textbook can also be seen in terms of power structures, as the teacher controls the use of the textbook to control the pupils. In making visible the multilayered links between language education policy and classroom practices, we have proceeded towards problematising the classic gap between ‘policy words’ and ‘policy deeds’, showing the material actions that the macro-level policy discourses on, for instance, curriculum produce in educational interaction. Moreover, a simple classroom example allows for a historical view on the matter, as it indexes policy instances as they provide a scene for the historical trajectories to emerge (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). Even within the wider frame for our foci (Figure 9.1), our study depicts only a pale and incomplete abstraction of the whole network of various actions, documents, practices and individuals affecting each other and coming together in a classroom situation. Thus, from a methodological point of view, the chapter leaves open several possibilities for deepening both vertical and horizontal aspects of multi-sitedness. The time scales and trajectories (Blommaert, 2010) can be short in terms of the length of a turn, or life-long in terms of pedagogical cultures. The approach adopted in our study also allows for an understanding of ‘the reality’ not as something that disturbs policy implementation but as a central element of that policy.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Professor Hanna Lehti-Eklund for the data. Part of this chapter is based on an Academy of Finland project no. 138287.

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Part 4 Epilogue

10 Epilogue: Multi-sited language policies – Where have We come from and where To from here in language policy? Muiris Ó Laoire

The chapters in the present volume have raised important theoretical questions aimed at achieving a holistic understanding of language policy, involving past and present merged into the concept of the multi-sited, referring both to the temporal and spatial aspects of language policy discourse. Although confined empirically to considerations of situations in Finland and Sweden, the volume in its theoretical contributions extends far beyond these locations. The polities of Finland and Sweden are the microcosm or the lens through which a new and much needed understanding of language policy research is posited. On a first reading, my thinking was as follows: there is both an opportunity and challenge in the chapters to understand policy through a new lens, that is, the idea of policy as multi-sited, through an analysis of discourses, conceived as spatial and evolving. This is an aspect of policy that has not been elucidated in language policy research to any extent to date, and the strength and contribution of the volume is the testing of this theoretical hypothesis (policy is multi-sited) in interdisciplinary accounts of historical and contemporary language developments in Finland and Sweden. Research on language ideologies and research on language policies and practices have more or less merged in recent years, and the divisions that were once accentuated between them in terms of the application of ideals in practice are less obvious now. The concept of policy as multi-sited, developed in this volume, not only posits a necessarily complex relation 247

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between ideologies and policies, particularly when viewed from the perspective of the ‘superdiverse’, but it also affords an alternative glimpse into the effusive nature of policy. The challenge that this volume poses in putting a new understanding of policy on the agenda is clear. It is true to state that there has been an un­ warranted dichotomy between the past and the present in language policy. Policy has been formulated with a corrective reference to the past in the hope of ensuring an improved situation in the future. The typical discourse is: ‘This has happened in the past … so we need a policy to correct things and move on’. Policies are thus seen to be more about correcting the faults of the past than about moving towards the future. This is typical of the policy implementation research and reform-centredness of earlier decades in other policy fields as well. The rupture with the past is intentionally secured and is meant, perhaps, to be absolute. The chapters in this volume make us stop in and consider policy again, this time as a phenomenon in constant dialogue with past and present. Policies to address increasing cultural diversity are constantly being called for. Diversity in this context tends to be viewed as a new phenomenon. The chapters in this volume lead us to question, for example, whether diversity has actually always been there, but whether our awareness of it has increased only in this era of superdiversity. Reading through some of the chapters that chart the historical evolutions of language developments through diversified modes of interactions, legislation and changes, this is an idea that needs to be developed in future conceptualisations of language policy.

Contextualising this volume As well as exploring these points in more depth later, this chapter, acting as an epilogue, apart from commenting on the significance of the volume, also attempts to contextualise the studies it contains against the background of the general language policy research literature. The dis­ cussion here revolves around the emergence of this volume at a critical time for language policy and language policy research. In order to illustrate this, two established approaches to language policy are discussed briefly here: the classical approach and critical perspectives. Tracing language policy as a nascent area of study in its own right and using critical theory to scrutinise the thinking and theories inherent in the discipline show up policy as being more than the yardstick against which success or the lack of success in effecting change can be measured. The more critical approach which constitutes the theoretical underpinnings of this volume illuminates policy as an iterative and reiterative dynamic ensuring

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that power is negotiated and renegotiated. The work of Ricento (2006), Pennycook (2006), Tollefson (2006) and McCarty (2011), among others, using the tools of critical theory, enables us to conduct an excavation of the archaeology of language policy research since its emergence as an academic discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. This is charted briefly in the next section.

The classical approach Although language policy research is interdisciplinary, it came into its own as a branch of sociolinguistics during the 1970s. In earlier decades, Western-trained linguists were involved in fieldwork developing grammars, writing systems and orthography, and dictionaries for indigenous languages in Africa, Asia and South America. Much of this work had a language planning (particularly a corpus planning) focus. Ricento (2006: 13) states: the activities of many sociolinguists were understood [by them] as beneficial to nation building and national unification – the discussion of which language [i.e. colonial or indigenous] would best serve these interests was often based on which language would provide access to advanced, that is, Western technological and economic assistance. A corollary of this ongoing work was the development of a stable diglossia, with a major European language used for formal and specialised domains and with local languages used to serve less formal functions. The end result was, of course, the elevation of the former colonial language as the language of power, status and prestige in national, political and elite educational sectors. We could conclude, therefore, that language policy, despite its post-colonial beginnings in earlier decades, became, albeit un­ wittingly, associated with bolstering the powerful and dominant languages at the expense of local indigenous languages.

