English alongside Finnish national languages: Towards flexible multilingualism

Presentation by Paula Rautionaho, University of Eastern Finland.

The role of English in Finland, as elsewhere in the Nordic countries, has changed considerably over the past decades. Complementing previous basic research and adopting a data-driven approach, our study investigates the extent to which English is used in three key areas of the Finnish society (public administration, business and industry, higher education and science). Three types of primary data were collected for the study. Digital questionnaires were used to collect responses from all three strands of the survey (n=1750), statistical data on language choices in theses were requested from universities, and a large born-digital social media material was added to the public administration data.

The results show that there are few signs of marginalisation of the national languages, Finnish and Swedish, because of the influx of English. The public discourse focuses mainly on possible threats of English to the national languages, but this is not corroborated in the findings. The results show that English is one of the key languages of multilingual Finland, but its role and importance varies considerably from one sector to another. Restricting its use could cause significant harm to international cooperation and make it more difficult to attract and integrate international talent, labour, and students into Finland. The report makes ten policy recommendations to ensure that English can co-exist with the national languages in Finland.

In this presentation, I will introduce the study design and implementation, and present the main findings together with the policy recommendations.

Find the report [in Finish]