NNL Pod 13: Why and how is the English language used in the Nordic countries?

Listen to a discussion on how the use of English in the Nordic countries, with a focus on Finland and Sweden, and the consequences of this on immigration populations and identity.

In the thirteen episode, students Gaëtan Gamba and Essi Turva speak mainly to Elizabeth Peterson from the University of Helsinki. Nina Carlsson from Uppsala University, Tuire Liimatainen from the Migration Institute of Finland, and Nicola Witcombe, editor of nordics.info, also join the discussion. This podcast was made possible by funding from the A.P. Moller Foundation.

Sound credits: Summer by tictac9 from freesound.org.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Transcript

00:00:05 Gaëtan

So welcome to this podcast for the New Nordic Lexicon. We are here in Helsinki with students and researchers from Aarhus University, Uppsala University and the University of Helsinki.

00:00:22 Nicola

This is the 13th New Nordic Lexicon podcast on 'why and how is English used in the Nordic countries'. The New Nordic Lexicon is a collection of articles, podcasts, and films based on research about the Nordic region and the world.

00:00:41 Gaëtan

My name is Gaëtan and I'm a master’s student in European Nordic studies here at the University of Helsinki.

00:00:48 Nicola

Hi, my name is Nicola Whitcombe. I'm editor of the research dissemination website nordics.info, which is based at Aarhus University in Denmark and the project manager for the New Nordic Lexicon.

00:01:03 Essi

My name is Essi. I'm from Helsinki, Finland, and here I study European and Nordic Cities. I have previously studied in Scotland and Norway, and I'm very interested in languages in a political context, especially in the Nordic countries. But why not elsewhere as well?

00:01:22 Elizabeth

I'm Elizabeth Peterson, and I'm a sociolinguist and I'm really interested in the relationships between language justice, language equity, multilingualism...

00:01:36 Tuire

My name is Tuire. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and my background is involved in Scandinavian languages and area and culture studies, and I'm quite broadly interested in all kinds of questions that relate to migration, minorities, identities, culture, digital media and language is of course a very, very central part of all these topics.

00:02:03 Nina

And I'm Nina. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in political science at Uppsala University. And I just started a position at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research. And I'm gonna work on a project that deals with language testing of immigrants in multilingual cities. So, in the Nordic states, or Sweden, Finland and Denmark. And I wrote my dissertation on how the politics of immigrant integration kind of creates this monolingual mono-national image of the nation and ignores minority languages and indigenous languages.

00:02:43 Nicola

In the previous podcast we talked more about bilingualism and minority languages, and in this podcast, we're going to talk about English in the Nordic countries and also again a bit about heritage and minority languages.

00:03:00 Gaëtan

So, about this idea of language in the Nordic countries and especially English in the Nordic countries, Elizabeth, your native language is English, and you have lived in Finland for many years. Could you tell us a bit more about your background and your research in general?

00:03:17 Elizabeth

Sure. In fact, the first time I became interested in languages from this perspective was when I was an exchange student here in Finland. I went to one year of Finnish high school, Finnish 'lukio' and that was the very first time I encountered a language attitude about my own use of my mother tongue, which is American English, I think you can hear that the way I speak. And that was that the English teacher in that high school told the other students that they shouldn't talk to me because I was going to corrupt their English, and that in fact, I spoke the wrong kind of English and that, well, I hadn't encountered that before and it was something that really feels like it goes to the heart of who you are, that this is my mother tongue. Like you said, this is a huge part of my identity. So, you might say that that memory stayed with me in a way. And that's actually what I research today, it's how these attitudes, from my perspective, my own experience, it felt like a big deal, but it was actually quite light compared to the extreme injustices and human rights violations that people experience due to their language in the world today.

00:04:24 Gaëtan

Interesting. And you have written and spoken about colonising or decolonizing when talking about English in Finland or in the Nordic countries more generally. Why did you decide to use these terms, 'colonise' or 'decolonize'? And what are their exact definition in this context?