Critical perspectives In the 1980s and 1990s, language planning and policy were beginning to be criticised from critical sociolinguistic perspectives. Having developed its original thinking and methodologies in post-colonial contexts, language policy was accused of serving the interests and agendas of the dominant elites, of perpetuating the interests and agendas and discourse of the powerful and the former colonial powers. The role that language policy played in the reproduction of social and economic inequality was being questioned and the imbalance of power relations that it effected was being elucidated by critical theorists. Even terms like ‘mother tongue’, ‘standardis­ ation’

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and ‘linguistic competence’ – the hallmarks of the typical language policy document – were now being questioned. There was a broad calling into question of received ideas about language, language learning, language and local economic interests – with a move from positivistic to a more critical epistemological orientation. Tollefson states that during the 1980s and 1990s there was new departure in the discipline; a branching occurred between mainstream sociolinguistic research that dealt with language shift in language contact situations (using data interviews and ethnographic analysis) and critical approaches where language shift is understood not as an incidental and natural outcome of language contact but rather as an illustration of asymmetrical power relations based on social situations that position groups (Tollefson, 2006: 42–49). Rather than concerns with language per se, the emphasis shifted to discourse and discourse analysis, which views language as social interaction, and is concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded. This shift of emphasis from positivistic enquiry to analysis of discourse occurred at a time when language policy came under a stronger focus, as it tried to respond more fully to, and engage with, contingent contemporary sociopolitical realities. A similar trend can be found in historical research, though not to the same extent. Within language education policies, for example, new issues and questions were being raised in the 1990s that re-echoed and reverberated the criticisms being levelled at language policy. Even in the field of politics of language, more self-critical approaches were beginning to emerge at the beginning of the new century. Alderson (2009) was beginning to speak about a language politics with a small p, including not only institutional politics but personal politics, the motivations of actors themselves and their agendas, showing how personal politics at the micro level can influence day-to-day politics for innovation and change.

Agency: Policy as peopled Critical theory also provided new perspectives on the importance of agency in understanding the need to shift the paradigms in language policy in education research and practice. Baldauf (2008) reminds us that the issue of agency has traditionally not been investigated or regarded as important in language policy. The reason for this quite simply is that it was assumed that language policy was always carried out by central agents who made decisions that were in the best interests of the state. Who they were was of little interest, provided they had the required expertise. In fact, this tendency to overlook the crucial issue of agency appears to have been endemic in all areas of social policy until recently. In higher

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education policy, for instance, structural explanations have dominated the field at the expense of actor, agency or discursive approaches (see e.g. Saarinen & Ursin, 2012). Policy analysis has been dominated by a rational planning model of decision-making that assumes a linear sequence of stages: identify the problem, formulate goals, compare costs and benefits of alternative solutions, select the optimal solution, and implement it. Such a technocratic approach has inevitably led to much disappointment, many have argued, because implementation is perceived as an administrative process, devoid of values (Hajer & Wagenaar, 2003), interests or emotion (Wagenaar & Cook, 2003). The blame for implementation failure has frequently been placed on a perceived gap between policy and practice (Ball, 1997). Typically, policy studies have considered people only as either those who have policy done to them or as shadowy resistors who contribute to this gap (Ball, 1997). This has been the orientation of policy studies across the board, from education to environment, to poverty and development, and including language policy (Shohamy, 2006). On the other hand, a strong tradition to study politics as a conceptually contested, discursive process exists within political science and historical research at universities such as Jyväskylä. Until this volume, these different lines of research have not come together. A key recent shift in policy studies internationally has been to understand the policy process itself as peopled. Ball (1997), for example, draws attention to the importance of both human agency and context. He suggests that policies are ‘awkward, incomplete, incoherent and unstable’, and that ‘local conditions, resources, histories and commitments will differ and that policy realisation will differ accordingly’ (Ball, 1997: 265). He draws attention to how people at different levels of policy formation and implementation are active, indeed are compelled to be creative, in interpreting how to implement policy, not least because operationalisation in each specific context must respond to local circumstances. Everyday problems require localised decisions regarding how the people who implement policy should ‘consider the other things they are expected or required to take seriously and which compete for attention, effort and resources in the complexities of practice’ (Ball, 1997: 265). The issue of agency has become a very important one, particularly in micro contexts; for example, teachers are seen as central agents in language policy development at this micro/local level (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). Baldauf aptly points out (2008: 25–26) that: The fundamental planning is conceptualised and carried out at the macro level with the local taking an implementation role. This is the traditional top-down approach where language policy decisions are

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implemented via good professional development models. By contrast micro planning refers to cases where businesses, institutions, groups or individuals hold agency and create what can be recognised as a language policy and plan to utilise and develop their language resources; one that is not directly the result of some larger macro policy, but is a response to their own needs, their own ‘language problems’, their own requirement for language management.

Ethnographic approaches It is not surprising, therefore, that language policy research is deploying and moving more towards ethnographic approaches. Ethnographically oriented language research (e.g. the pioneering works of Blommaert, Creese, Gal and Heller mentioned in this volume) provides a multidimensional and holistic view of language policy and includes an emphasis on agency in the micro interacting with and in the macro. This work, however, is in its infancy and is only very recently emerging specifically in language policy research (e.g. McCarty, 2011). The need is ever apparent to build on discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2006) and to understand the construction of social meaning in the interface of policy participants and locality (Canagarajah, 2005; Pennycook, 2010; Ramanathan, 2005). A recent collection of studies edited by McCarty (2011), referred to above, unambiguously joins language policy research and ethnographic methods and analysis. This volume exemplifies an important milestone in language policy research, illustrating enquiry into how indi­ viduals as agents make and live through policy, emphasising human interaction, negotiation and power relations. The importance of the current volume, therefore, is that it follows strongly in that tradition, but also breaks into new frontiers. It is apposite in that it brings new and fresh perspectives to bear on language policy and on the methodologies used to analyse policy. How the volume achieves this is discussed in the sections that follow.

