“I know that the natives must suffer every now and then”: Native / non-native indexing language ideologies in Finnish higher education

Abstract

This article examines the construction of“native”and“non-native”English use in Finnish higher education. Previous studies on the Finnish situationimplicate not just language ideological but political hierarchies which favour stu-dents from the traditional, hegemonic“Inner circle”countries such as the UnitedKingdom, United States, Australia, Anglophone Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.This hegemonic position of the inner circle variants is being challenged by anemerging normative ELF ideology. Our article tackles the meeting point ofthese ideological positions. We aim to understand how native English speakerideologies might be changing as a result of globalization. We have combineddata from our individual research projects, based on interviews with studentsand staffwith a variety of L1 backgrounds at two Finnish universities and oneuniversity of applied sciences, and using particularly the data extracts whereconstructions of native/non-native appear regarding English. Our results indi-cate that while there are strong norms still in favour of native-like English,different political and pedagogical factors are challenging the native norm.We conclude by discussing the potential implications of this development tolanguage policies in the internationalization of (Finnish) higher education.