00:04:44 Elizabeth

So, for many years now, we've been talking about the fact that English is a pluricentric language, and that means the language with many homes. Swedish is another example. It has a couple of different homes. English in particular, so many homes, because it has so many different kinds of speakers all around the world. So, for a long time we were talking about, let's sort of celebrate the diversity. Let's talk about the differences. But you know what? That's not enough, in my opinion, because we need to acknowledge and confront the fact that this diversity is not there for pretty reasons. It's there because of exploitation of people. It's there because of really tragic history and colonisation. There's the word you were looking for. So, a language and its history, a language and its culture, a language and its people are never separated, so we can't just talk about the varieties of English. I don't think we should, anyway, without acknowledging and confronting this very tragic history, actually. So, addressing the skeletons in the closet, that's what I mean by that.

00:05:50 Nicola

Could I just step in there? So, I think for non-researchers the word 'coloniser' or perhaps 'post-colonialism' or stuff like that, people think that it's to do with elsewhere rather than within a country's border. So, when you meet non-scholars, is it an easy word to use, 'colonise'? When you're talking about something that's happening inside your own borders and are there other ways of talking about that issue? Without using the word 'colonise' cause it has all these connotations about, you know, abroad?

00:06:29 Tuire

Well, at least I've experienced that it is sometimes very helpful to make a clear distinction between colonialism and coloniality. So, when we talk about colonialism, we talk about or refer to this overseas colonialism. But then coloniality refers then more broadly into the way that we think and how we sort of construct reality and how that builds on this colonial legacy. And even though, for instance, here in Finland, it's this constant debate, if Finland has been part of this colonial system, but still we are Western country, so how we think, how we see the world, how we see differences is affected by this colonial history. So 'coloniality', I think, is a better term to maybe understand this sort of a broader power structures and relations.

00:07:24 Nicola

So, Elizabeth and Tuire, you were both editors of a book published in 2022 called 'Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality', which was that term that you were using there. Can you just briefly tell us what it was about? And perhaps why it was published in English?

00:07:44 Elizabeth

The reason it was published in English is because the press that we use publishes only in English, so that's a simple explanation, but perhaps a more meaningful explanation for this context about why it was published in English is because in a way it's an equaliser. And also, we really wanted to make these stories that are in this book available to a wider audience. We know that people in Finland can read in English, and we've had lots of publications, well, maybe not lots, but we've had several publications about these issues in the Finnish context, written in Finnish and Swedish. We wanted to get these stories out there because we think that it's something that is not widely known, how Finland has participated in these kinds of phenomena. Do you want to add something?

00:08:32 Tuire

Yeah, and I think the whole case of Finland as itself is an important contribution to broader international debate on whiteness and coloniality. So, I think that of course, language choice is crucial as well.

00:08:47 Gaëtan

And how would you say that this colonial experience reflects in practise and everyday life?

00:08:57 Tuire

There is this continuous, not continuous, but this sort of continuing debate about Finland and Finland's role in this colonial system, and of course Finland has a very interesting history. It has been part of, or the Finnish territories have been part of Sweden, then part of the Imperial Russia. And because of that, there is sometimes this kind of narrative of Finland being this oppressed nation that has sort of emancipated and gained its status in the world. So, there is this kind of victim narrative sometimes that you hear, but then on the other hand, when you look at Finland in the sort of modern Western context, you can't ignore that Finland is part of this kind of a, I don't know how to call it...

00:09:46 Elizabeth

That's the coloniality.

00:09:47 Tuire

The coloniality! Exactly. Yeah. So, it's complex, and of course, in political rhetoric, you have people who use these different narratives for different purposes as well.

00:10:00 Gaëtan

Something we talk about also very often, and that thing is the labour market, like how it's hard to enter workforce in Finland if you don't speak the language, and how it might be also used as a tool to kind of select a category of the population or maybe even more specifically, Finnish people and kind of discriminate for other immigrant populations or other. So, would you say that this would be also a manifestation of these colonial practises?

00:10:39 Elizabeth

Yes, yes. Depending on what kind of an immigrant you are to Finland, you are afforded different kinds of opportunities. We all know that. So, I can use myself as an example. I am such a privileged immigrant in this context. I have the luxury of going around in my daily life, speaking my mother tongue. Can you imagine? And I get to do that from my work, I get to do that when I go to the doctor, I get to do that in all these different contexts. It's the very definition of privilege, but I'm really aware of that, and it certainly doesn't extend to other migrant groups, that's for sure. And I think that's what you're getting at.