New findings from revising conceptualisations of policy The idea of policy existing in the natural intersections of past and present is refreshingly novel in language policy research and has potential for new exploration and fresh illumination. The chapters in this volume conceptualise policy as both a subject and an object of time, that is, one that

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has its roots and essence in past and present (diachronic and synchronic) discourses on policy, moving constantly in a backwards and forwards flux. This is the very kernel of the theory of multi-sitedness which underpins the case studies and research the volume comprises. Traditional and official thinking and thereby discourse on policy may have restricted it to a single site at any one time, for example a policy declaration or text or government act. An expanded view of policy was put forward by Spolsky (2004) to include ideological, behavioural and the management dimensions, and more critical approaches have broadened its definition to include agency, process and complex social processes, as outlined above. Even though the essential notion of multiplicity was introduced in language policy, there may have been a lingering tendency in discourse to approach and present policy as still belonging to, or always existing at, only one and within one single site. There were a number of discourses around the language policy of the Official Languages Act (OLA) in Ireland in 2003, for example (see Georgiou et al., 2010; Ó Laoire et al., 2011), from the discourse of lobbying and getting legislation on the political agenda to the drafting of the policy text, to discourses surrounding its implementation. But these discourses, when examined through the lens of multi-sited discourse, will show that the discourse around the OLA did not begin in any one particular time. As they emerged and developed, significantly, they had a continuous presence of experiences, remembrances and constructions of the past also present in them. This brings to policy research on the OLA, for example, an increasing awareness of older discourse and a mergence with them: for example, the civil rights discourse of the 1960s, legal judgements discourse (1983 and 1988) and the discursive strategies of a new government in 1977. There are many examples of such elucidation in the case studies that comprise this volume. Ihalainen and Saarinen, for example, focusing on the contemporary situation in Finland and Sweden (Chapter 2), analyse multisited discursive processes related to legislation and parliamentary debate on language legislation reforms in both countries. The study clearly shows how policies typically consist of multi-sited and interconnected trajectories in which the language policy actors interact with each other and with the political process itself. The debate on bilingualism in the Finnish/Swedish context is also multi-sited, as is shown in the analysis of political discourses carried out in the study by Boyd and Palviainen (Chapter 3), where arguments used historically were shown to have been recycled, modified and reframed. This study has implications for studies of language policy discourse related to bilingualism in other contexts, such as Canada, Wales, New Zealand and Ireland, where debates, if scrutinised, would, no doubt, exhibit similar kinds of recycled arguments and modified concepts of previous discussions.

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The debate on language policy scrutinised through the lens of multi-sited discourse has the potential to unearth and illuminate important dimensions of language policy that might otherwise remain hidden or obscure. It can show, for example, how radically different political and ideological agendas can be in any merger towards syncretism, as is the case in the Lähteenmäki and Pöyhönen study of the position of Russian in Finnish policy (Chapter 4). In addition, it can unmistakably show how identity can become politicised, as in the analysis of political speeches regarding the speakers of a minority language in Wickström’s study (Chapter 7). It can also illuminate the processes and trajectories of interaction between national, regional and local policies and the influence of local agents in power positions, as in the historical analysis by Kotilainen (Chapter 6), and the historical evolution of language attitudes, as Lainio’s Chapter 5. Like all ethnographical approaches, of course, this type of analysis can forcibly present and analyse the human experiences of linguistic minorities in language shift and acculturation contexts, as evident in Snellmann’s analysis of the experiences of migrant linguistic minorities (i.e. Finnish women in Sweden) (Chapter 8). Last but by no means least, it has enormous potential to contribute to our understanding of the discourse of the language classroom, as examined in Chapter 9, by Halonen, Nikula, Saarinen and Tarnanen, who adeptly and concisely analyse interaction in a language (Swedish) classroom in Finland. To conclude this section, it needs to be emphasised that while the context and polities here are Finland and Sweden, the new findings and evidence presented in these chapters call for a rethink and a reshuffle in operational concepts (e.g. language, bilingualism, ideology, identity construction) and in the way we approach and analyse language policy that will resonate with researchers and authorities in many countries. To achieve the perspectives that a multi-sited approach to discourse may bring to bear on the evolving understanding of policy calls necessarily for a review of and a change in the dominant research methodologies deployed by present and future scholars in the field, as is certainly the case in ­historical research. This is discussed briefly in the next section.

Research methods The dominant research paradigms and approaches to the study of language policy in the past – such as the quantitative survey, the qualitative interview, the analysis of legal texts and official documents needed – are in need of expansion, revision and a new perspective. As previously stated, while ethnographically oriented language research (the work of Monica Heller, Jan Blommaert, Susan Gal or Angela Creese cited frequently in this

