The internationalisation of higher education in two different contexts: Catalan and Estonian sociolinguistic perspectives

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and Ideological Orders and the production of Bilingual Subjects. In A. Jaffe (Ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 119–145). New York, NY: Oxford University Press] and attitudes towards the different languages present in their immediate contexts. In particular, we compare the University of Tartu (Estonia) with the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), analysing several key parameters. The purpose of the comparison is to contrast, from a sociolinguistic point of view, the higher education setting of two medium-sized language contexts in Europe [Vila, F. X., & Bretxa, V. (Eds.). (2015). Language policy in higher education. The case of medium-sized languages. Bristol: Multilingual Matters] with different demolinguistic and language political features. The results show that both institutions adopt a similar stance in connection to their respective national language (a protectionist attitude), but they take different approaches towards the other societal language and English. We read these differences in light of the broader historical and socio-political backgrounds, which we suggest are reflected in the microcosm of the universities here analysed.