Image 1: An example of a generic “no dogs allowed” sign

Signs can be iconic, symbolic or indexical. An icon is something that resembles its target, a symbol symbolizes something via learned sociocultural agreements, and an index points to something by e.g. causal or spatial contiguity.

For example, the sign in Image 1 utilizes all of these three types. The black silhouette of a dog is an icon as it resembles a (generic terrier) dog, the red circle with a slash across symbolizes prohibition and the location of the sign indexes the location in the real world where it applies.

A fascinating aspect of dog signs is how they index various sets of dogs. Some dog signs index the concept of all dogs, as in “all dogs are barred from here” while other dog signs index a particular dog, as in “beware of this (dangerous) dog”. Also note how the intent of the poster of a “no dogs allowed” is to keep an area free from any canines, but the dog-walking sign-reader transforms the meaning of this general dog prohibition to specifically indexing their dog(s). On the other hand, someone without a dog might simply ignore such a sign or infer that the area they will enter will be dog free – just as the sign poster intended.

Image 2: An aerial photograph of a typical area of the suburb. Modern houses, farmed fields and nature are in close proximity.

The geocultural context of the signs

The suburb we are interested in is a neighbourhood of about 3,000 residents within the city of Espoo in Finland and is going through (or is finishing the process of) gentrification. The buildings in the suburb are largely row houses and town houses, though there are also a few larger apartment buildings.

In Finland it is common that apartment buildings and other larger housing complexes are governed by a company, somewhat similar to a homeowner association, whose stocks are tied to the apartments themselves. The size of the apartment building or apartment building complex can have a strong effect on communications. The system may feel more like a friendly coalition of neighbors or a large faceless housing institution. This creates a gradient on how top-down or bottom-up the communications from the board of governors feel.

The organization level of most housing communities in this suburb is at the level of maybe a dozen families. In the context of dog signs this idea should be combined with the fact that, except for nearby forests and dog parks, a large part of dog-walking happens near one’s own home. Indeed, the canine signage we observe here is more akin to “friendly reminders among neighbours” than what Halonen & Laihonen describe seeing in Jyväskylä with their 100k+ residents. This observation is further supported by the fact that most of the dog signs were unique, implying that there was no coordinated action of purchasing similar signs by a big actor.

Image 3: Two classical “no dogs allowed” signs fixed on fences. The one on the left has been slightly painted over, which is both a sign of age and of not being considered so important to warrant greater care or cleaning. The one on the right, though not apparent in the image, is quite small and hard to notice also due to faded colors.

We think this communality is also a large factor on why we have very few threatening or even strongly commanding signs here – as noted by Halonen & Laihonen, commands or threats can be damaging to social interactions and with the signs being more easily connected to individuals they might be detrimental to neighborly relations. Instead of a “top-down” or “bottom-up” approach or a private/public/commercial division, we think that here a relevant angle is about the “facelessness” or “anonymity” of the sign. It is easier to “hide” behind a sign if it has been put up by a bigger actor that you are a part of, like the state, than behind a sign that you have clearly put up yourself.

The signs

We have discovered 15 types of dog signs in the suburb. We can’t claim our search to have been exhaustive, but it has been very extensive. Out of the 15 types one had five instances surrounding a housing block and another had three instances on the three gates of a public playground. The rest of the sign types were unique.

Image 4: Two signs showing a clearly altered stance of the dogs due to urination or defecation.

Out of these 15 types 7 were direct “no dog excrements” signs totaling 11 instances out of 21 instances in total. The other signs were divided between signs forbidding dogs, signs reminding to keep dogs on a leash or not letting them out of a gate, a singular sign warning of a dog and then a few signs that had a larger message of which “no dogs” constituted a part. The “no dog excrements” signs were the clear majority of sign types and instances, and furthermore they were the most prominent. The other types of signs we discovered only after having walked past them on several occasions.

Our focus here will be mostly on these “no dog excrements” signs. We’ll discuss the other types of signs only shortly, mostly in how they supplement and contrast the “no dog excrement” signs.