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volume) has gone a long way to bring a more multidimensional view and approach, and while ethnographic approaches explicitly geared towards under­standing language policy have just begun to emerge (e.g. McCarty, 2011), more extensive and careful ethnographic scrutiny is called for. Such an approach is needed not only to put a more robust research tradition in place, but also, importantly, to ensure that new perspectives and disclosures reveal standpoints, views and understandings that may otherwise remain hidden and covered. Viewed from the perspective on language policy research to date, this volume makes a considerable contribution. The methodological approach underpinning the studies (comprising empirical approaches and non-­ empirical theorising) innovatively documents how various policies may become visible in one micro situation, but may not do so in another, thus making the multi-sited nature of policy empirically quantifiable. In other words, this research approach elucidates, above all else, the fact that policies typically are ‘multi-sited and interconnected historical trajectories in which the language policy actors reinforce and reformulate policies in interaction with each other and the political process’, as the editors of this volume put it in Chapter 1. In this alone, the volume makes a considerable contribution to research to date on language policy. It is equally important to stress that the research involves inter­ disciplinary approaches or interdisciplinarity. The editors in Chapter 1 comment that this involved the conbributors to this volume having ‘come out of their comfort zones in various scholarly fields and joined forces to develop language policy research and the analysis of political discourse in general on a comparative and multidisciplinary basis’. To this end, the disciplines of history and linguistics, on this occasion, coalesce and bear fruit. The Ihalainen and Saarinen study (Chapter 2) is a good example of such productive interdisciplinarity between, in this case, a historian of political discourse on the one hand and a language policy researcher on the other. The editors make a valid claim about the challenge for further research when they state: ‘The challenge of multi-sitedness may, furthermore, mean for all the involved disciplines the application of a more multidimensional view of traditional micro and macro scales’. To be in a position to achieve the perspectives on the language policy discourses such as are revealed in this volume must necessarily involve, perhaps, more and more inter­disciplinary collaboration and analysis. Such an approach not only challenges ­researchers to rethink the methodological approaches in their own fields, but it also transcends the traditional disciplinary boundaries that serve as barriers to excavating fresh insights on existing phenomena. Using the approach of interdisciplinarity inherent in these studies, as a model or exemplar, there

256 Part 4: Epilogue

are other fields as well that share an inherent interest in micro, meso and macro policies, though from quite different perspectives (e.g. social policy, health science and economics) that could partner language policy research using and exploring multi-sited policy discourse. One final comment needs to be made in the context of this book’s contribution to research methods in language education policy. This comment is in relation to language education policy. Language education policy studies, to date, have by and large confined themselves to analysis of school policy texts, curriculum and examination documents, to reports and to qualitative analysis of data elicited by key agents. There have been very few, if any, studies of the ethnography of language classroom discourse itself for the purpose of analysing language policy. The study by Halonen, Nikula, Saarinen and Tarnanen (Chapter 9) begins significantly to fill this gap. This is an innovative study of Finnish students’ first stages of learning Swedish, which undoubtedly shows a link between the micro level of inter­ actions between teachers and learners in the classroom and the macro level of state policy and state control. The analysis of classroom events and/ or momentary actions or even of a classroom event can, therefore, reveal significant insights into the intersections of the micro and macro and the multi-sitedness of language education policies. Such an approach serves as a showcase and a model to researchers of language education policies elsewhere interested in undertaking ethnographic analysis of the realities and discourses that shape the classroom experience.

Confronting dichotomies There have been many dichotomies in language policy as a discipline since its emergence in the 1970s. Not least has been the dichotomy between language policy and language planning. Originally conceived of as being the articulation of the changes needed in any speech community to effect a change or resolve a problem, language policy gradually ceded to or coalesced with language planning, conceived of as the practical implementation of that policy. In recent times, language planning and language policy are not conceived of as separate, but as being ‘mutually constitutive, interdependent, and co-occurring sociocultural processes’ (McCarthy, 2011: 9–10). There was not only a tendency, until recent times, to deliberately separate policy and planning, but other dichotomies and separations gradually emerged,such as the micro and the macro, the global and the local, the centralist and the peripheral, the act and the agency. Symmetrical theoretical binaries such as these have not reconciled differing understandings and positions. The approach and methodological hypothesis put forward in this

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volume facilitate the development of another perspective that may well achieve a more reconciliatory and holistic approach to understanding policy.

Language policy at the crossroads Language policy and language policy research have come a long way. From politicised beginnings and emergence in post-colonial and nationbuilding contexts to the study and analysis of official texts and documents, language policy research and practice have always had to work with competing ideologies, diversification and practices. From its rather linear and technocratic focus as a nascent discipline in identifying problems and formulating a policy response, it has moved through critical methodological approaches to being part of wider sociocultural practices. This has led to new interpretations of language policy being inextricably linked or coexisting with language planning rather than being separate from it. Being part of sociocultural processes and dynamics, language policy is now considered dynamic, complex and peopled. A language policy constantly interacts with a range of contexts and becomes an integral part of those micro, meso, macro, supranational and global contexts. Ethnographic approaches, as evident in this volume, capture this dynamic of interaction more fully. But other aspects of policy may yet remain elusive and impervious to empirical probing. So, where does language policy research go from here? In the 21st century, migration, internationalisation, uncertainty and globalisation are growing and are becoming more compelling phenomena in dictating the research agenda. More migration, both voluntary and enforced, for example, has led to increased multilingualism and increased internal and external displacement. Language ecologies are experiencing unprecedented change and upheaval, leading significantly to deconstruction of monolingual ideologies. With growing internationalisation and globalisation, additive bilingualism is becoming more widespread, with more and more programmes of English being offered throughout the world. Language policy will and must remain a vibrant discipline in this context of unprecedented change and a more multifaceted approach is needed. Yet, as the editors of this volume argue, globalisation is not necessarily a new phenomenon. It appears apt here to re-echo the editors’ comments: We approach multi-sitedness by starting from globalisation, which, while not a new phenomenon as such, has since the 1980s led to an increasing awareness of other phenomena that may have implications for the study of both past and present political discourse.… we can say that