00:11:22 Nicola

Could I just go back to the book, 'Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality'? Could you just explain briefly what it's about? I know you've explained the background, but if you could just explain briefly what the book is about, that would be great, one of you?

00:11:37 Elizabeth

Yes. So, my own perspective there, my own chapter has to do with the English language. And because of course I'm a linguist, and this deals specifically with the question of coloniality and ties in with what I was saying earlier, that within the context of Finland, it's complicated, but historically speaking, then are there reasons to promote English as a tool of coloniality? So, by which I mean that English in other places in the world, the UK being a prime example, the language is very separated in terms of socioeconomic class, which in turn is linked to race, and access to privilege and so on. Do we want to propagate that kind of a model here in the Finnish context or not? What's lost and what's gained? Do we want to fight a battle that's not ours? We're supposed to be a land of equity here. This is one of the primary ideologies here. This is a just place full of equity and this also applies to the way people speak. But the English language itself is not like that. So, we have some choices to make. Do we perpetuate this divide in English through this kind of coloniality, this notion of coloniality, or do we make the English language itself more equitable in this context? A really important question, I think.

00:12:52 Essi

Do you have any examples of that, like how that could be done in Finland for example, or how that's visible?

00:12:59 Elizabeth

Yeah, I think that is one of the challenges because of course, when English is taught here as a foreign language and there has to be a standard for teaching, it becomes very complex. "Oh, you can just speak English however you want". But again, going back to what I was saying earlier, I think that we're sophisticated enough that we can build in this history, so that people know that when they speak the very most prestigious form of British English, let's say, which is called RP, Received Pronunciation. What it means to speak that, that you have choices here to be made. Do you want to speak that? Do you want to teach that in your classroom? If so, do you understand what kind of history comes along with it? And what kind of human division comes along with it? Or do you want to sound like you are, you know, a Finnish person? Maybe you want to sound Finnish when you speak English. What a concept! That you would sound like, what you are, right? But do we all know that if somebody has too much Finnish accent in the way they speak English, that it's almost even something to make fun of. We have this term "ralli englanti", right, 'rally English'. So, it's something- 'Oh, it's shameful to sound too Finnish'. But maybe we can change our attitudes that, you know, it's English. You have choices. You can show your identity. You don't need to adhere to these norms of use that are brought in from these foreign territories that have a very different kind of system of equality than we do.

00:14:26 Gaëtan

But in the context of when and where, English is used also a lot by for example immigrant populations in order to communicate with the big majority of Finnish speakers. Isn't English used as a tool for more oppressed communities that have been living through colonial oppression, to actually free themselves from this by getting integrated in the Finnish society thanks to English. That my English would not be a necessarily a vehicle of coloniality, but a way to integrate actually in Finnish society for example.

00:15:10 Elizabeth

Yeah, what you're talking about is a phenomenon that we call English as a lingua franca. And it's very well researched. For example, in the University of Helsinki by a number of researchers. So certainly, it is empowering and I think he used the word 'tool' and that's the perfect word to use. So, it's a communication tool. It's seen as something very, very practical, but also something that one can take ownership over without shame. And in this way, it is disassociated from these canonical rules of use. That's one thing that we know about English as a lingua franca, it's that the primary purpose is to communicate. It's not to go by any set of rules, so that is very empowering, isn't it?

00:15:52 Gaëtan

What measure could authorities take in order to restrain English from spreading?

