Following substantial investments in battery production and fossil-free steel, a few select places in northern Sweden are currently undergoing rapid economic and cultural changes. The aim of this article is to explore the role language education plays for three different groups of (im)mobile subjects - refugees, labor migrants, and cosmopolitan…

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with…

This article investigates to what extent spaces created in the language introduction programme (LIP) in Upper Secondary School in Sweden close or open up for students' varied linguistic resources, to create an understanding of the implementational spaces of the educational environments that the school represents, and of the ideological…

International mobility has caused a need for language education where adults can learn the language(s) used in their new country. In Sweden, the language programme SFI (Swedish for immigrants) provides basic second language education for adult immigrants. For those learners who are not yet functionally literate, basic literacy education is…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

What are the material-semiotic relationships between a language policy and a table game activity in a bilingual preschool? Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the aim of this article is to explore this question, working with both human and nonhuman aspects of the activity, symmetrically, at the same level. The game playing activity takes place at a…

The aim of this article is to describe young children's beliefs about language and bilingualism as they are expressed in verbal utterances. The data is from Swedish-medium preschool units in three different sites in Finland. It was generated through ethnographic observations and recordings of the author's interactions with the children. The…

In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on…

This paper presents results from an ethnographic study of language policy as it is enacted in everyday interaction in two language profile preschools in Sweden with explicit monolingual language policies: English and Finnish, respectively. However, in both preschools, children are free to choose language or code alternate. The study shows how…

This article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers' interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro…

This article presents an analysis and interpretation of language policy documents from eight Swedish universities with regard to intertextuality, authorship and content analysis of the notions of language practices and English as a lingua franca (ELF). The analysis is then linked to Spolsky's framework of language policy, namely language…