258 Part 4: Epilogue

all the different chapters in this volume are about globalisation, whether the focus is on the clergymen in the 19th-century Finnish country­ side creating new spelling practices for names and at the same time developing the orthography of the Finnish language, on the activism for language rights in Sweden in the 1960s or on a Swedish-language classroom interaction in a Finnish city in the 2010s: all these examples are characterised by the existence of long and short trajectories in time and in place, tracing both backwards and forwards in time – and, in addition, to simultaneous events in other places. An analysis of policy as multi-sited supports a strengthening awareness that past experiences and agency are nearly always at hand in present policies. The micro and macro at the centre of considerations in language policy in responding to globalisation, migration and internationalisation have always existed. The chapters here show clearly that these intersections between macro and micro have been always present in history as they are in the present and alternate, shift and overlap. Further research and studies, like those reported in the present volume, are necessary at this juncture in the 21st century. The editors and their team above all else not only clearly point to the success of an ethnographic agenda in achieving a multifaceted and new approach to language policy, but they equally show the validity of interdisciplinarity in language policy research. Finally, these studies underscore the fact that both the construction and the deconstruction of language policy are complex processes, involving dialogic historical and contemporary exchanges. In light of this, researchers need to adapt their research approach when investigating language policy and language policy practices.

References Alderson, C. (2009) The Politics of Language Education: Individuals and Institutions. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Baldauf, B. (2008) Rearticulating the case for micro language planning in a language ecology context. In A. Liddicoat and R.B. Baldauf, Jr (eds) Language Planning in Local Contexts (pp. 18–45). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ball, S.J. (1997) Policy sociology and critical social research: A personal review of recent education policy and policy research. British Educational Research Journal 23, 257–274. Blommaert, J. (2006) Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canagarajah, S. (2005) Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. London: Routledge. Georgiou, V., Ó Laoire, M. and Rigg, C. (2010) Shaping language policy on the ground: The Official Languages Act (2003) in Ireland. In P. Cuvelier, T. du Plessis, M. Meeuwis, R.

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Vandekerckhove and V. Webb (eds) Multilingualism From Below (pp. 95–116). Studies in Language Policy in South Africa, vol. 8. Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers. Hajer, M.A. and Wagenaar, H. (eds) (2003) Deliberate Policy Analysis: Understanding Govern­ ance in the Network Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarty, T. (ed.) (2011) Ethnography and Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Ó Laoire, M., Rigg, C. and Georgiou, V. (2011) Subaltern agency and language education policy: Implementing a language policy on the ground. Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies 5 (3), 19–32. Pennycook, A. (2006) Postmodernism in language policy. In T. Ricento (ed.) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method (pp. 60–76). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pennycook, A. (2010) Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Ramanathan, V. (2005) Rethinking language planning and policy from the ground up. Refashioning institutional realities and human lives. Current Issues in Language Planning 6 (2) 89–101. Ricento, T. (ed.) (2006) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ricento, T. and Hornberger, N. (1996) Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 401–427. Saarinen, T. and Ursin, J. (2012) Dominant and emerging approaches in the study of higher education policy change. Studies in Higher Education 37 (2), 143–156. Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge. Spolsky, B. (2004) Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tollefson, J.W. (2006) Critical theory in language policy. In T. Ricento (ed.) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method (pp. 42–59). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wagenaar, H. and Cook, S.D.N. (2003) Understanding policy, practices, action, dialectic and deliberation in policy analysis. In M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar (eds) Deliberative Policy Analysis (pp. 139–171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index

activism 15, 65, 175, 213, 258 activist 17, 22, 53, 173–9, 181, 183, 185, 187–93, 204 actor 147, 163, 175, 176, 181, 187, 190, 208, 250–1, 253, 255 adjustment 124, 173–4, 176–7, 182–4, 200 administrative language 21, 148, 151, 166 agency 21, 148, 176, 239, 250–2, 256, 258 agrarian communities 153 Åland Islands 22, 44, 87, 229, 231, 236–8 anti-assimilation 124 assimilation 21, 122, 124–7, 136–9, 173, 184 autonomous Finland 7–8, 60, 92, 147, 153, 155, 165 Baltic empire 6 Baltic Sea 236 baptism 149, 156, 161–5, 167–8 Basic Education Act 70, 227 basic literacy 163, 230 Belgium 10, 12, 44, 61, 196 biblical name 152 bilateral affirmation 173, 193 bilingual schools 19, 20, 57, 59, 61, 64, 68–70, 73–4, 76, 79–85 bilingualism 12, 19, 30–1, 38, 40, 43–5, 51–2, 57–8, 61, 65–9, 71–3, 75, 77,

79, 81–3, 92–3, 112, 127–8, 134, 136, 179–80, 185, 193, 225, 235, 237, 253–4, 257 birth 61, 102, 106, 108, 149, 157, 159, 209, 213 bodily incidents 208 Bolsheviks 104 bottom-up 18–19, 22, 224 Britain 12 burial 161 Canada 12, 67, 102, 253 Catholic Church 6 Centre (party) 31–2, 40, 42, 44–5, 47–8, 53, 178, 181 childbirth 207–8 Christian Democrats 32, 37, 42, 53 Christian name 152, 157, 161, 163 Christian Union 31 Civil War 94 classroom interaction 15, 18, 224–5, 227–8, 230–1, 238–9, 258 classroom practices 221, 233, 240–1 clergy (also cleric) 8, 15, 17, 21, 148, 152, 154–7, 159–61, 163–6, 258 codification 104 Cold War 94, 225 collective biographical methodology 149, 167–8 colonisation 12, 104, 181 commercial college 205, 210 260

