The paper explores practices of multilingual text production in a large Nordic university. We focus on the production of a genre used in university communications: the programme curriculum. This is a genre which describes what studies degrees contain, what students can expect to learn and how they will be assessed. It is produced collaboratively by administrators and teaching staff and made available on university websites, thus also functioning as a marketing tool. In multilingual institutions, curricula are typically published in several languages, so their production also involves language versioning.
The paper contributes to the analysis of multilingual universities from perspectives which have thus far received relatively little attention, particularly how the production of multilingualism is regulated and resourced by university management and how different participants collaborate to produce texts. The study was conducted as part of the research project Language Regulation in Academia, which focuses on the dynamic between top-down policy-making and situated forms of language regulation (see e.g. Solin & Hynninen 2018, Pienimäki 2021). In the analysis, we draw on ethnographic and discourse approaches to the study of language policy, as well as the concept of "practiced language policy" (Bonacina-Pugh 2012).
Our data derives from a university where public documents are regularly produced in three languages. The trilingual language policy also affects programme curricula. We explore how the production of language versions is regulated through policy documents, how and by whom the language versions are produced and what languages are visible in published curricula. The analysis illustrates how decision-making about language choice is distributed across different settings and forms of participation. The analysis draws on document data (including language policy documents and university websites) as well as interviews with administrators, teaching staff and translators.
References
Bonacina-Pugh, F. (2012) Researching 'practiced language policies': Insights from conversation analysis. Language Policy, 11, 213–234.
Pienimäki, H-M. (2021) Language Professionals as Regulators of Academic Discourse. Doctoral dissertation, October 2021. University of Helsinki.
Solin, A. & Hynninen, N. (2018) Regulating the language of research writing: Disciplinary and institutional mechanisms. Language and Education, 32, 494–510.
