Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland by Taina Saarinen

Author:Taina Saarinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030609023
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Pyykkö (2011, p. 26) has, along the same lines, written about the invisibility of language in Finnish innovation policy, where language has in neoliberal terms been hidden behind words like cooperation, interaction and communication. This may reflect the communicative turn in language studies, but it also hides multilingualism or conflates it with English. In Baltic contexts, Estonia has witnessed relatively similar developments (Soler 2019). In Latvia, in turn, the large Russian speaker population has caused different dynamics, resulting in conceptualizing “EU languages” (rather than English) as a way of avoiding talk of Russian, but on the other hand investing in Russian language private tuition programmes while marginalizing Russian in the public sector (Kibbermann 2017; Soler-Carbonell et al. 2017).

In post-nationalist higher education, English has become both a catalyst (in its relationship with other languages) and a metaphor (for globalization and apparent loss of national distinguishing features) in its dynamic with other languages. Hultgren (2019) describes English as “red herring”, referring to the role of English as pulling our attention away from the more topical (societal) issues of power and (in)equality. English, rather than being the cause or the consequence of language dynamics, is mainly a veil that may hinder us from seeing the bigger picture, unless we specifically look behind it. Thus, it is counterproductive to talk about English alone, but to look behind the language at the societal, cultural, political, economic, and knowledge structures that all too often remain invisible when our focus is primarily on language (Saarinen and Ennser-Kananen 2020).

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