Shaping discourses of multilingualism through a language ideological debate: The case of Swedish in...

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Journal of Language and Politics 13:1 (2014), –. doi 10.1075/jlp.13.1.01hulissn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Shaping discourses of multilingualism through a language ideological debate

The case of Swedish in Finland

Francis M. Hult & Sari PietikäinenLund University / University of Jyväskylä

The ideological (re)construction of the position of Swedish in Finland is examined as it took shape during a major year-long debate about the role of Swedish in Finnish education. Data were collected through archival research of the leading national newspapers in the two official languages of Finland: Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish) and Hufvudstadsbladet (Swedish). Circulating and intersecting discourses in newspaper texts are traced in order to examine how these discourses facilitate the negotiation of tensions about the status of Swedish in Finland. Analysis demonstrates how ideological space was opened for destabilizing dominant perspectives about the relative value of languages in Finland. Moreover, it is shown that (re)interpretations of the discourse of ‘Swedish as mandatory’ in education became a fulcrum for leveraging a wider debate about the ‘Finland as bilingual nation’ discourse, which has long been part of the national consciousness.

Keywords: education policy; Finnish; Finland; language ideological debate; media; societal multilingualism; Swedish

. Introduction

As an officially bilingual country in northern Scandinavia, Finland is often taken as an example of a polity where the rights of both large and small national language communities, in this case Finnish and Swedish speakers, are stabilized and main-tained. Language relations, however, are always the result of historical, political and ideological processes, closely linked to the development of nation-states, eco-nomic structures, and legal frameworks (Heller 2011; Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes 2013). As such, the linguistic order of any society is dynamic rather than static and is continually (re)conceptualized (Blommaert 2010; Fairclough 2006).

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

Francis M. Hult & Sari Pietikäinen

Taking this dynamism as our starting point, we examine the on-going nego-tiation of the position of Swedish in Finland, where it is a constitutionally official language with a numerical minority of speakers. This negotiation, we argue, can be fruitfully theorized with respect to concurrent and conflicting language ide-ologies, which are historically situated discursive constructs, embedded in daily language practices, and carry articulations and beliefs about the nature, value, and function of languages (Blommaert 1999; Gal 2006; Gal & Woolard 2001; Irvine & Gal 2000; Heller 2006; Hill 2002; Laihiala-Kankainen & Pietikäinen 2010; Jaffe 2007a; Kroskrity 2000). Multilingual contexts, like Finland, are often sites for language ideological debate (Blommaert 1999). They are fluid, complex spaces with a spectrum of language ideologies, and language boundaries and norms are often dislocated, in flux or renegotiated (Jaffe 2007b; Meek 2007; Nevins 2004; Östman & Mattfolk 2011).

In the present study, we investigate language ideological processes at play in print media during a contemporary ideological debate about the role of Swedish in Finland. Considering the nature of print media in amplifying and legitimiz-ing circulating discourses, this is a salient domain for such debate (Milani 2007; Sung-Yul Park 2010; Östman & Mattfolk 2011). Drawing upon nexus analysis ( Scollon & Scollon 2004), we trace circulating and intersecting discourses in news-paper texts in order to examine how these discourses facilitate the negotiation of tensions about the status of Swedish in Finland and, in turn, open ideologi-cal space ( Hornberger 2005) for destabilizing dominant perspectives on societal bi-/ multilingualism in Finland. The kind of processual perspective adopted here highlights how interrelationships between discourses and their networked char-acteristics are seen in connection with historical, social, economic, and political practices (cf. Pietikäinen in press). We begin by offering a brief account of the lin-guistic history of Swedish in Finland. Next, we turn to a discussion of the concep-tual orientation to language ideological debate that underpins the study followed by a presentation of the discourse analytic methodology employed. Then, we pres-ent our analysis of the debate as it was entextualized in the two major newspapers Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet.

. A brief history of Swedish in Finland

Cronin (1995: 97) argues that the concept of minority language is an expression of a relation between languages, not an essence of language, and that these relations have temporal and spatial dimensions. While Swedish in Finland has always been a minority language in terms of the number of speakers, its position has varied in different times and domains. Historically, for the most part, Swedish has been



the prestige language in many social domains, including politics, administration, education and economics. This is related to the historical development of the sov-ereign state of Finland.

The terrain of what is today known as Finland was part of Sweden until 1809, when, as a result of the 1808–1809 Finnish War between Sweden and Russia, it became an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire until the indepen-dence of Finland in 1917. Under Swedish rule, many societal infrastructures were developed, and the language policy at the time favored almost exclusively Swedish (Liebkind et al. 2007: 1–2; Tandefelt & Finnäs 2007: 35–36). Consequently, Swed-ish became a resource for social mobility in Finland. For those Finns who desired to have a higher education or a job in commerce, politics, administration, among other domains, this meant learning and mastering Swedish.

