Language ideologies in a Finnish university student union’s Facebook communication practices

Abstract

This paper examines language ideologies – sets of normative beliefs about language and its speakers – in a Finnish university student union’s Facebook communication practices. Prior research has discussed how today’s Nordic universities appear to be caught in an ideological tension between the preservation of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the pursuit of internationalization through the use of English. We are interested in the case of university student unions in the changing landscape of communication practices today. We analyzed the student union’s Facebook posts using critical discursive psychology. Our analysis identifies the university’s Finnish–English bilingualism as discursively affording an ambiguous kind of inclusion to students as Finnish-speaking/local and English-speaking/international students, and also social media communication as possibly contributing to the inclusion of all students as social media users. We argue that multimodal affordances of social media may act as an alternative discursive resource for inclusive intergroup relations among students in a student organization on an international campus.