Language Policies in Finland and Sweden

Interdisciplinary and Multi-sited Comparisons

Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen, Taina Saarinen

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781783092703
• eBook ISBN: 9781783092727
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this volume, authors from four disciplines join forces to develop an analysis of political discourse on a comparative and multidisciplinary basis. Language policy is often based on the political use of history, where the remembrance of past experiences by communities, individuals and historical bodies play a fundamental role. These authors see politics and policies as multi-sited by nature, taking place, being constructed, contested and reproduced simultaneously and in different times and places. Theoretically the book draws on the concept of language policy, operationalising it through the rhizomatic nature of politics and policies. Although confined empirically to considerations of situations in Finland and Sweden, the volume extends far beyond these locations in its theoretical contributions. The polities of Finland and Sweden are the lens through which a new and much needed understanding of language policy research, and policy research in general, is posited.

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, 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 disciplinary 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 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 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 multilingual 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 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 multiethnic 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 monolingually 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 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 Swedishspeaking 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 unconditional 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 Sweden-oriented (Svecoman) opinion of the Swedish-speaking old elite. From the 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 republi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Introduction
• Part 2: Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media
• Part 3: Individuals as Constructors and Reflectors of Language Policies
• Part 4: Epilogue
• Index