During Russian rule, the multilingual language policy at the time allowed the use of Russian, Finnish, and Swedish in official contexts as well as, to an extent, in everyday communication (Huss & Huss 2010). Limited Finnish skills among many authorities, however, and the Swedish-speaking cultural, economic, and political elite meant that, in practice, Swedish maintained its status as a prestige language in official and political contexts (Andersson & Herberts 1996: 384; Tandefelt & Finnäs 2007: 38–39). By the second half of the 19th century, concurrent with wider European political and economic processes, several simultaneous political and ideological developments started to stir language relations in Finland, especially the dominant position of Swedish in official contexts.

First, the ideological construct of a unified, homogeneous nation with a national language linked to a specific territory (see e.g. Heller 2007, 2011; Jaffe 2007a) was taken up by a growing Finnish political movement aimed at strengthen-ing the position of the Finnish culture and language within socio-political arenas. Finnish language planning included, for example, the development and increase of Finnish-medium education, Finnish print media and literature as well as the creation of new registers of Finnish for these domains. This political and linguistic mobilization raised strong reactions among both Finnish- and Swedish-speaking citizens, leading to relatively radical and polarized positions at the time. A par-ticular feature of this language ideological movement was a voluntary language shift from a prestige language to a relatively stigmatized language: quite a few of so far (mainly) Swedish-speaking families, many of them belonging to the politi-cal, cultural and economic elite, voluntarily changed their language practices from (mainly) Swedish into (mainly) Finnish (see e.g. Lindgren et al. 2010). The reason behind this shift was political and related to a desire to support the Finnish inde-pendence movement. Inspired by this movement, over 100,000 people changed their family names from Swedish ones into Finnish ones (e.g. Sten → Kivi, both meaning ‘stone’) (Teppo 1942: 105–112).



Second, as an application of the political strategy of “divide and rule”, the Russian authorities encouraged Finns to develop the Finnish language and other cultural and political traditions as a way of distancing Finns from Swedes, the prior rulers (Coleman 2010: 47). A turning point was a manifesto by the Russian tsar in 1863 recognizing Finnish as an official language alongside Swedish. The Finns were also, within a transition period of 20 years, promised to be able to use Finnish with authorities. Over the following decades, a series of reforms gradu-ally strengthened the position of Finnish in government administration, educa-tion, and in society more generally (Andersson & Herberts 1996: 384; Lindgren et al. 2011).

By the early 20th century, there was an educated Finnish-speaking elite, and Finnish had gained status as a modern language with a written standard. After a heated debate, a concept of ‘national language’ was created for the new constitu-tion of the young state of Finland, a compromise to balance and negotiate tensions between two languages and their speakers. Hence an officially bilingual state of Finland was created, with two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. A notable exception is the Åland Islands, which were granted status by the League of Nations in 1921 as an autonomous area of Finland with Swedish as the de jure language (Allardt Ljunggren 2008). During the process of modernization and nation build-ing, the position of both languages and their speakers was secured by law in the rest of Finland, and consequently, major social infrastructures, including the edu-cation system, mass media, and economic, cultural, and social institutions were developed simultaneously in the two languages (Lindgren et al. 2011: 25).

The current official position of the two national languages is visible, inter alia, in official signage and in the requirement to use both Finnish and Swedish for official positions and documents. Also, with few exceptions, most Finns study Swedish as a mandatory subject for a minimum of three years as part of their basic education, but in practice Swedish skills vary considerably (Palviainen 2011). The Swedish used in Finland also varies (Östman & Mattfolk 2011), and Vincze and Moring (2012: 4), for example, argue that the Swedish population is becoming increasingly bilingual. Attitudes and beliefs about the relevance and motivation of learning and using Swedish in a Finnish context seem to be in flux as well (cf. Juurakko-Paavola & Palviainen 2011). Thus, while the state is officially bilingual, functional multilingualism is far from balanced. As Lindgren et al. (2011: 22) argue, regardless of its legal status, during the 20th century, the position of Swed-ish “resembles the situation of a minority language. Swedish is today one of the two national languages, but quantitatively it is a minority language with only 5.5% (2007) of the total population declaring that they speak it as their first language”. Today, in the early 21st century, Swedish is, yet again, being called into ques-tion. Heated discussions are taking place about the status and value of Swedish



in a globalizing Finland with a shifting multilingual landscape. The present study examines how one iteration of this discussion unfolds in print media through the discursive process of language ideological debate.