Index 261

comparative history (also historical comparison) 3, 6, 13, 29–31, 149, 167 conceptual exclusions 173 conceptual history 13–14, 188 conceptual inclusions 173 consensus, consensual 19, 31, 40, 43–7, 51–3, 82–3, 85–6, 193 Conservatives (National Coalition or Moderates) 31–2, 35, 37, 41–3, 45, 47, 49–50, 53, 74 Constitution of the Russian Federation 103 Constitutional Committee 35, 37, 41, 47, 49 constructivist view 14, 33 container 107 contextualisation (also recontextualisation) 5, 14–15, 17, 21, 59–60, 175, 225–6, 248 Continuation War 94 Council of Europe 20, 36, 40–2, 48, 50–2, 91–2, 95–102, 110–12, 129, 134–6 County of Värmland 118 Crimean war 150, 158 critical theory 148, 250 cultural choreography 198, 213 cultural core value 133 cultural heritage 43, 60, 98, 111, 119, 122, 137 cultural history 3, 6 cultural spirit 60 curriculum 124, 184–5, 221, 225–39, 241 Dagens Nyheter 138, 177 danger of Finns 122 defamiliarisation 235, 237–8 Denmark, Danish 7, 152, 154, 197 dialect 7, 95, 149, 155, 162, 164–5 diasporic communities 105, 108, 112 diet 8, 32, 153, 158 discourse cycle 59, 61, 63, 69, 86 discrimination 7, 36, 65, 97, 106, 123

discursive operationalisation 16, 34, 51, 53, 175 disparity 178–80, 183 domestic language 50, 63–4, 67, 81, 133, 138, 191, 235, 237, 240 educational history 131 egalitarianism 21, 123–4, 127, 136 elites 8–9, 46, 60–1, 90, 94, 153, 173, 193, 225–6, 249 English 5, 9, 10, 12, 30, 32, 57, 123, 125, 134, 148, 164, 171, 201, 204, 221, 228, 257 entangled history (also common, joint or shared history or historical interconnectedness) 5, 10, 20, 22, 32, 49–50, 90–5, 101, 110, 119–20, 147, 179, 221 equality 9, 49, 123, 126, 136, 184–5, 186, 188, 191, 205, 225, 227, 234, 240 eras of oppression 94, 157 Estonian(s) 111, 120, 174, 177 ethnic activist 171, 173–7, 179, 181, 183, 185, 188–91 ethnic minority 41, 65, 213 ethnography, ethnographic 3, 5, 13–14, 18, 22, 133, 182, 198, 200–1, 204, 220, 222–3, 250, 252, 254–8 ethnology, ethnological research 3, 5–6, 13, 16–17, 21–2, 198 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages 48, 95, 138 European Union 11, 50, 52, 110–11, 126, 132, 134 family disintegration 183 family history 109 fatherland 180, 190 Fennoman(s) 8–9, 60–1, 94, 149–51, 153–5, 157–60, 165–6, 178, 180 Finland Finnish 132–4 Finland Swedish 12, 49, 70, 133 Finlandisation 94 Finnish Constitution 30–1, 34–5, 39, 44, 61, 90, 111, 235–6

262 Index

Finnish government 20, 32–3, 38–41, 43–4, 95–9, 101, 110–11, 176, 189, 192–3 Finnish provinces 6–8 Finnishness 20, 91, 94, 101, 134, 158, 166–7, 172, 178, 190–1, 205 forced Swedish 50, 226 foreign language 40, 111, 126, 221–2, 225, 235, 237–8, 240 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation (FPCRF) 105, 110 Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities 41, 91, 95, 97, 99–100, 135 Francophone Canada 12, 67, 253 French 6, 11–12, 36, 70, 75, 85 fundamental rights 65 German provinces, Germany, German 6–8, 11–12, 14, 70, 75, 85, 102, 196–7 globalisation 5, 10, 11, 15, 50, 54, 65, 93, 109, 257–8 government programmes 19, 29, 31–4, 38–41, 43–5, 51 Grand Duchy of Finland 7–8, 60, 92–4, 122, 153, 158 Greece 197 Greens 31–2, 37, 40, 48–9, 53, 57, 74, 80, 85 Helsingin Sanomat 58, 73, 79 Herderian Nationalism 64, 106, 180 hidden curriculum 237 higher education 8, 11, 129, 137 historic motherland 106 historical body 5, 16–17, 20–2, 49, 59, 72, 75, 84, 151, 156, 167, 175–8, 181, 190, 198, 208–9, 212–13, 233, 237 historical contexts 31, 59–60, 117, 150–1, 240 historical discourses 20, 33, 132 historical experience 42, 51 historical minority 21, 41, 110 historical practice 19

historical pragmatics 4, 13 historical presence 116, 122, 135, 137–8 historical processes (also historical develop­ments or historical evolutions) 91, 138, 221, 248, 254 historical research (also historical analysis or historical studies) 3–6, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 30, 33, 150, 167, 250–1, 254 historical semantics 13, 16 historical trajectories 17, 19–22, 30, 51, 54, 221, 241, 255 historical turn 150 history of Finland 12, 91–5, 101, 110 history of ideas 3, 13–16 history of political cultures 8, 14, 16–17, 43, 147, 218 history of political discourse 4, 6, 13–16, 20, 30, 33, 175, 181, 188, 255 history of political thought 14, 21, 175 history of Russia 90, 107–8 history of Sweden 90, 238 history politics (also historical arguments) 4, 16, 49, 53 home language 37, 128–30, 186–9, 192–3, 197 Hufvudstadsbladet 47, 57–8, 69, 74 Hungary, Hungarians 12, 197 idealism 20 idealist discourse 58, 66–9, 72, 77–8, 80, 82, 85 identity 10, 21, 34, 36–8, 47, 58, 67, 72, 93–4, 98, 100, 103, 106, 109, 125–6, 133, 137, 148, 152–3, 157, 165–7, 175, 181, 183, 188, 190, 197, 240, 254 illiterate 149, 150, 157, 164, 166 imagined modernity 124 Immigrant Committee 126 immigrant occupations 201, 211, 213 Immigration Board 182 indigenous language, indigenous people 5, 7, 11, 39, 51, 249