“No dog excrements”

Image 5: A “no dog urination” sign on a fence. The context makes it clear that the fence functions not as the boundary of the prohibition but as the target of the forbidden urination.

Halonen & Laihonen discussed the class of “no dog excrements” in the context of “potential impurity and dirt”. We again refer to their work for more detailed description of this context, but note that with the signs we observed we feel that the question is less of the impurity and behaviour of the dog, and more about reminding the owner about their excrement-related responsibilities. Halonen & Laihonen mention that visually such signs are often similar to “no dogs allowed” signs with an addition that signifies either defecation or urination. However, in many of the examples we’ll see here the whole stance of the dog is usually different and thus helps to emphasize that it is not the whole dog but the excrement that is subject to prohibition.

There are quite strong cultural norms in Finland to collect after your dog, especially outside of forests, but it is not so rare for people to allow their dogs to urinate on fences or other vertical surfaces next to streets. This can cause discoloration, smell or other damage to these surfaces in the long run, even if a single event seems quite harmless. We feel that this aspect of “dogs often urinate on vertical surfaces” slightly alters how we should interpret the placement of these signs. Often fences and gates symbolize (and function as) boundaries between spaces, and a “no dogs allowed” sign placed on a fence tends to mean that it is from within the fenced area that dogs are barred from. But in this setting a “no dog urination” sign on a fence does not mean that the fence is a barrier that limits the effect of the sign to within, but instead is a generic vertical surface that the owner wants to protect from dog urine.

Image 6: Sign whose style is cartoonish rather than realistic or iconic, perhaps aimed to soften the message?

The styles of the signs vary from simple crossed out silhouettes of dogs to more detailed cartoony versions. The most sturdy sign, a metal plaque bolted onto a stone wall, also had the most cartoony and colorful illustration – perhaps this was to reduce the severity of the sign arising from the heavy installation? None of the dog icons used in the signs seemed threatening in any way, nor did they face the viewer or seem to pay them any attention. Their passivity with respect to the sign viewer also seems to emphasize the fact that it is not the dog’s behaviour that is targeted here but that of the dog’s walker.

Textual messages, when used, tended to be very polite. Any text usually employed the Finnish grammatical construction of softening an imperative “Clean after your dog!” to a more questioning “You’ll clean up after your dog, won’t you?”.

Image 7: Two signs with text in them, both using very polite forms of addressing the viewer.

We note that the leftmost sign with text here is the sole dog sign we have seen, in this suburb or elsewhere in Finland, where the collection of dog excrement by an owner is depicted directly.

Other signs

The signs not directly related to dog excrements were much more varied. They ranged from official signage from the city of Espoo, which we think reflects less on the local culture, to clearly self-made notices stapled or taped to whatever surface was convenient.

Besides two examples – one of them a public notice on dog leashing situated on a road leading to a large forest, and a “Beware of an attack dog” sign within a private property – the signs tended to continue the theme of friendly messages between neighbours. This was reflected both in the style, language choices and style of the signs.

Conclusions

Image 8: Example of a miscellaneous sign

Halonen & Laihonen found clear differences on what aspects of the interactions between humans, dogs and properties are restricted in different settings. Compared to their observations in the urban cityscape of Jyväskylä, we feel that in our suburb there is a much stronger emphasis on reminding the dog-owners that they have authority and responsibility regarding their dogs’ behavior.

We furthermore think that there is a considerable effect in play with regards to the level of non-anonymity in these signs – the signs are quite strongly connected to small-ish communities who might not want to jeopardise their neighborly relations by using angry commanding signs.

In future, we hope to extend our work by contrasting the dog signage found here to signage found in some other suburb with differing level of housing communities. Another related question we are interested in is if the amount or style of the dog signs is dependent on their location with respect to “outside visitors”. Is there a noticable difference on roads that e.g. lead to forests or dog parks, thus being used more by people who are not immediate neighbours?

We conclude by agreeing with Halonen and Laihonen about the fact that something like dog-signs that might on the surface seem quite insignificant can reflect interesting things about the local cultural landscape.