. Nexus analysis of language ideological debate

Language ideological debates are “slowly unfolding processes of discursive exchange” (Blommaert 1999: 11) about “the complex nexus between how peo-ple think about, label and evaluate linguistic practices in various sociopolitical contexts” (Milani 2007: 113). It is through such debates that language ideologies are (re)constructed and relationships between language and national, ethnic or linguistic identities are negotiated (Blommaert 1999; Laihiala-Kankainen & Pietikäinen 2010). While debates may become salient at particular moments of political crisis, neither the debates nor the ideologies themselves emerge ex nihilo from the crisis point. They are, rather, contemporary instantiations and recon-textualizations of historically situated discourses (Blommaert 1999: 6; Milani 2006: 104; see also Jaffe 2007a; Pietikäinen 2010). As we explained in the previous section, for instance, debates about the status of Swedish have been integral to the imagination of Finland for centuries. The specific debate that we examine here is a present incarnation in media discourse.

. Language ideological debate

Language ideological debates, then, can be understood in terms of nested dis-course cycles that unfold at various scales of time and space (cf. Blommaert 1999; Hult 2010; Lemke 2000; Pietikäinen in press). Synchronically, we can observe the process through which language ideologies are reconfigured and deployed in real-time as a debate unfolds, for instance, in what is referred to in common parlance as the ‘news cycle.’ Diachronically, any particular debate forms part of a longer legacy that may unfold over centuries through which ideological discourses become sedi-mented over a series of previous instances of debate. Each individual debate is a nexus point between past, present, and future. Established discourses mediate a present debate. At the same time, that present debate is a new opportunity for the negotiation of ideological discourses which, in turn, will become part of the his-torical legacy and subsequently contextualize future debates.

Given the nature of language ideological debates, print media have become a central focus for (critical) discourse analysts seeking to study them (e.g. Horner 2007; Milani 2007). With respect to the synchronic/diachronic relationship, news-papers have a unique position. Print media texts are produced synchronically



thereby creating a trace of the discourses circulating in a particular language ideo-logical debate. Diachronically, newspapers become de facto historical record and, as such, allow the analyst to view the discursive construction of history in the making. In terms of content, the reporting and synthesizing functions of print media engender the entextualization of a broad scope of different discourses that circulate in a particular debate as well as representations of indexical relation-ships among these discourses (Milani 2007: 114–115; Sung-Yul Park 2010: 190; cf. Blommaert 2005: 47). Newspapers are, moreover, widely encountered by the public on a daily basis and imbued with authority, making them key to the construction of social reality through legitimizing both the debate itself as well as the represen-tation of specific discourses (Bednarek & Caple 2012; Blackledge 2005: 134; Milani 2007: 113–114; Sung-Yul Park 2010: 191; van Dijk 2008: 55). Despite many recent technological and sociopolitical shifts, in Finland, as in many other Nordic coun-tries, newspapers continue to have a prominent role as a space for public debate and deliberation as well as media consumption (cf. Harrie 2009).

In the present study, we employ aspects of the multidisciplinary discourse analytic approach of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) in order to map the discourses which circulated via print media during the language ideological debate about Swedish in Finnish education that took place in 2010. Nexus analy-sis is an approach to examining discourse1 that focuses on “the study of semiotic cycles of people, objects, and discourses in and through moments of socio-cultural importance” (Scollon & Scollon 2004: x). It falls within the broad scope of criti-cal perspectives on discourse analysis that share a focus on the role of discourse in, inter alia, mediating sociopolitical issues, (re)producing power relations, con-necting texts and society, and shaping ideologies (Scollon & Scollon 2004: 173; van Dijk 2008: 86). Among the semiotic/discourse cycles that Scollon and Scollon2

. In developing nexus analysis, Scollon and Scollon were inspired by Gee’s conceptualiza-tion of Discourse as the integration of language with “ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols, tools, and objects… [in order to] give the material world certain meanings, distribute social goods in a certain way, make certain sorts of meaningful connections in our experience, and privilege certain symbol systems and ways of knowing over others” (as cited in Scollon & Scollon 2004: 4). We take up this same spirit of discourse here. While a theoretical unpacking of the notion of discourse is beyond the scope of this paper, we acknowledge that it is a complex, polysemic term. Various concep-tualizations of the term can be found in several publications related to language ideologies and discourses about languages and their speakers (e.g. Heller & Duchêne 2007; Pennycook 2010; Pietikäinen in press).