Index 263

Ingrians 92–3, 99–100 integration 18–19, 49–50, 53–4, 119–20, 122, 126–7, 137, 170, 173, 182–4, 188, 197, 227–8 intelligentsia 153 interaction order 59, 84 intersection, intersectional 151, 252, 256, 258 Ireland, Irish 148, 253 Italy, Italians 11–12, 44, 200 Jews 7, 41–2, 98, 119–20, 174, 177 Kalevala 8, 157 Karelia, Karelian isthmus, Karelian languages 31, 38, 92–3, 190 Kingdom of Sweden 92, 177 Kivijärvi 149, 156–7, 160–3, 165, 168 knowledge economy, knowledge society 11 Kven 12 Language Act 9, 31–2, 35–6, 39–43, 48, 51, 53, 60–1, 111, 125, 132, 135–6, 138, 188 language as a problem 64 language as a resource 64–5, 68 language as a right 64–5 Language Board 30, 133 language climate 44 language death 65 Language Decree 150–1, 154–5, 158–9, 161 language history (also history of language) 30, 167 language ideological discourses, language ideology 10–11, 21, 35, 54, 57–60, 90–1, 110, 112, 116, 151, 155, 181–2, 188, 220, 226, 237, 247 language legislation 9, 19, 21, 29–31, 33, 36, 39, 42–3, 45, 51–2, 91, 93, 105, 110–12, 147–51, 154, 157, 159, 166–7, 183, 253 language petition 119

language reform 128, 153, 187–9 language shift 60, 65, 68, 130, 132–3, 137, 155, 280, 284 Lapland 38, 123 Latin 6, 8, 161, 225 League of Nations 236 Leftists 31–2, 37, 46, 49–50, 53, 129, 187 linguistic anthropology 13–14 linguistic emancipation 152 linguistic turn 5, 16, 33 literacy skills 21, 148–9, 152, 160, 163 longue durée (also long-term) 6, 13–14, 30, 131, 150, 156, 165, 223 lost generation 172 Lutheran Church 8, 92–3, 150, 152, 156, 161 Lutheran Reformation 6, 8, 152 majority language 5, 9, 18, 37, 41, 47, 62 material artefacts, materiality 224, 230, 238 Meänkieli 12, 32, 42–3, 118, 120, 129, 133, 135, 138 media 15, 19, 27, 29, 46–8, 51, 59, 84, 96, 101, 116, 128, 131, 137 medium of instruction 61, 63–4 methods, methodologies 6, 12–14, 16–20, 22, 33, 91, 149–50, 167, 223, 229, 241, 249, 252, 254–7 migrant languages 10, 37, 43, 121, 125, 129, 135–6, 138 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (MIDRF) 106–7 minority languages 5, 7, 11, 30–2, 36, 38–43, 46–53, 91, 95–7, 122, 129, 132, 135–8, 183–5, 192 mobility turn 5–6, 15, 93, 106, 109 monolingual, monolingualism 7, 12, 19–20, 36, 38, 40, 44, 57, 61–2, 64, 66–7, 69–74, 78, 80, 83, 86, 106, 116–18, 123–4, 126–7, 133, 138–9, 178–9, 182, 184–6, 192–3, 226, 236–7

264 Index

mother tongue 21, 35–6, 40, 43–4, 50–1, 57, 61–2, 65, 76–7, 81, 94, 101, 112, 119, 121, 124–5, 127–31, 135–7, 153, 155, 165, 168, 171–95, 212, 226, 233–4, 249 multilingualism 11, 21, 32, 40, 44, 52, 65, 109, 120, 125, 136–7, 149, 151, 167, 193, 257 multi-sited policy discourse 5, 13, 21, 256 nation state 6, 8, 12, 15, 64–5, 93, 97, 109, 153, 178–9, 181 National Agency of Higher Education 129 National Board of Education 117, 119, 128, 227, 233, 235 national history 52 national language 9, 31, 34–5, 39–42, 44, 48–9, 51–2, 58, 73, 83, 90, 107, 150, 152–4, 167, 222, 225, 235, 237 national minority language 31–2, 36, 43, 122, 127, 129, 132, 135–8 national romanticism 8, 64 native language 148, 155, 165–6 near abroad 105 neoliberal discourse 67–8, 79 Network for the Nordic Language Council 30 new language 30, 36, 42, 45, 53, 84, 129, 135, 148, 155, 166, 189 new Russians 93, 98–100 nexus analysis 17–18, 150, 175, 223 (non-)territorial language 96, 99 North Calotte 12 Norway, Norwegian 12, 122, 154 October Revolution 93, 104 official language 35, 95–6, 101–2, 152–3, 155 old Russians, old Russian minority 52, 93, 98–100, 111 onomastics, onomastic history 17, 150, 156, 167 oral history 196

