The set of processes termed ‘internationalization’ is increasingly making universities worldwide into border-crossing spaces, drawing students and staff from various geographical locations of the world and so transforming universities into sites where abundant sociolinguistic repertoires converge. This paper is concerned with sociolinguistic effects of such transnational academic mobility as they unfold in everyday practice. Using linguistic ethnographic data gathered in Swedish academia, we argue that the sociolinguistic diversity ushered in by internationalizing processes is largely subjected to erasure – ‘the process in which ideology, in simplifying the field of linguistic practices, renders some persons or activities or sociolinguistic phenomena invisible’ (Irvine and Gal 1995, 974). As we will show, a plethora of linguistic resources are being employed in classroom settings, research practices, etc., often facilitated by the use of modern technology such as laptops and mobile phones. Yet, plenty of power-laden practices at Swedish departments take place though Swedish only, which consequently silences many speakers. Those constructed as ‘non-Swedish speakers’ are often referred to as ‘English speakers’ irrespective of their linguistic backgrounds; that is, they are grouped as English-speaking Others from the perspective of the Swedish-speaking majority. This erasure of diversity is an effect of the confrontational discourse surrounding the balance of powers between Swedish and English – that is, the language of the Swedish state, and the language through which globalizing academia increasingly operates. Such linguistic boundary-making, produced and reproduced in scholarly discourse as well as in practice, yield binary divisions which erase multilingualism and ‘hide the fact that these contexts are in themselves heterogeneous and modified by power geometries’ (Paasi 2005, 770). These dynamics are important to understand to avoid implementing a notion of internationalization which is only manifested ‘on the surface’ of an inertly national structure, and where the diversity it engenders – and necessitates – gains a low degree of salience, visibility, and value.
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Paasi, A. 2005. Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces. Environment and Planning A 37: 769– 789.