. They suggest that a nexus analysis may focus on the following cycles: Discourses in Place, Interaction Order, and Historical Body. See Scollon and Scollon (2004: 13–15), Hult (2010: 10–13) and Pietikäinen (2010: 85–86) for further discussion of these.



include within nexus analysis, Discourses in Place (DiPs) are especially relevant to investigating language ideological debates as captured in print media.

Discourses in Place include the “complex aggregates (or nexus) of many dis-courses which circulate” in the social world and serve to construct it symboli-cally or materially (Scollon & Scollon 2004: 14). These discourses are ‘in place’ because they are already present at a moment of social action. DiPs both medi-ate the action and may be reconfigured by it, as discourses are both invoked and negotiated simultaneously. Accordingly, it is useful to think in terms of discourse cycles, which dovetails with the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of lan-guage ideological debate (Scollon 2005: 473; Scollon & Scollon 2004: 27–28). By tracing DiPs in a particular ideological debate it is possible to map which histori-cally situated discourses are foregrounded as well as to trace the ways in which those foregrounded discourses currently circulate and come to be recontextualized by, for instance, being indexed with other discourses or having their parameters expanded or limited which, in turn, will have an effect on how those discourses will be foregrounded and deployed in subsequent debates (cf. Scollon & Scollon 2004: 27).

. The study

Data for the study were collected through archival research using the online repos-itories of the leading national newspapers in the two official languages of Finland: Helsingin Sanomat3 (Finnish) and Hufvudstadsbladet (Swedish). These newspa-pers were selected in order to capture the large-scale circulation of discourses, with the aim of examining how those discourses contribute to mediating (concep-tualizations of) societal bilingualism. The search parameters focused specifically on the calendar year January-December 2010, the heart of a debate sparked by the parliamentary election to be held the following year. Texts relating primarily to the debate about Swedish in Finnish education were identified through keyword searches of the repositories.4 Each text was then read and verified to include con-tent pertaining to the role of Swedish in Finland. This resulted in a data set of 53 Helsingin Sanomat (HS) texts and 81 Hufvudstadsbladet (HBL) texts.

Guided by principles of nexus analysis, inductive, recursive analysis of the data set was conducted in order to identify and examine the salient and reoccurring

. The international edition was included as well. English translations of the Swedish and Finnish texts were made by Hult and Pietikäinen, respectively. We use the English-language convention of quotation marks when text was quoted within a text. Excerpts are referenced with the publication abbreviation followed by month.day.year.

. The following keywords were used: language debate, obligatory Swedish, school Swedish, Swedish, Swedish teaching.



discourses in the language ideological debate. The first stage of analysis was what Scollon and Scollon (2004: 153) refer to as “engaging the nexus of practice.” For the present study, this involved reconnoitering the textual data set in order to “discover the social actions and social actors which [were] crucial in the production” of the debate (Scollon & Scollon 2004: 153). Inventories were created to identify the indi-vidual social actors and the range of relevant discourses that were circulating as well as the specific texts in which they appeared (cf. Scollon & Scollon 2004: 155). With this focus established, the second stage of analysis was ‘navigating the nexus of practice’ wherein we drew upon the inventory of relevant discourses in order to determine how they relate to each other interdiscursively as components of major discourse cycles which we then, in turn, mapped in detail across multiple texts in the two newspapers in order to bring to light how those discourses were deployed and transformed (Scollon 2008: 79–80; Scollon & Scollon 2004: 159–160).

We present here our analysis and interpretation of two major historically situ-ated discourse cycles that were central to the debate about Swedish in Finland in our data: (1) Swedish as mandatory and (2) Finland as bilingual nation. Specifi-cally, we examine how discourses intersect in these two major cycles in ways that facilitated the negotiation of tensions surrounding the status of Swedish in educa-tion and opened discursive space for the destabilization of Finland as an imag-ined bilingual nation. In the next two sections, we examine excerpts from the two newspapers in order highlight these interdiscursive connections as part and parcel of a dynamic language ideological debate.

. Debating Swedish in Finland

The debate about Swedish in Finland that we examine here gained momentum in the early months of 2010, following statements by the education minister Henna Virkkunen5 that students in Finland should begin studying Swedish as early as grade 5 instead of the current grade 7. In the months that followed, the debate expanded to include broader negotiation about the status of Swedish in the Finnish educational system and, ultimately, transformed into a discussion about the very nature of societal multilingualism in Finland itself. Accordingly, we examine here how two major historically situated discourses in place, one related to education (Swedish as mandatory) and one related to societal multilingualism (Finland as bilingual nation) came to be (re)configured during the debate.

