This interview-based study investigates the ways in which various discursive processes within and about Swedish Higher Education (HE) are rendering some value-laden linguistic practices invisible. Focussing on language ideologies, the study demonstrates the affordances of taking a multilingual approach when seeking to respond to the diversification of contemporary HE.
The processes associated with what is termed 'internationalisation' are diversifying the existing linguistic and cultural diversity always already found in HE institutions. This paper investigates the ways in which various discursive processes within and about Swedish Higher Education (HE), which respond to the aforementioned diversification, are rendering some linguistic practices invisible. Previous studies in the field of Language Policy and Planning have tended to focus on the internationalisation of HE with a pre-occupation for opposing linguistic systems, for example, Swedish and English. However, this paper reveals how such dualistic thinking can (re)produce essentialising and highly ideologized monolingual and monocultural categories, over-simplifying what is understood by the 'international' and 'national' in contemporary HE. Yet, as is accounted for in this study, Swedish and English linguistic resources are not the only resources employed in meaning-making and value-laden academic practices in Swedish HE. Rather, understood through the language ideological processes of erasure, iconization and fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal, 2000), hidden multilingual complexities are here drawn out, while, concurrently, linguistic resources are revealed to be regimented according to certain 'orders of visibility' (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam 2017). With data from an interview-based study carried out in a sciences department, with faculty members at different stages of their career and on different rungs of the academic ladder, this study demonstrates the potential in taking a multilingual approach when seeking to better understand the affordances and constraints of internationalisation in contemporary HE.
Keywords: multilingualism, language ideologies, linguistic resources, orders of visibility, parallel language policies.
References: Irvine, J. & Gal, S. (2000) Language Ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities and identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pp. 35-84. Kerfoot, C. & Hyltenstam, K. (eds.) (2017) Entangled Discourses. South-North Orders of Visibility. New York: Routledge.
