What about Swedish? Internationalisation, Societal Responsibility and National Languages in Finnish Higher Education

Abstract

The chapter discusses discourses of “language” indexing social tasks of universities. We are interested in how talk of “language” is used to index the political, economic, educational, cultural etc. nature of higher education; in other words, what we talk about when we think we talk about language. We are mainly focusing on the position Swedish in the tensions of national language policies, higher education policies and internationalisation. In the chapter, we show the various ways in which higher education policies and language policies are intertwined, producing both intended and unintended language policy outcomes.