. http://hbl.fi/nyheter/2010-02-16/svenska-redan-i-femman



. Education

The status of Swedish as a required subject has long been a political issue and one that has regularly surfaced in previous language ideological debates as well, most prominently in recent times around the 2005 decision to remove Swedish as an examination requirement for upper secondary school completion (Myntti 2010: 18, 47–50; Palviainen 2011). Indeed, it is such a prominent discourse in place with respect to education that it eclipsed the discourse with which the 2010 debate began. Thus, rather than focusing on how early to begin Swedish instruction, the debate quickly came to be centered on negotiating the meaning and implications of mandatory Swedish itself. This is shown here:

(1) “Mandatory is not a good criteria in education – people can decide for themselves what language fits them and their children”. (HS 3.9.2010, quote from Anu Kantola, a researcher from the University of Helsinki)

(2) “If Swedish becomes optional, one has to ask who will make the choice? Is it the student? No, hardly. Is it the parents? Not even them. It is the municipality. In order for monolingual Finnish municipalities to offer a real possibility for students to choose Swedish, one must guarantee by law that instruction in Swedish is offered when a student so desires”. (HBL 12.28.2010, quote from Olav Melin, Society and Media Relations specialist for Magma, a Finland Swedish think tank)

The juxtaposition of excerpts (1) and (2) illustrate how, during the course of the debate, the nature of Swedish as a language problem or as an educational lan-guage right came to be negotiated (Ruíz 1984). Excerpt (1) is from an HS example of civic journalism, called an HS Jury. For this jury, HS invited seventy influ-ential people (politicians, authorities, authors, researchers, etc.) to provide their views on the question of whether the teaching of mandatory Swedish should be increased in schools. This discussion was then exhaustively reported in the news-paper. Excerpt (1) is indicative of attempts to recontextualize mandatory Swedish as a problem by invoking neoliberal ideologies that educational choices should be made in a free linguistic market (“people can decide for themselves what lan-guage”) rather than mediated by government policies (Petrovic 2005: 403; cf. Fairclough 2006: 67). In contrast to excerpt (1), the second excerpt, quoting Olaf Melin, challenges the idea of a neoliberal linguistic market, discursively connect-ing the notion of choice to power relationships. Here a language rights discourse is asserted (“one must guarantee by law that instruction in Swedish is offered”) in order to support an assertion that the power dynamics underlying language choices must be managed for the sake of educational equity (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 269–278).



While a language rights discourse remained present throughout the debate, the problematization of mandatory Swedish was particularly prominent in media representations. The concept of tvång (Swedish) and pakko (Finnish), meaning ‘forced,’ as in tvångsvenskan/pakkoruotsi (‘forced Swedish’) was a recurring lexical item, for instance. The terms tvång/ pakko or tvångsvenskan/pakkoruotsi appeared 106 times across 54 different HS and HBL texts.6 The discursive result of such iteration across texts is an ongoing (re)signification in which a particular meaning comes to be extended (Milani 2006: 155). Indeed, fundamentally, as Blommaert (1999: 10) remarks, “debates about languages define or redefine these languages.” In the present debate, mandatory Swedish was being defined as problematic, at the very least, and often as an obstacle. The discourse of mandatory Swedish as obstacle is further evident in the following excerpts in which Swedish is framed as a barrier to multiculturalism and multilingualism in globalizing Finland:

(3) According to the head of education at the central union for trade, Markku Koponen, it is time to give up mandatory Swedish and make it a voluntary subject at school. According to Koponen Swedish has become a stopper (plug) for gaining more multifaceted language skills, because only very few can simultaneously study three languages at primary school [peruskoulu]. The extensive study of English is understandable, because it has become a world language in work life also. (HS 3.2.2010)

(4) Just recently Konsta Happonen from the youth group of the Finnish Green Party said that it is high time to abolish obligatory Swedish and make Finland into a real multicultural society and forget today’s polarizing around two national languages. (HBL 5.22.2010)

Excerpt (3) presents folks beliefs about language learning (cf. Lightbown & Spada 1999: 161–170) to lend support to the idea that requiring students to study Swedish prevents them from successfully learning another language. These folk beliefs are legitimized here by recontextualization through the addition of infor-mation about the authoritative social position (“head of education in the central union for trade”) of the individual (“Markku Koponen”) asserting those beliefs ( Blackledge 2005: 126). While Swedish is positioned as a problem, English is framed as a resource and connected to a neoliberal globalist discourse whereby it serves as a ‘lingua economica’ for access to the world economy and global mobility ( Fairclough 2006: 40; Petrovic 2005; Phillipson 2006: 80; Ruíz 1984).

