Language Policy Beyond the State

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introductory Chapter: Questioning Borders

   • Kara D. Brown, Kadri Koreinik, Maarja Siiner

   Pages 1-21

3. Spatial Reconsiderations: State Decentered by Migration and Globalization

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. Priming Language Political Issues as Issues of State Security: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Language Ideological Debates in Estonian Media Before and After the Ukrainian Crisis

      • Maarja Siiner, Svetlana L’nyavskiy-Ekelund

      Pages 25-44

   3. Doing Language Policy: Teasing Out the Tensions for Transnational Scholars in Estonian and Danish Higher Education

      • Josep Soler Carbonell, Merike Jürna

      Pages 45-60

   4. Swedishization or Internationalization? Negotiating the Common Language and Culture in a Swedish-Baltic Financial Institution

      • Maarja Siiner

      Pages 61-80

   5. Emerging Language Political Agency Among Estonian Native Speakers in Finland

      • Kadri Koreinik, Kristiina Praakli

      Pages 81-98

   6. Parental Attitudes and Family Conversational Strategies Shaping the Family Language Policies of Two Estonian-Finnish Families

      • Kristiina Teiss, Sirje Perendi

      Pages 99-122

   7. Young Swedish-Estonian Returnees to Estonia: Reflections on Family Language Policy and a Multilingual Upbringing

      • Anna Verschik, Colm James Doyle

      Pages 123-140

4. Temporal Reconsiderations: State Decentered by Enduring Connections and New Patterns

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 141-141

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   2. Negotiating a Place for German in Estonia: Contemporary Functions, Attitudes and Policies

      • Heiko F. Marten

      Pages 143-162

   3. From Literary Languages to Dialectal Varieties to Microlanguages?: Historical Perspectives on Language Policy Towards South Estonian and Latgalian

      • Catherine Gibson

      Pages 163-182

   4. Policy Drag & Resiliency: Teachers’ Response to Voluntary Language Policy in Southeastern Estonia

      • Kara D. Brown

      Pages 183-200

   5. Official Language Policy as a Factor in Using Receptive Multilingualism Among Members of an Estonian and a Finnish Student Organization

      • Hanna-Ilona Härmävaara

      Pages 201-221

   6. Language as an Object of National Passion: Reflections from Estonia

      • Emilia Pawłusz

      Pages 223-239

   7. Epilogue

      • Lenore A. Grenoble

      Pages 241-245

Language Policy beyond the State invites readers to (re-)consider the ways language policy is constituted, taken up, and researched if we look within and past the state. Contributors to this edited volume draw attention to language policy as always in the making, focusing on agency, on-the-ground practices, and ideologies. The chapters of the book reveal how simultaneous, and at times contradicting, language policies exist within a state and explore the complex roles played by families, businesses, educational institutions, and media in generating and appropriating these policies. 


By moving away from language policy analysis concerned primarily with how official state policies address well-defined language problems, some of the contributions of the volume highlight how the problems themselves can be ideological artifacts or are discursively constructed in language ideological debates that are provoked by changes in the geopolitical situation in the region.  Using qualitative and descriptive research, the book uses Estonia as a setting to examine the ways historic and contemporary populations navigate language policies in both local and transnational spaces. As a whole, the collection speaks eloquently and powerfully to current efforts to understand and map the ways multiple institutions and individuals—not just the state—play an active role in forming and taking up language policies.

• Estonia as part of northern Europe
• borderland Russian-speakers in Estonia
• ecology of language
• ethnography of language policy
• ethnolinguistic vitality in Estonia
• family language policy
• globalization in the former Soviet states
• immigration in the Baltic states
• inter-generational language transmission
• internationalization in Eastern Europe
• language education policy in Estonia
• language policies and nation states
• multilingualism in Estonia
• national identity development and language policy

• Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

  Maarja Siiner

• Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

  Kadri Koreinik

• Educational Studies, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA

  Kara D. Brown

Maarja Siiner, Ph.D., is a research affiliate at the University of Oslo, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, where she studied discourses on dementia and immigrants in the project Language and Communication in Multilingual Speakers with Dementia in Norway. She has previously served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Centre for Internationalization and Parallel Language Use, studying institutional responses to internationalization at the University of Copenhagen. Her previous research includes studies of language management in Swedish multinational companies operating in Estonia, carried out at Lund University and cross-country comparisons of the interrelatedness of language policy developments and the democratization and decentralization processes in Scandinavia and Baltics.

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