The Social Status of Languages in Finland and Lithuania

Abstract

This is the eleventh volume in my book series on Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe. I am happy that this volume highlights the ideologically and sociologically loaded topic area of language policy. The Baltic Scholar Kessler and the Finno-Ugrian Philologist Pantermöller study language contacts and conflicts within and across the borders of sparsely populated national cultures in Scandinavia (Sweden and Finland), and the Baltics (Lithuania, Estonia). These European Union member states who, according to Eurostat (May 2019), are the member states at the bottom line in population density of all 27 states, went through complex political and social histories during the last hundred years. As a consequence the population is faced with diverse language options within and across their national boundaries: Languages serve different functions, and have a variant status depending on who chooses which communicative code with whom, and in which communicative context. This fringe part of Europe is also of particular interest to systemic contact linguists since languages of different typologies clash into each other in this part of Europe (Indo-European/Germanic and Finno-Ugric/Finnic languages). On top of that we can encounter clashes between less and more demographically powerful national cum regional languages (Swedish versus Finnish; Latvian/ Estonian/Lithuanian versus Russian), and modern, or even global versus ancestral languages that characterize the language hub (e.g. English and e.g. Sami).The volume stem from a project that empirically, and critically researched language policy in the poly-lingual language cultures of Finland and Lithuania. At the core of the quantitative and qualitative study lies the (semantically) fuzzy concept of language attitudes. Language attitudes, and language opinions, or sentimentalism in the European North/North-East are grounded in political changes and migration before, and after World War II, as well as in the social and economic changes following the break-down of the soviet regime almost thirty years agoThe publication as a collected volume developed from the editors' final project report to the German Research Foundation in 2016/17. The report was supplemented by invited papers from specialists in Baltic, and Finnic language cultures that focus on language choice in varying domains and genres. It is the first empirical study of language attitudes and language policy in Finland and Lithuania in book form.