Similarly, excerpt (4) frames Swedish as a barrier to multiculturalism by discursively linking Swedish to political controversy, which is framed here as a

. 37 times in 29 different HBL and 69 times in 25 different HS texts.



conflict about linguistic nationalism (“polarizing around two national languages”) wherein Swedish is placed in opposition to Finnish thereby, presumably, over-shadowing other ethnolinguistic groups. The strength of the Swedish as obstacle discourse is apparent here as it is only mandatory Swedish, and not, for example, equitably balancing Swedish with Finnish, that is presented as a problem to be solved (cf. Myntti 2010: 14).

The positioning of Swedish in opposition to multilingualism and multicultur-alism must be read against the backdrop of the historical development of language relations in Finland and Finnish language politics, especially with respect to the Russian language (Rynkänen & Pöyhönen 2010). The problematization of Swedish during the present debate opened ideological space (Hornberger 2005) for nego-tiation about the status of Russian in the Finnish educational system:

(5) It is obvious that in Finnish-medium basic school Swedish is studied at least three years and in high school yet another three years more and yet the lan-guage is not learned to be used. It is also clear that in Finland more people who know Russian and other languages are needed. (HS 6.10.2010)

(6) “Why are new school subjects always implemented at the cost of Swedish? Let students study Russian, I have nothing against that. But I am beginning to get tired of it always being Swedish that has to yield and of skills in the other national language regularly being disparaged.” (HBL 9.20.2010, quote from Ulla-Maj Wideroos, a well-known Finnish Swedish politician and a group chair for the Swedish People′s Party in Finland).

The commentary offered in excerpt (5) echoes the discourse that mandatory Swedish threatens multilingualism in Finland. Swedish, which is framed as per-functory (“the language is not learned to be used”), is positioned in opposition to the Russian language, which is specifically highlighted as a component of soci-etal multilingualism that should be attended to in education. Prying open ideo-logical space (Hornberger 2005: 606) for Russian in education here is articulated as an either-or issue (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 665): Swedish or Russian. A quote from Ulla-Maj Wideroos in excerpt (6) exemplifies a both-and (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 137) counterargument in which space for Swedish and Russian in education is conceptualized while simultaneously reinforcing the special status of Swedish (“the other national language”).

Across these two excerpts we see an illustration of the negotiation of discursive relationships (Blommaert 2005: 74; Fairclough 2006: 3), in this case the position-ing of different languages in the institution of education. Accordingly, reverberat-ing in these examples, latent also in excerpts (3) and (4), is a broader discourse in place about societal multilingualism – that is to say the fundamental linguistic ecology of Finland and the relative positions of languages within it.



. Societal multilingualism

While the present debate began surrounding controversies related to language education, the (re)contextualization, recycling and (re)definition of the dis-course in place of Swedish as mandatory came to be interdiscursively connected ( Blommaert 2005: 253) to the discourse in place of Finland as an officially bilin-gual nation. This connection became fully explicit in a public statement by former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen in which he suggested that the issue of mandatory Swedish in school and national bilingualism are two sides of the same coin. This overt interdiscursivity was met with some skepticism, as reflected in this response by then Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi during an interview for HBL:

(7) What do you think about linking the country’s official bilingualism with obligatory Swedish instruction?

“I think that it is completely strange. School Swedish is a different issue and therefore Lipponen does a disservice to bilingualism and Swedish when he makes the link.” (HBL 12.14.2010, quote from Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi)

Kiviniemi, in an example of a politician attempting to manage the metadis-course of debate by projecting her own common-sense interpretation (Blackledge 2005: 124; Blommaert 2005: 185–187), explicitly rejects the interdiscursive link between mandatory Swedish and national bilingualism so as to redirect atten-tion away from issues about national bilingualism (“Lipponen does a disservice to bilingualism and Swedish when he makes the link”). Well before the end of 2010, though, the interdiscursive connection between mandatory Swedish and national bilingualism was already firmly established in the debate:

(8) “We no longer live in a bilingual country, even though legislation orders it”, says the editor Minna Tawast. “Merely supporting bilingualism via school Swedish and administrative Swedish is the work of fools.” (HS 3.9.2010)

As reflected in excerpt (8), which is a quotation from an editor for the cultural magazine Tanssi (dance), this interdiscursive connection allowed for an expanded negotiation of the meaning of national bilingualism and, ultimately, a question-ing and destabilization of the very linguistic order of Finland itself (Blommaert 2010: 32; Fairclough 2006: 30; Pennycook 2007: 115; Pietikäinen 2010: 83–84).

