Abstract
Language policy has an impact both on societies and on individuals, especially in contexts where negative ideologies toward minorities and minority languages may exist. A functional language policy protects a minority and allows it to develop its culture and language, while an ineffective policy might cause irreparable damage and lead to language attrition and even complete loss of language. The development of Finnish in Sweden from a language policy perspective has been fairly positive since the mid-1990s, especially when it comes to the establishment and strengthening of the legal and regulatory support in international conventions and domestic legislation. Despite these improvements there have been practical negative developments, which are symbolised in the closing down of a bilingual independent school in Gothenburg in 2016. The closing of the schools signal opposing tendencies in the treatment of Finnish in Sweden. In this paper I will examine how supranational and national language policies are implemented locally in Gothenburg and how this implementation reveals how well the policies function and what role ideologies play in the implementation. I discuss how different levels of policymaking and application contribute to the current status of the Sweden Finnish minority and Sweden Finnish as a minority language by employing Richard Ruiz’s three orientations to language planning (Ruiz 1984; Hult and Hornberger 2016) in tandem with Irvine & Gal’s concept of erasure and critical discourse analysis. I exemplify how the language policies work by studying interviews and media reporting from the field. I examine how the different discourses are in conflict with each other and what ramifications these discrepancies result in.
Highlights
With the Council of Europe’s and UN’s status-building work, linguistic rights are portrayed as human rights, which has influenced states to protect their respective minorities and their languages with language policy at least to some degree
When it comes to the relationship between the majority language and minority languages in a state, a fair and successful language policy may be the only way to guarantee the survival of minority cultures and languages
The main body of language policy mostly follows the statecontrolled paradigm of linguistic human rights
Summary
With the Council of Europe’s and UN’s status-building work, linguistic rights are portrayed as human rights, which has influenced states to protect their respective minorities and their languages with language policy at least to some degree. Not following the rule was one of the issues for which the Schools Inspectorate criticised the S-FG; the document stated multiple times that the pupils did not receive instruction through the medium of Swedish the amount they “had the right to” (Skolinspektionen 2016a: 10) Adhering to this rule in practice is more difficult than it might appear since, according to my informants, some of the classes in the former Sweden Finnish school were shared with different grades which makes the process of counting hours and the percentage difficult. Instead of fulfilling their commitments towards the national minority language, Finnish is currently allowed only to exist in MTI classes with heterogeneous groups, not providing with enough teaching time and having few teachers
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