“Speak your own language” : On tensions regarding Finnish in Sweden

In this compilation dissertation I examine social tensions that relate to the Sweden Finnish minority and the Finnish language in Sweden. The dissertation is based on critical applied linguistics and I employ various related theoretical notions in the included articles. For the overarching analysis, I employ a conceptualization of language consisting of two levels, namely language as a noun and language as a verb. I examine these levels with the help of Bakhtin’s notions of centrifugal and centripetal forces (1981). In article I I use Richard Ruiz’s orientations (1984) to language policy to compare the policy formulations on the supranational and national levels with the enacted policy on the local level. The analysis indicates that the policy formulations on the supranational level and national level relate mostly to the language as a right orientation in Ruiz’s framework, while the enacted policies in Sweden Finnish bilingual independent schools and in municipal mother tongue instruction lead to differing results. Article II is a linguistic landscape study in which I analyse how a group of activists use different resources to encourage the Sweden Finnish minority to ‘speak their own language’. The data consist of social media posts, media reporting in Sweden and Finland as well as excerpts from forum and comment sections. The social media posts feature stickers with minority specific iconography and Finnish translations of everyday objects in the Swedish linguistic landscape. With the stickers the activists create a moral positioning (Harré & Langehove 1991) which the majority speakers in Sweden and Finland seek to deny by counter-positioning the activists’ efforts. In article III I examine how Sweden Finnish pupils alter their behaviour according to the assumed language proficiency in Finnish of the co-interlocutor. Theoretically the article is based on Canagrajah’s spatial orientation (2018) and appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005). With the help of the theoretical framework, I identify three different peer interaction practises. The findings show that the pupils are aware of each others’ linguistic proficiencies in Finnish and only comment a pupils’ linguistic production negatively if they are deemed proficient. If they are not proficient, they are encouraged. Finally in article IV I examine how and to what extent a group of 6th graders attending a Sweden Finnish bilingual school use so-called shortened infinitives, which is a spoken Finnish feature from the Helsinki region. The pupils use shortened infinitives more often than the standard Finnish forms and mostly as they are used in Helsinki. There are some signs that pupils might be acquiring the shortened form in the group through accommodation. Article IV suggests that the development of spoken Finnish in Finland and Sweden is interconnected. In the overarching analysis I implement the notions of centripetal and centrifugal forces to the results of the articles. The language policies in article I act as a centripetal force that seeks to homogenise and centralise language, while the activists in article II seek do the opposite. Article III shows that proficiency differences in Finnish and linguistic heterogeneity is commonplace and is an example of the centrifugal force. However, some of the pupils in the same group have adopted a spoken Finnish feature that is most prominent in the Helsinki region in Finland, which is an example of the centripetal force