00:16:02 Elizabeth

I hate to say it because, you know, most of our countries have these language boards or national language boards and so on. And their work is very, very valuable. But people speak the way they speak. You can't control it any more than you can control any other kind of human behaviour unless it's criminal, let's say or something. But speaking language is such an expression of identity in your history. I just think the simple answer is that in essence it cannot be regulated, but at the same time returning to what you were saying, that in each different context you have these principles that you go by, and you certainly name some important principles. Do we want to go for equality? Do we want to go for symbolic value? Do we want to go for economy of expression? These are choices that we face in every single situation, and why can't we take it on a case-by-case basis and say, well, what are our priorities here? Do we want inclusivity? Or do we want a symbolic function? And that's not always so straightforward, but these are the questions to ask. That said, I think that in the long term, that why can't we support multilingualism? If we choose to speak English here, I honestly don't know what damage we are doing to Finnish, to Swedish, to Danish, they still exist. We're going to be fine. But these are multilingual societies. They always have been, I think, demonising or weaponizing one language against another. That is not what we want to do. Languages go with their speakers and in demonising a certain language, in essence, what we are doing is demonising certain people who are associated as the speakers of that language. We don't want to do that. We can exist together.

00:17:42 Nina

And I could add to the regulation issue that language is regulating all the time, everywhere by legislation, by requiring certain language knowledge for citizenship, by having schools in certain language, by having healthcare in certain language. So, this is the way societies are already regulating. Like, why don't we speak English in Finland? Because Finnish has a very strong status here. Of course you can't throw regulation from above-tier. What people actually choose to do in their lives fully. But for example, we think about Ireland, where huge state efforts of revitalising the Irish language are going on and have been going on for a long time. And it's still a minoritized language, so English is dominating, you could say, pretty far. Pretty much the Irish society. And then you have, like, French that has a pretty strong policy for protecting the French language, so for example going from regulations, how much English or foreign music you're allowed to play on the radio and how much French music you have to play on radio. So, there is a number of regulations that do have an impact. It's an interaction between the bottom-up and top-down dimensions, of course.

00:19:08 Tuire

I would also like to add because you, Elizabeth, touch upon the issue of also languages having these symbolic dimensions and values and then when we talk about Nordic cooperation, it is also something that cannot be ignored. Of course you have these top-down measure measures, but then at the same time within the Nordic context, it has usually been similar culture and also the shared linguistic heritage that has been set to generate trust, which is then a key component of Nordic cooperation. So, in that sense Nordic languages have this continued relevance even when you would consider them more from this kind of symbolic perspective. So, you can also look at languages from very, very different angles as well. And also, when you link them to culture values, they are often quite hard, maybe to talk about, because we are talking about very abstract kind of things.

00:20:08 Gaëtan

So, around the line of these different questions, it is important to protect cultural heritage and language is a part of that. But how do we balance protection between different cultural heritage? And also, often protection can lead to advocating one cultural heritage over another, playing a more nation state perspective. So how do we deal with this issue?

00:20:40 Tuire

We're not talking about a pie, so the metaphor of pie, so I didn't think that when we talk about linguistic rights or cultural rights that it means, that if we give equal rights to someone, that it's less rights for us. So, it's not a pie. You don't lose part of your pie. But I think it's important to also think about this question from that perspective as well. So, I don't know who's actually losing something if we give rights to someone else.

00:21:12 Nina

I agree with Tuire, and I think it's also important to remember that on a global scale, the languages that have a nation state like Finnish, Swedish, Danish. They are not very vulnerable. But there are thousands of languages that are actually very vulnerable for disappearing. So, these are stable and rather big nation states. And these are big literal languages and also globally respected. And you can study these languages at universities abroad. So, this is very rare for languages, and I think maybe we have to focus on the power dimension when we speak about cultural heritage. So, what about Yiddish or Greenlandic or Sámi or Romani that we have talked about before? And that are spoken in these nation states, they are actually vulnerable in a different way. But there are also groups who live in the Nordic states who maybe speak languages that don't have a nation state like Romani or languages like these that maybe want to develop these languages in this context and that needs support for that. And I think also we have to be careful with how the far right is kind of appropriating this course of being vulnerable and kind of identifying as minorities, we see this in the Nordic countries, we see this in the Netherlands. So, we are vulnerable in front of the immigrants who are coming here and speaking English or speaking Arabic and so on. And here I think it's important to be very careful with who is speaking from which position and what is actually going on.