References

Halonen, M., & Laihonen, P. (2019). From ‘no dogs here!’ to ‘beware of the dog!’: restricting dog signs as a reflection of social norms. Visual Communication, 20(4), 501-526.
Laihonen, P. (2016). Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia. Language Policy, 15(4), 373-391.

Diego Marani’s novel New Finnish Grammar (translated by Judith Landry from the Italian original, Nuova Grammatica Finlandese) has won multiple awards and has already been reviewed many times. The (English language) reviews discuss Marani’s fascination with language in both this and his other novels, mentioning his professional background as a translator and Europanto, the “mock” language he created. The novel has even been reviewed in the Australian Journal of Linguistics (Libert, 2014).

As the glowing reviews indicate, while the novel indeed discusses language, its structure, and acquisition, it does so in a poetic and engaging way. However, even more striking for me were the links between language learning and migrant identity. This really is a story about language on the move. As I read about Sampo’s emotionally charged and difficult journey to rediscover his lost language and identity, co-narrated by Friari, who reflects on his own experiences as a migrant, I began to consider it a metaphor for the migrant’s journey of building an identity and sense of belonging in a new place, all while adopting a new language. Sampo’s struggles learning Finnish and trying to find his place in a country he is supposed to come from but of which he has no memory, and his striving for authenticity as a speaker (and thus a member of the society) are beautifully portrayed throughout the novel:

My words betrayed my outsider status: my very voice gave off sounds that did not ring true, like a cracked glass. The language did not flow with ease; I had to construct each word carefully before pronouncing it, laboriously seeking the right amount of breath, the correct pressure of the lips, sounding out my palate with my tongue in search of the only point which could produce the sound I was looking for and then turning it into the right case before actually delivering it up…. It seemed impossible to me that everything should be played out within those fractions of a millimetre, that a segment of muscle, if too tense, should alter a meaning completely, that one puff of air too much, or too little, should be enough to cause me to be mistaken for an Estonian or Ingrian, or indeed break off the thread of meaning entirely.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s famous 1896 painting, The defense of the Sampo (Source: Wikipedia)

Reading the novel also encouraged me to learn a little bit about Finnish history and led me to consider Sampo’s individual journey as representing, or at least being similar to, Finland’s recent history. I realized that the novel involves multiple references to language (and identity) on various levels.

In Finland, Sampo’s language acquisition continues with the assistance of his new friend, Koskela, a somewhat eccentric priest. Koskela helps him learn the language by telling him about Finnish history, sharing his thoughts on geopolitics, and through the Kalevala, a collection of epic poems from Finnish mythology and folklore, which was compiled in the 19^th century after being passed down orally through songs.

The Kalevala constituted an important tool for developing and protecting a Finnish national identity against Swedish and Russian influence, as Karner (1991) argues. It was published at a time when Finland was emerging from 600 years of Swedish rule, which ended with (semi-autonomous) integration into the Russian Empire. Despite such a long period under Swedish rule, the Finnish language had largely survived, with only around 14% of the population speaking Swedish. However, Karner argues, Finland was lacking a clear national identity. The Kalevala came to form a pivotal role in the construction of this national identity in what was otherwise a void of “we are neither Swedish nor Russian”. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot, who collected the folklore from rural Finns throughout the country, and published it in 1835, the epic soon became famous throughout Europe, and regarded as constituting complete and “authentic representations of Finnish history: heroes, customs, and religion” (p. 159).

Therefore, the Kalevala forms an important parallel or analogy in New Finnish Grammar: much like Sampo who has no memory of his past, the Finnish nation relies on reconstructing a set of Finnish folktales to reclaim and reconstruct a past Finnish identity, bypassing the preceding 600 years of Swedish rule. In fact, even Sampo’s name itself comes from the Kalevala. As the priest explains to him, the Sampo was a magical and much-coveted object throughout the mythical stories. However, once again resembling Sampo’s own story, nobody is quite sure what it was.

