Monikielisyys vai ”English only”? : yliopistojen henkilökunnan asenteet eri kielten käyttöä kohtaan akateemisessa ympäristössä

Abstract

The strategic internationalisation of academia has had an important impact on the development of English as the lingua franca in all areas (research, teaching, services and administration) and disciplines of universities worldwide. In this paper, the attitudes of university staff in Finland toward the use of Languages Other Than English (LOTE) were analysed. The data for this study stems from one question in a survey conducted in 2009: “As far as foreign languages are concerned, English is often seen as su#cient in Finnish university contexts. Can you think of any reason why other languages should be used?” 1,991 open ended answers to this question were analysed by means of qualitative inductive content analysis and the distribution of the answers to categories was analysed quantitatively. The results show that the attitudes of Finnish university personnel across all disciplines towards the use of LOTE were overwhelmingly positive, indicating that an ideology of multilingualism was clearly more widespread than an “English-only” ideology.