TPCS 23: Finnish Culture and Language Endangered: Language ideological debates on English in the Finnish press from 1995 to 2007

By Sirpa Leppänen and Päivi Pahta 

Introduction

In Finland, foreign languages have frequently been at the focus of impassioned public debates – this is evinced in many of the chapters in this volume. In this attitudinal climate English is no exception. In the press, for example, this anxiety manifests itself in frequent avalanches of worry, suspicion and irritation. In these, English is typically depicted as a clear and present danger that can seriously disrupt the purity of the Finnish language and culture. What often seems to lie behind these concerns is a deep-rooted language ideology of the national language/s as a key defining the nation-state and determining national and cultural identity and integrity.

In this chapter we hope to anatomize these discourses of danger about the English language, in order to show the role English has in the hierarchical valorization of languages in Finland. The public discourse we focus on here is newspapers – an institutional discourse arena whose representations of language ideologies can be consequential in the wider society. It is a particularly visible and influential societal forum where the voices, arguments and attitudes of the civil society are expressed, and where “the polity gets involved in shaping policies” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 8). Language ideological issues and debates on the allegedly dangerous impact of English on the Finnish culture and language are at the core of our chapter. More specifically, we look at recurrent themes and topics in the language ideological debates on the dangerousness of English, uncovering some of the recurrent patterns and instalments in these debates. In our discussion of the findings we hope to show how the concerns voiced about English in public intertwine with a worry about the end of the nation, the nation-state and national culture in an inevitable but reluctant transition towards late modernity. As we will show in detail, these issues and debates also bring into focus questions of purity – the foreign language is repeatedly pictured as a force threatening to tarnish the purity of not only the Finnish language and culture, but also that of the nation-state, national identity and even Finns’ minds.

In our analysis we draw on a database consisting of newspaper genres which typically provide a point of entry to language ideological views and debates by a range of social actors: editorials representing the authoritative voice of the newspaper, and letters-to-the-editor in the voice of the reading public. The data was collected within the time span of 12 years extending from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s from Helsingin Sanomat, the leading national newspaper. As a time period in the unwinding of language ideological debates in Finland, this was a particularly interesting one. During this period Finland underwent a series of major political, economic, cultural and linguistic changes which had an impact on the language situation in different societal domains. One of these changes was joining the EU in 1995. For the society as well as for many Finns, this represented a major turning point in the ways in which Finland defined its identity and political role in Europe, marked by a new openness to and allegiance with western Europe. As an event, it generated a great deal of discussion of the implications of the political Europeanization for Finnish society, culture and language/s. At the same time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, processes of economic, political and cultural globalization contributed to the increase of the popularity, visibility, uses and significance of English in such key societal domains as education, media, work and everyday life (see Leppänen & Nikula, 2007, 2008; Taavitsainen & Pahta, 2003, 2008; Leppänen et al., 2011)

How to quote: Leppänen, S., & Pahta, P. (2012). Finnish Culture and Language Endangered: Language ideological debates on English in the Finnish press from 1995 to 2007. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 23).

Read the full working paper here: Finnish Culture and Language Endangered: Language ideological debates on English in the Finnish press from 1995 to 2007.