Despite Estonia being ranked among the highest performing nations in the world-wide testing of students, these encouraging results are somewhat overshadowed by the challenge to overcome the divided school system with different languages of learning that impacts crucially on students' social, academic and professional paths. The study examines…

The article seeks to answer four questions: (1) How different are the value worlds in the Estonian- and German-language songbooks used in Estonia 1860-1914? (2) To what extent do the value worlds of songbooks express the ideals of the Wandervogel movement? (3) What is the position of wandering among other values? (4) Is the representation of…

The term 'new speaker' has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the different types of speaker profiles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in…

The paper explores children and youths' perceptions of the reasons for bullying in multicultural schools. How do their different backgrounds explain the variations in those perceptions? The questions will be answered based on data gathered from 9 to 10, 12 to 13 and 15 to 16-year-old students (N = 2781) in Estonia, Finland and Sweden. A survey and…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Võro in Estonia, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools,…

Along with increased international migration, many nation-states are facing the dilemma of embracing a multi-cultural and multi-lingual society while protecting their cultural and linguistic heritage. Non-Anglophone universities are often the sites of this struggle as they aim to become world-class international universities operating largely in…

This article analyses language policies in higher education (HE) in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, as well as the European Union (EU). We take a multilayered approach to language policies in order to illuminate the intertwined nature of local, national, and international language policies in HE. We are particularly interested in the construction of…

The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

In order to reach far in the work for sustainable development, communication in foreign languages prior to strategic decisions is required from international partners. In this communication English has become the lingua franca. Even though the use of EFL (English as a foreign language) is widely spread, it is clear that in some geographical…

The role of English as a global language and its consequences for the internationalization of higher education are matters that have increasingly drawn the attention of researchers from different fields of language and communication. In this paper, an overview of the situation in Estonia is presented. The Estonian context has not previously been…