First, as also seen in excerpt (8), the debate raised issues about whether the image of national bilingualism in Finland exists in reality, as shown in this quote from Minister of Justice Tuija Brax:

(9) “Even today one can ask if the constitution is applied de facto. There are many areas where residents do not receive service in Swedish and places where Finnish service limps along”. (HBL 10.18.2010, quote from Tuija Brax)



While it is not novel to note that bilingualism in Finland may be less ideal in prac-tice than in principle (e.g. Myntti 2010), the present debate brought this into relief thereby contributing to the destabilization of Finland as an imagined bilingual nation (Anderson 1983). With the established social reality of national bilingual-ism called into question, this opened space for debating the nature of societal mul-tilingualism and the definition of specific languages.

Swedish, the speakers of which are a numerical minority in Finland,7 has long been framed as a national language rather than a minority language (Lindgren et al. 2011). As alluded to in excerpt (9), Swedish has co-official status in Finland by constitutional authority. With national bilingualism open for debate so, too, was the definition of Swedish:

(10) In Finland, the starting point of the debate is that only 5 percent of the population speaks Swedish as a mother tongue and the majority of Finns have only very little contact with Swedish in their daily lives. A relatively small language minority protects their rights with such determination that it sometimes feels provocative to change those rights. (HS 6.10.2010)

(11) Swedish is not a minority language that exists to keep the Swedish speakers happy. Swedish is a national language in Finland. That means that all Finns have Swedish as a national language, regardless of whether one uses it oneself or not. (HBL 8.22.2010)

In the commentaries offered in excerpts (10) and (11), we see the discursive ten-sion surrounding the (re)definition of Swedish during the debate. As Blommaert remarks, language ideological debates are often about “the social ‘value’ of some language(s) as opposed to (an)other(s)” (1999: 2). As these two excerpts reflect, the present debate brought to light conflicts about the fundamental social value of Swedish in Finland, including whether it serves a limited role as part of the lin-guistic repertoire of only a numerical minority (excerpt 10) or whether it is more broadly a semiotic resource for national identity for the entire Finnish population (excerpt 11). Notably, the status of Finnish as a national language was never chal-lenged during the present debate, suggesting its discursive position as sine qua non for national identity. Swedish, even when framed as a national language, was repeatedly noted as ‘the other’ national language,8 indexing the status of Finnish as primus inter pares among constitutionally official languages.

. According to the official statistics of Finland, in 2010 there were 291,154 speakers of Swedish in Finland amounting to 5.42% of Finns. It is worth pointing out, though, that counting speakers is a highly language ideological practice (e.g. Moore, Pietikäinen & Blommaert 2010).

. 18 times in 12 different HBL texts and 30 times in 17 different HS texts. See excerpt (6) as an example.



In a similar vein, the definition of Russian and its discursive position in the constellation of languages in Finland was also opened for debate:

(12) It is time to make Russian an official minority language in Finland, says Eilina Gusatinsky. Today over one percent of Finland’s population communicates primarily in Russian. (HBL 9.16.2010)

(13) “Official Russian in Finland would be too much of a gift for the Kremlin.” (HBL 9.16.2010, quote from Jussi Halla-aho, a Finnish politician and MP from the party The Finns)

A key tenet of mobility in relation to transnationalism is that “multiple cultures can exist in one space and that, conversely, one culture can be produced in dif-ferent spaces,” yet links between language and place are not uncontroversial ( Blommaert 2010: p. 63). In the two excerpts above, we see tensions surrounding the (re) territorialization (Blommaert 2010: p. 44–45) of Russian and, concomi-tantly, what implications this may have for how the language is conceptualized as a component of societal multilingualism in Finland.

In a statement by Eilina Gusatinsky, editor-in-chief of the Russian newspaper Spektr that is produced in Finland, in excerpt (12) Russian is territorialized by being indexed with Finnish space (“one percent of Finland’s population commu-nicates primarily in Russian”) thereby justifying the claim that its status should be codified. Further legitimizing the proposition, a (subtle) intertextual link is made to minority language politics in Sweden, which defined five official minority languages in conjunction with ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Hult 2004). In excerpt (13), Jussi Halla-aho, member of the right-wing, populist party The Finns (Swedish: Sannfinländarna, Finnish: Perussuomalaiset, literally: The True Finns), known for a critical stance towards mandatory Swedish in his public statements, also draws upon territorialization to advance the opposite position. He rejects the discursive construction of Russian as a minority language by indexing the language with Russian space, even suggesting that codifying the status of Russian in Finland would be a political incursion.

