LANGUAGE PLANNING IN THE REALITY OF MULTILINGUALISM (THE CASE OF FINLAND)

The paper focuses on the issue of status language planning under
the conditions of multilingualism. The author points out two
major types of difficulties with regard to status language
planning. The first relates to social and ideological matters and
concerns the purity of the language existing in the community.
The second one relates to legal matters and is contingent to
observing the compliance with several international agreements
and treaties.
The objective of the current research paper is to make a review of
those language status planning measures in polilingual
environment. Language status planning is considered as certain
measures of the authorities with regard to establishing the status
of a certain language on certain territory of state. Language
planning is just one type of language policy as the latter concerns
not only planning of status of some languages but also language
in the education sphere and language corpora.
The subject matter of the research became solely the status
planning towards minority languages (besides Finnish as a title
and national language of the Finnish republic) under the
condition of multilingualism. Moreover, the country has long had
the long history of bilingualism (i.e. two official languages
Finnish and Swedish) and, being a part of the EU, it faces
migration, and as a result, challenges of a big number of
languages on its territory. Bearing this in mind, the methods
included the analysis of the Finnish Republic in-laws (particularly
Language Laws, Saami Languages Act etc.) and also
International treaties which Finland signed as a contract party.
Having analysed all the minority languages that have been
reflected in Finnish Language Acts, the paper also shares results
of questionnaire of the Russian people living in Finland on their
attitude of recognising Russian language as a minority language
in Finland. The paper also contains results of the questionnaire
conducted through surveymonkey.com among Russian
community living in Finland. The survey of the Russian language
in Finland has shown that the recognition of one’s own language
as a minority language is not necessary, which is due to the
functions performed by the language
A secondary perspective of the research was to identify what
other (minority) languages are reflected in the language policy of
Finland and what languages should be reflected as minority ones
if they have not received such a status so far.
As the analysis of the research shows, the difficulty in
implementing language policy in conditions of multilingualism is
also connected with the fact that any recognition at the official
level of a certain language situation component, to some extent,
affects the status of the national language of the country. It is
difficult to accept something new and alien, which would
immediately become an integral part of everyday life «on legal
grounds». As far as the notion of minority language is concerned,
it is essential to underline that official recognition of a language
status may not be an adequate measure of a language policy
Moreover, in conditions of multilingualism, in all probability we
are dealing with a situation that can be characterized as
polyglossia. By analogy with this definition of diglossia,
polyglossia can be defined as such a type of multilingualism, in
which there is one language that should be used, for the most
part, in official situations, and several low languages functioning
in everyday communication. Another resolution, that the review
under question implies, is that we should reconsider the notion of
‘minority language’ per se. Perhaps, description of the spheres of
language use (sometimes on official grounds) can provide for
more practical application than designating a status of a minority
or a majority language.
Keywords: multilingualism; status planning; language policy;
minority language; Russian language in Finland