Sprachenpolitik finnischer Universitäten im Zeitalter strategischer Internationalisierung

Abstract

The Finnish Ministry of Education expected higher education institutions to draw up language strategies during 2009. The aim of the present study is to explore to what extent this expectation was taken into account by the universities. To investigate the state and contents of the language strategies, archival research and surveys were designed. The research questions were: 1) How many language strategies existed until the beginning of 2014? 2) Is there any evidence for cooperation between universities in language strategy matters? 3) Which languages matter strategically? The results show that until the beginning of 2014, 71 percent of the universities had a language strategy. It appears that there was no cooperation between the universities. All language strategy documents indicated a strong emphasis on English for internationalisation purposes without neglecting the legislative regulations for the national languages, Finnish and Swedish. Internationalisation seemed to be equated with the use of English. In most cases, reference to foreign languages other than English was made only vaguely.