6. Challenging Constitutional Bilingualism with ‘What if …’: Counterfactual Histories and At-risk Minorities in Finland

Abstract

Introduction: At-risk Minorities in Different Language Policy ScenariosThis chapter analyzes language ideologies in Finnish language policy through a lens of risk. More specifically, it presents a meta-analysis of Finnish language policy spanning a 100-year period since 1917, discusses this policy against the concept of risk (Beck, 1992) and examines the implications for language minoritized groups since the establishment of Finnish constitutional bilingualism in 1919, when Finnish and Swedish were designated equal status as national languages. In our discussion we utilize the analytical tool of counterfactual histories (see Villstrand & Karonen, 2017 for a discussion), a form of historiography that attempts to answer 'what if' questions known as counterfactuals (Rodwell, 2013;Bunzl, 2004). Through this, we attempt to illuminate the risks of language policy for different minoritized speaker groups by presenting an alternative to the mainstream analysis and thus opening historical developments and processes for critical scrutiny from a new perspective.At the heart of our counterfactual alternative is an imaginary constitution declaring Swedish a (regional) minority language rather than a national language, a viable scenario in the geopolitical situation of the post-independence and post-civil-war Finland of 1919 (Saarinen & Ihalainen, 2018). By discussing this counterfactual, we aim at problematizing the often assumed and self-evident language policies, particularly from the point of view of vulnerable minoritized speaker groups.