Poster for the 1959 Russian film “Sampo” based on the Kalevala (Source: imdb)

In both cases, the Finnish language is the crucial conduit to reconstructing identity and a sense of history. Language and emerging identity are interconnected and interdependent in both the individual and national. In Finland’s case, in the 1800s, elite Finns spoke Swedish, and Finnish had been maintained through the peasant communities. The Kalevala’s fame and acceptance as an authentic artefact of Finnish history and culture created a renewed value in the Finnish language. Therefore, acquiring and using Finnish was an essential part of national identity formation (Karner, 1991, 159-160).

Likewise, for Sampo, a crucial step in recreating himself, fulfilling his yearning to uncover his past and thus learn who he is, is to learn Finnish. This is a monumental undertaking that he documents throughout the journals that form the medium through which the novel is presented. As he sits watching the priest Koskela discuss the Kalevala in a Finnish that is much too fast and complex for him to understand, he reflects:

I had grasped the bare bones of it even if much escaped me, above all those strange words, those fantastical objects whose shape the pastor outlined vainly with his hands: I had never seen anything like them. But I had been captivated by seeing the sounds forming themselves in his mouth, to be turned into words, then melt away. When I could not understand them, I listened to them like music, a fascinated witness to their fleeting life. How many words needed to bring a man to life!

Language, and the Finnish language in particular, is therefore a fundamental part of Sampo’s struggle to rediscover himself. Set against the bleak backdrop of World War II Finland, it is far from an easy exercise, and in the end – without revealing too much – not a very successful one either.

Diego Marani’s acclaimed novel is therefore much more than an essay on language learning. He seamlessly threads together different languages and identities as they operate on different scales: the individual migrant language-learning struggle, with that of national discourse creation about language and identity against the background of sweeping geopolitical change. While the novel is full of struggle, these engaging themes and the poignant, near-poetic way the story is told (even in its English translation) make reading New Finnish Grammar both a pleasurable and fulfilling undertaking.

References 

Karner, T. (1991). Ideology and nationalism: the Finnish move to independence, 1809-1918. Ethnic & Racial Studies. Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 152-169.
Marani, D. (2011). New Finnish Grammar (trans. J. Landry). Sawtry, UK: Dedalus Books.
Libert, A.R. (2014). Book review of New Finnish Grammar. Australian Review of Linguistics. Vol. 34. No. 2, pp. 292-293.

Related content

Reading challenge

• One orientalism or many orientalisms?
• Why are you not citing any African female expert?
• The devil’s handwriting
• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Finnish

• Are Finns saying no to Swedish
• Pronunciation: A matter of life and death
• Cleaning work: a stepping stone or dead-end job for migrants?
• Revaluing minority languages

Fictional accounts of language learning

• Two caravans

The 16th International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML XVI) will be held at University of Jyväskylä Language Campus

The 16^th International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML XVI) and the 34th Summer School and Conference of Applied Language Studies will be held in Jyväskylä and Närpes, Finland, August 28-30, 2017.

Conference theme: Revaluing minority languages

Minority languages have long been used by different groups of social actors for identity and community building purposes, such as the symbolic, material, and political mobilisation of linguistic and cultural rights. Currently, under changing political, economic and cultural conditions around the world, minority languages are subject to multiple, overlapping and even contradictory discourses and practices of valuation and revaluation.

The peripheral position of minority languages, as structured by nation-state logics, and the central role endowed to them in the political projects of various minority groups are now complexified by both the increasing economic value of minority languages as a resource of distinction and authenticity, and by the intensified mobility of languages and their speakers. Some of the consequences of this complexification result in re-evaluating the relationship between minority and migrant languages and the trajectories of so-called “new speakers” of minority languages.

ICML XVI will address critical questions such as how minority languages are valued, by whom and under what conditions.

The conference is open to researchers, students and stakeholders from across the multidisciplinary field of minority languages.

Academic Programme

In addition to the talks delivered by plenary speakers, the programme will consist of panel discussions, paper and poster sessions, colloquia and workshops.

