University language policy in Estonia and Catalonia. Is there a north-south divide in European higher education?

Abstract

Abstract Within the context of the internationalisation of higher education, language matters have become increasingly prominent for universities across a wide variety of contexts. This has made the higher education domain an attractive site for applied linguists and sociolinguists to investigate in close detail. One relatively consolidated idea is that contexts in which English has made further incursions in universities are more internationalised than those settings where English has penetrated to a lesser extent. In line with that, a supposed north-south divide in European higher education has been conceived of, with universities in the north leading in terms of internationalisation efforts, while those in the south lag behind. In this article, I problematise this idea and suggest instead that a narrower and more focused contrastive analysis between language ecologies across different countries and contexts might be more useful. In doing that, we can thus avoid the dangers of binarism and lumping that can come associated to holding preconceived geographical borders. In particular, the comparative analysis proposed here allows us to highlight two key issues that seem to be highly pressing in present-day higher education domains: the language-ideological and the socio-economic. I build the argument in the paper by utilising empirical material from Estonia and Catalonia, two contexts that have been at the centre of my own work in recent years.