. Conclusion

The language ideological debate about Swedish in Finland that we have traced here (re)produced a metadiscursive context for language politics in Finland, opening a discursive space for re(e)valuating the ‘preferred reading’ of relationships among languages and a negotiation about whether and how the position of Swedish should be framed as a language problem (Blommaert 1999: 9, 2010: 185–187; Lo Bianco 2005). Our analysis shows, in particular, how two major historically situated



discourses, namely the discourse of Swedish as mandatory and the discourse of Finland as bilingual nation, were negotiated and transformed during this debate.

The first discourse, which focuses on the status of Swedish in the Finnish educational system, centered on the curricular space for Swedish as a mandatory subject. It is no surprise that the domain of education is at the center of such a language ideological debate, given its close link to language policy and plan-ning as well as to national and cultural identities (Kaplan & Baldauf 1997: 123). In addition, though, education is an influential site for (re)producing citizenship and nationhood. Accordingly, as we show here, negotiation about Swedish in educa-tion also became a fulcrum used to leverage a conversation about Finland as a bilingual society more broadly.

The trajectory of Finland as an officially bilingual nation discourse stems from the historically embedded language ideological solution from the early 19th cen-tury. At that time, in order to navigate a highly contested language terrain with two very strong language movements (i.e. Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking), a compromise was to imagine Finland as a bilingual nation with two ‘national lan-guages.’ Recycled and relocalized in contemporary time and space, the discourse of Finland as a bilingual nation became interlinked with the discourse of Swedish as mandatory in education, forming a specific rationale for the debate: to maintain Finland as a bilingual nation, Swedish must be a mandatory subject for everyone. At the same time, negative attitudes toward its mandatory status are perceived as potentially accounting for the lack of motivation to learn Swedish and the result-ing limited skills in the Swedish language among many Finns.

The present debate, then, called into question existing ‘orders of indexicality’ (Blommaert 2005: 73–74) about the relative social value and social stratification of languages in Finland. The imagination of Finland as a bilingual national came up for negotiation, opening space to re-imagine the nation not as bilingual but as multilingual. Its history with Russia and its current relations with Russian speakers in Finland thus became intertwined with the debate as did the country’s shifting position as a space for immigration, albeit on a rather modest scale, instead of a space of emigration.

Thus, by analyzing the respectively Finnish- and Swedish-medium national newspapers Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet, we show how circulating discourses intersect with the manifestation of the present language ideological debate on a societal scale. Further research that examines media on regional or community scales where Swedish is dominant (e.g. Korsnäs, Närpes, and Larsmo), in border areas with Russia (e.g. Lappeenranta, Imatra), or in central Finland where Swedish is less visible (e.g. Jyväskylä, Kuopio) would yield additional insight into the full spectrum of localized discourses that are also part of the overall debate. In addition, while we have focused on the process of amplifying and legitimizing



discourses through newspaper texts themselves, insight into a diversity of dis-courses and their negotiation would also be gained through additional research that examines online reader comments on these texts.

In all, global trends in the mobility of people, goods, and practices create novel needs for multilingualism (Coupland 2010; Pennycook 2010), which is reflected clearly in the present debate where historically ordered language relations came to be dislodged and repositioned. Ultimately, the negotiation of societal multi-lingualism in Finland that we have examined here touches upon the heart of lan-guage ideological debate: which languages and linguistic practices are perceived as useful and valuable, what kinds of bi-/multilingualism are valued and validated, and who gets to decide.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Katja Huutokari for her assistance with data collection and man-agement during the early phases of this project. We also wish to acknowledge the Peripheral Multilingualism research project, funded by the Academy of Finland, which supported Sari Pietikäinen’s work on this study.

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Authors’ addresses

Francis M. Hult Sari PietikäinenLund University University of JyväskyläCentre for Languages and Literature Department of LanguagesBox 201 P.O. Box 35 FIN-4001422100 Lund University of JyväskyläSweden Finland

[email protected] [email protected]



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About the authors

Francis M. Hult is Associate Professor in the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University. His recent books include the Handbook of Educational Linguistics (2008, Wiley- Blackwell, with B. Spolsky), Directions and Prospects for Educational Linguistics (2010, Springer), and Educational Linguistics in Practice (2011, Multilingual Matters, with K.A. King).

Sari Pietikäinen is Professor in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä. She is the leader of the 3M Identities in Motion research network as well as the Northern Mul-tilingualism and Peripheral Multilingualism projects. Her recent books include A Path Towards Discourse [Kurssi kohti diskurssia] (2009, Vastapaino) and Multilingualism and the Periphery (2013, Oxford, with H. Kelly-Holmes).

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