Plenary speakers:

• Professor Helen Kelly Holmes (University of Limerick, Ireland)
• Professor Ingrid Piller (Macquarie University, Australia)
• Director Robert Adam (University College London, UK)
• Professor Sari Pöyhönen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

Pre- or post-conference workshops will be organized by plenary speakers.

Invited panels

• Historical language minorities in Finland and neighboring countries
• Immigration and integration in the Swedish speaking regions of Finland

Further information

The submission of proposals for papers, posters, colloquia and workshops within the research theme Revaluing Minority Languages will open in January 2017 and closes on February 28, 2017. Visit the conference website for regular updates on ICML XIV. The conference organizers can be contacted at icml2017@jyu.fi or on Twitter @ApplingJYU #ICMLXVI

Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory!

The state of language learning in Australian schools is dire. This weekend the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article entitled “Why students are turning away from learning foreign languages.” According to figures offered in the article, language learning in Australia might well be described as moribund: today only around 10% of HSC students study a language other than English (LOTE); that’s down 30% from the 1960s when about 40% of Australian high school students studied a LOTE. In 2015, out of a NSW HSC student population of over 77,000, only around 7,000 took a LOTE.

The article explains this sad state of affairs in a number of ways:

• Australians think knowing only English is just fine and everyone is learning English anyway
• There is a lack of continuity in language programs
• Language teaching in schools is tokenistic
• Minimum class requirements of 15 students work against languages
• The small number of required HSC subjects works against choosing a language

Overall, the take-away message of the article is bleak: “That message [=that languages are useful] is really not cutting through.”

A hard-working, passionate and dedicated high school LOTE teacher forwarded the link to the article to me with this question:

What more can us teachers do to change the Monolingual Mindset?!?!

The answer is really quite simple:

Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory!

We don’t leave it up to students whether they want to study maths, English, sciences or sports. We consider these subjects part of the core curriculum. A LOTE needs to be a required part of a well-rounded education in the same way that these subjects are.

Sadly, our politicians seem incapable of even imagining this simple solution. The objection comes in the slogan of “the crowded curriculum” – focussing on literacy, numeracy, the sciences and whatnot simply leaves no space for language learning, or so we are told. Our prime minister sums up Australia’s linguistic tunnel vision on his blog:

Learning any language at school is valuable but difficult because there simply aren’t enough hours in the school calendar for most students to achieve any real facility – as many Australians have discovered when they tried out their schoolboy or schoolgirl French on their first visit to Paris! (Malcolm Turnbull blog)

What the prime minister fails to realize is that this is not a language education problem but an Australian problem. In NSW, for instance, a LOTE is compulsory for only 100 hours in Year 7 and 8. That is insufficient time on task and, indeed, a pointless exercise. It does nothing for students other than instil a sense of linguistic inadequacy in them. No one achieves fluency in another language in 100 hours, particularly if those 100 hours are delivered in bits of two hours each, spread out over a school year.

But just because Australian curricula are designed in a way that makes language learning a pointless exercise for most students, does not mean that this is true of all language learning in school: while most Australians “on their first visit to Paris” may well be struggling linguistically, most international tourists who come to Australia are coping just fine on their first visit to Sydney. This is not because it is easier for a French, German or Japanese school kid to learn English than it is for an Australian school kid to learn French (or any other language) but because their school systems invest heavily in English language teaching.

Does making a language other than English compulsory throughout schooling come at the expense of a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths)?

Australian PISA scores in international comparison (Source: news.com.au)

No, it clearly does not, as a comparison with Finland shows. The Finnish education system is widely regarded as one of the best internationally, and regularly outperforms Australia in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings on numeracy, sciences and reading scores. In Finland, all students take two compulsory foreign languages throughout schooling; 44% of Finnish school students even study a third foreign language and 31% a fourth. In fact, all countries that outperform Australia on PISA – which measures numeracy, sciences and reading – and most countries that perform more or less the same, have at least one compulsory foreign language in their school system.

In these countries, language learning is a core plank of education. Not surprising given the many benefits of language learning (I won’t reiterate the multiple benefits of language learning here but if you wish, view a short overview or listen to a more detailed explanation). It is, in fact, not true that the message of the benefits of language learning “is really not cutting through.” It may not be cutting through to our politicians but it is cutting through to parents: recent research conducted by Livia Gerber, for instance, found that Australian parents very much wished to give their children “the gift of bilingualism.” Unfortunately, our public schools are failing them in this aspiration.

Further evidence that Australian families want high-quality language education for their children comes from the fact that families who can afford it increasingly choose the International Baccalaureate (IB) offered by private schools over the HSC. In the IB, all-round academic excellence includes the study of a second language. Universities value the all-rounder academic excellence of IB graduates, too: IB scores systematically translate into higher Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) scores than HSC scores. By contrast, choosing a language option in the HSC can work against high-achieving students because some languages, including those where the student is deemed a “background speaker”, scale poorly.

In sum, high-performing private schools following the IB system have a compulsory additional language; internationally, compulsory additional language learning is the norm, including in some of the world’s most highly performing educational systems. So, why not in Australia’s public schools? Why do we accept the linguistic myopia of our political leaders who can’t seem to imagine high-quality language education as a core plank of academic excellence?

Kifibin’s workplace was a big event centre, which was open to the public only once a week

Let me at once introduce you to the main character of this blog post: Kifibin. He is a Ugandan man in his mid-thirties currently working as a cleaner in Finland. His story includes many characteristics typical of migrant cleaners’ trajectories: he began cleaning work while studying on an international programme in a Finnish university, and he would now like to learn more Finnish and move on in his career, but he is struggling to get the opportunity to do so. His case is also typical because there are many African men in the Finnish cleaning industry who are over-educated for the job they are doing.

Kifibin moved to Finland in 2010 to study on an international Master’s programme in the natural sciences. He had completed his Bachelor’s degree and worked in the water industry in Uganda but then wanted to take his studies further. At that time, there were no tuition fees in Finland but the cost of living was high, so Kifibin tried to find a job and finally got part-time cleaning work.

Since he planned to stay in Finland, Kifibin took two beginner-level language courses (A1 and A2 in the European Framework of Reference) at the university. I was teaching the second of these courses and noticed that Kifibin was the most active student in the group, and he attended every lesson, that is, three times a week. He dreamt of becoming a university teacher and researcher. After finishing his programme, he tried to go on to doctoral studies but did not get funding. Nor did he get any other employment opportunities in his field, so he continued cleaning, working now for two cleaning companies, and meanwhile tried to learn more Finnish in order to get access to Finnish society and, particularly, to the broader labour market.

Kifibin mostly cleaned in big, empty spaces

Cleaning is a so-called entry-level job, where students and newly arrived immigrants get their first chance to work. In Finland, as in many other Western countries, cleaning is the most common job for immigrants. The language barrier is often regarded as the main reason for migrants’ difficulties getting a job. It is doubtful, however, whether migrants working in low-paid low-skilled jobs really do have any opportunities to move on. My PhD tackles this question by exploring the opportunities cleaners have for learning the language of their new country.

Private cleaning companies offer their services to companies and public institutions (like schools and hospitals) and cleaners often work on various sites. Here, the focus is on the workplace where Kifibin worked in the mornings: a large event centre, where a big sporting event is organised every week. It has restaurants, cafés, stables, toilets and locker rooms. I followed Kifibin’s work there for nine days in the spring of 2013, making field notes, recording some of Kifibin’s encounters with other people, and having discussions and interviews with Kifibin and with people we came across during his daily routine.

Kifibin cleaned a cafeteria every morning at 6 am before it opened

I was surprised how alone Kifibin was at work. He was the only cleaner working in the event centre, which was open to the public only once a week. He therefore worked mostly in closed, empty spaces. Cleaners usually work outside opening and office hours, as it is easier to clean empty places. I always had my audio-recorder with me but some days I did not get to record anything: besides greetings, there really was no interaction. No coffee breaks with work mates, no short chats in the corridor, no phone calls.

Once a week, however, Kifibin’s supervisor came to tell him about any extra tasks he had to do or other changes in the cleaning routine, and sometimes a restaurant manager, who was the contact person between the event centre and the cleaning company, exchanged a word or two with Kifibin. However, she mostly spoke English to him. In an interview, she explained why she was not in regular contact with the cleaner:

Actually the cleaning is outsourced and the supervising is outsourced, too, so it should disturb our work as little as possible so to say. So the cleaner should be like very invisible. […] And of course I need to contact their managers too so that the billing patterns and other stuff will be correct.

When the floor is being washed, it is difficult to stay in the same place as the cleaner

The restaurant manager’s words reveal the complexity of privatization and sub-contracting: she had to contact the cleaning company rather than tell the cleaner directly of any changes. Kifibin was not part of the event centre’s work community. At the same time, he was isolated also from his own work community, and did not meet his co-cleaners regularly.

Kifibin had no longer time to take any language courses as he cleaned from 6 am to 2 pm in this workplace and, besides, worked all evening for another cleaning company. That is why he tried to learn Finnish during the workdays, despite his isolation. He had asked his supervisors to use Finnish instead of English with him, and he tried to learn from the instructions they gave. Partly because of our teacher–student relationship, Kifibin asked me a lot of questions about the Finnish language during my fieldwork days. He also tried to read notes and signs in the workplace and he listened to the radio while cleaning:

There are few people around, and I’m always alone so I get to listen to the radio almost every day. So that has also been good for me to learn different phrases or even as well listening, especially listening, and trying to understand different topics when people are talking about different situations.

Kifibin took photos of signs that he tried to use for language learning at his workplace

Kifibin thought he had only limited possibilities to develop his language skills at work; he mostly learned to understand, not so much to produce Finnish. A year after this fieldwork, in 2014, Kifibin took a National Certificate of Language Proficiency test. He passed the intermediate level, which is required for getting Finnish citizenship (equivalent to level B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference). However, he is still stuck in cleaning work.

The precarious state of affairs in the Finnish cleaning industry became evident during the period of fieldwork when the client company cancelled the cleaning contract, after getting a better offer from another cleaning company. That is why Kifibin’s workplace changed when he had been cleaning there for seven months. Because of the fierce price competition in the cleaning industry, cleaners’ working hours have been cut to a minimum. This makes cleaning work both physically demanding and insecure. Cleaners need to be efficient, flexible and able to change their routines whenever their company loses an old contract or wins a new one.

In Finland, those immigrants whose residence permit is dependent on a specific minimum number of working hours often need to stay in cleaning jobs no matter what. For migrants like Kifibin, cleaning might turn out to be a dead-end job rather than a stepping-stone to a better one.

***

This study is part of the research project Finnish as a work language: A sociocognitive approach to work-related language skills of immigrants, funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (University of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages, PI: Minna Suni).

Details about this case study on language learning in cleaning work are available in Strömmer (2016).

***

Strömmer, M. (2016). Affordances and constraints: Second language learning in cleaning work Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-0113

Bilingual Swedish-Finnish monument in Helsinki commenmorating globally beloved children’s author Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn (Source: vanderkrogt.net)

50,000 people have signed a petition against mandatory Swedish classes in Finnish schools, triggering a parliamentary debate on the issue.

To assess the likely outcome of this, it’s instructive to consider some details of the sociolinguistic context (both historical and contemporary). Currently, Swedish first-language speakers make up approximately 6% of Finland’s population of five-and-a-half million, whereas the figure for Finnish sits at around 90%. These figures are almost exactly reversed in the Åland Islands (a small autonomous Finnish region located between Sweden and Finland), where Swedish is the only official language.

By Finnish national law, Swedish instruction begins at the latest in the three years of lower secondary school, with a minimum of 228 hours of instruction over those three years. Provision in upper secondary schools varies greatly, and can be as low as 16 hours total. As a result of this variation in demography and education, levels of proficiency acquired in Swedish are very mixed. There is also a good deal of resistance from pupils who become disinterested in Swedish, most notably in those areas where Swedish use is low.

Now consider the historical context. From the Middle Ages until the 19th century, Finland was ruled and governed as a part of Sweden. During this period, especially the later stages, Swedish was the language of the ruling class. In 1809, Finland was conquered by Russia, but still retained Swedish as the language of administration, justice, and higher education.

During the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Finnish gained ground in social and official domains due to growing nationalist sentiment. The first language law providing equal status for Finnish and Swedish was approved in 1902. Finland gained independence in 1917; and its current constitution came into effect in 1922, declaring co-official status for Finnish and Swedish (partly in order to see off Russian). In Finnish society today, Swedish is generally spoken more in the coastal southern, south-western and western regions, as well as in larger cities due to migration.

The petition reflects heated civic debate with passionate arguments on both sides. Ultimately though, it seems likely that the Finnish Parliament will not actually grant the wishes of the petitioners. There are several reasons…

First and most obvious is the co-official status for Finnish and Swedish, enshrined at the highest level in the national constitution. Mandatory Swedish education was not explicitly specified in the constitution, but subsequent laws have formalised that requirement. Whether constitutional amendments were deemed to be necessary, or just repeal of individual laws, decisive consensus would be needed from Finnish MPs – in a relatively diverse multi-party system ill-suited to radical change.

Second, mandatory Swedish in education began with a compromise in the 1970s involving reciprocal mandatory Finnish in Swedish-speaking municipalities – and so any change could affect both languages, which may be unappealing to Finns and seen as a risk to national unity.

Third, Finland is a signatory of the Declaration of Nordic Language Policy which aims to strengthen the teaching of Scandinavian languages. Finnish is not a Scandinavian language, and although Finland is a Nordic country (along with Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden), it is not consistently seen as part of Scandinavia (which tends to refer to just Denmark, Norway and Sweden) and so this could be seen as weakening Nordic ties – one may also speculate about Finnish consequently losing favour in Sweden’s schools, where it is taught in many border and coastal areas.

So, radical change may seem unlikely. Nevertheless, having said all this, it is worth pausing for a moment to assess the weight of opinion in this petition. The Finnish Parliament’s established threshold of 50,000 signatures might seem modest, but that is almost 1% of the Finnish population – the equivalent of requiring around 600,000 signatures in the UK, or around 3 million in the USA. For further perspective on this weight of opinion, the most signed petition on the UK’s official petition site currently has 266,327 signatures – around half the level of support for this Finnish poll by proportion of the population. So this is no fringe movement. Meanwhile, the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity runs periodic surveys showing broad support for removing the mandatory provision of Swedish. Then there’s the conspicuous rise of the nationalist ‘True Finns’ party (a bulwark of the anti-compulsory Swedish campaign), who now hold about a fifth of Parliamentary seats.

The lively critiques of mandatory Swedish range from utilitarian critiques of the usefulness of Swedish globally, all the way through to conspiratorial grumblings about powerful shadowy Swedish-speaking élites skewing Finnish corporate hiring practices. This latter aspect is troubling not least because it is so reminiscent of the sorts of malevolent conspiracies peddled elsewhere throughout history, about minorities seen as secretly pulling invisible strings.

In the end, the petition, the right-wing electoral upsurge, and the heating up of this old debate, could just be a historically familiar insular reaction to economic woes. It could just be a cloud that lifts with economic recovery. Nevertheless, that recovery is not expected imminently: real-terms declines in earnings are projected for years to come in Finland. So, at the very least this debate will lumber on for some time. Add to this the growth of migration to Finland – in particular Russian-speakers, projected to outweigh Swedish-speakers by 2050 – and the debate becomes even more complex and diffuse.

Whichever route Finland eventually chooses, it is unlikely to resolve the debate definitively. Finns are a judicious and cautious people. The trajectory of the debate can be summed up by an old Finnish proverb, which roughly translates as ‘better to go a mile in the wrong direction than take a dangerous shortcut’.