orthography 15, 152, 249, 258 other domestic language 63–4, 67, 81 other languages 5, 11, 41, 44, 51–2 parallel monolingualism 62, 226 parliament, parliamentarians 16–17, 19, 29, 31–2, 35, 40, 42, 45–50, 53, 64, 187, 235 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) 48–50 parliamentary debates, parliamentary discourse 15, 19, 29–34, 36, 38–40, 44–6, 48, 53, 94, 176, 187, 253 parliamentary democracies 46 peasants 8, 119, 149, 151–4, 156–60, 163 people’s home 21, 123, 136, 184, 186 People’s Party (Swedish Liberals) 32, 42, 46, 51, 53 perestroika 93 perfect language 104 personal history (also life history) 176, 199 pluralism 44, 122, 124, 138, 184, 189, 197 Poland, Polish 44, 121 policy analyses 3, 6, 16, 251 policy deeds 33–4, 241 policy words 33–4, 241 political action (also political activity, political activists, political actors or political agents) 14, 19–22, 175, 177, 181 political agenda 193, 253 political conceptions 5, 16 political concepts 123, 174, 185 political cultures 8, 14, 16–17, 43, 147, 220 political discourses (also political debates or political discussions) 4, 6, 11, 13–16, 20–1, 30, 33, 37, 101, 112, 116, 120, 135, 175, 177, 181, 188, 198, 240, 253, 255, 257 political elites 9, 46, 173, 193, 226 political groups (also political parties) 32, 35, 62–3, 74

Index 265

political history (also ‘new’ political history) 3, 6, 13, 15–17, 172 political ideology 59, 167 political participation 37, 52, 153 political phenomena 5 political processes 19, 54, 110, 253, 255 political programmes 63, 123 political rhetoric 105, 124 political science 251 political structures 4, 6, 14, 234, 241 political systems 37, 171 politics 3–5, 15–16, 41, 57, 62, 94, 116, 131, 150–1, 159, 164, 167, 175, 190, 192, 205, 250–1 preservation discourse 58, 66–71, 75–6, 79 preservationism, preservationist 20, 66, 69, 71, 73, 78, 80–6 prestige 20, 116, 123, 132–3, 249 programme of Soviet colonisation 104 Protestants 7 purism 152 Quebec 12 Race Biology Institute of Uppsala University 122 race ideologies, racism 122, 126 radicals 83 receptive skills 232–3 refugee 106, 120, 123, 127, 177 repatriate 92, 100, representative democracy 46–7 rhizo-analysis, rhizomes 17–18, 22, 205, 212, 223–4, 227, 232, 238 Roma language (also Romani or Romani chib) 7, 31–2, 35, 39, 41–3, 49, 51–2, 64, 96, 98, 101, 117–19, 122, 135, 197 Ruotsin-Suomalainen 177 Russia, Russian empire, Russian Federation, 8–10, 12, 20, 29–31, 35, 41, 43, 52, 60, 68, 83, 90–115, 122, 147, 152–3, 158, 166, 240, 254 Russian idea 104

Russian-speaking diaspora 90, 102, 105–7 Russification 9, 35 Saarijärvi 149, 156–60, 163–5 Saint Petersburg 93, 159 Sámi, Sámi people 7, 12, 32, 35–6, 39, 41–3, 49, 51–2, 83, 96, 98, 111–12, 117, 119–20, 122, 135, 138 Savo 159 Scandinavia 5, 9, 30, 86 second domestic language 63, 235, 237 second-generation immigrants 183, 187 Second World War 118, 123, 177, 181, 196–7, 199 secondary school 160, 181, 222 semilingualism 21, 127, 130, 172, 174, 176, 179, 183, 185–8, 191, 193 Senate 159 sign language 31–2, 35, 39, 41, 43, 112, 135 signature 163–4 small languages 43 social Darwinism 122 Social Democrats 31–2, 36, 39, 45–9, 53, 131, 173, 176, 184, 187, 191–2 societal access 19–20 sociolinguistic Darwinism 66, 68, 83 sociolinguistics 3, 14–15, 97, 109, 249 sociolinguistics of globalisation 15 Soviet Union 90, 92–4, 104–6, 123, 152 space-time 18 spatial turn 5, 17, 34, 223, 238, 247 speech act theory 4–5, 16, 21, 172, 174–5, 193 spelling 15, 21, 148, 156, 161–7, 258 standardisation 104, 148, 152, 249 state language 103–5 structuration 223 Suomen Kuvalehti 191 Suometar 158, 168 superdiversity 10–11, 15, 121, 213, 248 surname 157–8, 160, 167 Svecomans 8–9, 61

266 Index

Sweden Finnish 20–1, 49, 117, 122, 132–5 Sweden Finnish Delegation 132, 134 Sweden Finns 10, 41, 117–18 Sweden Swedish 70, 133 Swedish Academy 119 Swedish Constitution 8, 32, 35–6, 152–3 Swedish People’s Party 31, 35, 37, 41, 44–9, 52, 62, 225–6 Swedishness 120, 192 Swiss 12, 196 Switzerland 11, 44, 61 Tatar 31, 41, 96, 98 Taxell’s paradox 66–7, 70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 82 territorial languages 96 territory 65, 92, 95–8, 103, 106, 119, 153, 179, 210, 236 textbooks 231, 233, 240 tolerance 20, 101 top-down 18–19, 22, 224, 251 Tornedalen, Tornedalians 41, 118–20, 122–4 traditional minority 52 traditionally used language 95 translanguaging 134 translocal 108 transnational actors 46, 48 transnational history 3, 6, 17

transnational interaction 4, 19, 31, 46, 48, 53, 174, 190 transnational turn 15 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance 94 tripartite territorialisation 118 True Finns 31, 64 Tsarist Russian empire 104 Turkey 197 UNESCO 65, 179 unilingual 62 United Nations 98 upper-class 157 vernacularisation 6, 147 vocational training 203–4, 210 walls-to-bridges metaphor 83 welfare state 21, 123–4, 136, 139 white-collar occupation 205, 211 white welfare society 191 Winter War 94 Working Group on Immigration 176, 182–5 world languages 102, 105–6 writing skills 149,157, 163 written forms 162,165, 198 Yiddish 31–2, 43, 49, 135 Yugoslavia 197