00:23:04 Gaëtan

So, if you take a concrete example with, I think that it was in the Uusimaa region here in Helsinki, that they were talking about introducing English as an official language. So what would be your perspective on this example? For example, do you think it's a good idea? Do you think it's a more a colonial idea in some sense? What do you think? Of course, when you look at it from an economic perspective, of course it's beneficial that you can use English as an official language if you apply for jobs or employers and so on. But then of course, especially the case that you mentioned like introducing English as an official language always raises these counterarguments.

00:23:52 Tuire

Because of what also Nina said that we have these national languages that are perceived as being threatened in the face of globalisation and immigration and so on. So, you have this sort of symbolic and economic forces maybe, discussing with each other with questions like this.

00:24:12 Nicola

Nina has also written about how there's this overriding assumption that each nation is associated with one language. Perhaps particularly from outside the Nordic countries, people assume a level of homogeneity, particularly.

00:24:29 Elizabeth

I can see it both ways. I think it is interesting that, you know, for Finnish speaking Finns, obviously in particular, there's kind of a one-to-one relationship in a way of 'I'm Finnish, I'm a Finnish person, therefore I speak the Finnish language'. It's seen as being such a unique cultural property, such a unique cultural heritage, whereas for an English speaker, because of the reasons I was saying earlier, you don't have that to the same extent. So, in a way, I can understand where people are coming from, where there's this sense of, you know, 'I'm Norwegian and therefore I speak Norwegian'. And because there is this idea of a nation state in one language. So, I kind of get it, but at the same time I think it's a rather dangerous concept because it can lead to oversimplification and what Nina was just describing, and with the pie as well, right? Where this pie metaphor, it really oversimplifies some really complex realities. We'll just leave it at that.

00:25:32 Gaëtan

I think the Swedish minority in Finland, the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, is considered the richest minority in the world overall because usually minorities go along with language minorities. Go also with a sense of oppression and they often have a lower economic code status than the majority language. The tables are kind of reversed.

00:26:05 Elizabeth

There are other examples in the world, so I would be kind of cautious about saying things like the most we have examples of, you know, Spanish speaking populations in places like New Mexico who have been there since before the United States was the United States, and they have a lot of prestige in that context. But certainly, the generalisation that you've made is absolutely true, that these things tend to go hand in hand. Being a language minority and being part of a marginalised group.

00:26:32 Tuire

Being part of the Swedish speaking community, it links to prestige, power and so on. And of course it has very evident historical reasons. Because of Finland being part of Sweden for so many centuries, and what basically happened when Sweden lost Finland in early 19th century was that Swedish still continued to be used as the main language of communication in Finland. It was the language of administration, also the language of educated class, and then Finnish was only used in oral communication or in religious context, and it's then of course an important part of Finnish nationalism that you sort of raised the status of Finnish language into this modern national language. So of course, this whole issue has historical roots. But then at the same time, if we talk about Swedish speakers being this elite, let's say, we easily also go into stereotyping. And I think it's good to remember that Swedish speakers are also like just normal people, kinds of people who might not be in positions of power and so on, but this is definitely this image that people often tend to have.

00:27:45 Elizabeth

It's more of an urban image with the Helsinki area. Also, one thing you didn't mention, Tuire, was that it's also been an economic factor. So, for example, migrants who would have come to Finland from Russia and Eastern Europe, 100-150 years ago to the Helsinki area, if they wanted to be involved in local economics, they became Swedish speakers when they moved here, because that's where the money was to put it bluntly.

00:28:16 Gaëtan

So many thanks to all of you. Thank you for your time and interesting discussions.

00:28:23 Nicola

Thanks very much. The students you heard in this podcast were Gaëtan Gamba and Essi Turva. Other students helped out with this podcast, including Chance Dorland and Sóley Eliasdottir from Aarhus University and Emma Healey from the University of Helsinki. The researchers in this podcast were Tuire Liimatainen and Elizabeth Peterson from Helsinki University and Nina Carlsson from Uppsala University. My name is Nicola Whitcombe and I'm the project manager of the New Nordic Lexicon and the editor of nordics.info. The New Nordic Lexicon is brought to you by the team behind nordics.info at Aarhus University in Denmark with students and colleagues from across the Nordics and beyond. The New Nordic Lexicon is supported by the A. P. Møller Foundation and grew out of the university hub, Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World which was supported by NordForsk.