The Englishization of Nordic universities: What do scientists think?

• Published in: European Journal of Language Policy
• Main Author: Hultgren, Anna Kristina
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: https://oro.open.ac.uk/56979/; https://oro.open.ac.uk/56979/1/Hultgren2018EJLP.pdf; https://oro.open.ac.uk/56979/7/Lanvers%20and%20Hultgren%202018%20Foreword%20EJLP.pdf; https://doi.org/10.3828/ejlp.2018.4

In the context of an ongoing Englishization of higher education in the Nordic countries, much of the language policy discourse has centred on the notion of “domain loss”, a diffuse and under-defined concept based on the idea that English encroaches on the status and functionality of the national languages. In response to such concerns, “parallel language use” has been launched as a language policy concept to ensure the continued use and functionality of the national languages. In such language policy debates, however, the voices of the scientists themselves are rarely heard, which prompts questions about the extent to which alarmist discourses about threats to national languages have any purchase among the key stakeholders in this domain, i.e. the scientists themselves. Within a theoretical framework of critical language policy, this study investigates the attitudes to Englishization among Nordic scientists, and reports on the findings from a questionnaire of over 200 physicists, chemists and computer scientists working at universities in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The overarching aim is to investigate if concerns about “domain loss”, operationalised here as a lack of national language scientific terminology, are replicated by scientists. Findings suggest that Nordic scientists do believe that local language terminology is missing, but the extent to which they find this problematic is less clear. Some possible reasons for this apparent lack of concern among scientists compared to other participants in the debate are discussed, as are the implications for language policy. Dans le contexte d’une anglicisation continue de l’enseignement supérieur dans les pays nordiques, une grande partie du discours sur la politique linguistique s’est centrée sur la notion de “perte de domaines”, concept diffus et sous-défini basé sur l’idée que l’anglais empiète sur fonctionnalité des langues nationales. En réponse à de telles préoccupations, “l’utilisation parallèle des langues” a été lancée en tant que ...