Background

Finnish-Estonian “close contrastive studies ” (Fi. lähivertailu, “close comparison”) – i.e. investigating how Finns learn Estonian or vice versa, or the study of Finnish-Estonian bilingualism – already look back to a long tradition. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the situation not unusual at universities and other teaching institutions outside Finland and Estonia: teaching Finnish and Estonian side by side in an environment where the dominant language, the language of instruction and the default native language of the students is neither of these two. I am no expert of language teaching, but in my profession, I have to deal with questions of administration, student recruitment and other academic planning and PR activities. For this reason, I try to keep the following reflections on a general level, hoping that language teaching professionals can be motivated to comment on and investigate the questions I attempt to raise in this paper. For a starting point for these reflections, I distributed a preliminary query to two e-mail lists, UKANET (serving the communication between teachers of Finnish at foreign universities and the coordinating organs within the Finnish Ministry o