The making of “the Other” is a social act, comprising the processes of identification and classification as driven by the power relations in the society (Bauman 1991, Jenkins 2008). The term “other languages” is... [ view full abstract ]
The making of “the Other” is a social act, comprising the processes of identification and classification as driven by the power relations in the society (Bauman 1991, Jenkins 2008). The term “other languages” is mentioned in the Finnish Language Act of 2003 (Section 9) to refer to languages other than the two national languages (Finnish and Swedish) and the Saami minority language. The same term is also used as a collective label for language options in online contexts. Finland has become more diverse due to the growing number of migrants arriving from outside the EU. This process of crossing borders generated the need for more languages in public authority websites. The study aims to explore the language selections offered as "other languages" and to find reasons for the differences in their representations.
The analysis falls within the interconnected scope of online Linguistic Landscape studies (Kelly-Holmes 2015) and website design, as the presence, the visibility and the visual positioning of the languages will be studied. The research questions are as follows: 1) How are the “other languages” represented compared to the main language(s) of the websites? 2) What could this imply about the public authorities' language policies and their assumptions about the speakers of the different languages?
The data consists of screenshots and field notes taken during the visits of four official public websites: Health Insurance Institution, Tax Administration, Immigration Service, and a municipality website in Central Finland.
The findings show that the pages published in “other languages” often lack full functionality and make use of less varied multimodal resources than the pages created in the two national languages and in English. Among the languages that fall into this category, the minority and the European migrant languages are usually given more prominence over the languages of the non-European migrants and asylum seekers.
Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press
Jenkins, R. (2008). Social Identity. London: Routledge
Kelly-Holmes, H. (2015). Analysing language policies in new media. In F.M. Hult & D.C. Johnson (eds) Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell
