Language planning and national identity in Sweden: a ... · Language planning and national identity in Sweden: a performativity approach ... issues of language, culture and society.

© Tommaso Milani. Not for citation or distribution without permission of the author. 1

Language planning and national identity in Sweden: a performativity approach

Tommaso M. Milani

1. Introduction

Most of the existing body of literature on language and national identity in Sweden is

based on the assumption that language and national identity are pre-given categories. The

focus of analysis is either on the role played by language in the nation building process (e.g.

Teleman 2003) or on the function of language as a marker of ethnic and/or national identity in

different historical periods (e.g. Oakes 2001). These studies are in line with the traditional

theoretical approach to language planning. This scholarship (Fishman, Ferguson & Das Gupta

1968; Fishman 1974; Tollefson 1981; Cooper 1989) underscores the intentionality of

language planning at the same time as it circumscribes planning to top-down, legitimate and

authoritative decisions made by certain institutions of power with regard to the status, the

corpus and the acquisition of a given language. As Blommaert points out (1996), traditional

language planning is characterised by an organic view that treats languages as unproblematic

gifts of nature, non-arbitrarily linked to ethnic differences. According to this view, linguistic

differences are treated as ethnic differences: language always marks one’s ethnicity and

individuals have one, and only one, ethnolinguistic identity.

By contrast, the present study takes up Blommaert’s notion of language planning as “a

discourse on language and society, containing ideological assumptions of various kinds and

evolving in a particular socio-historical and political context” (1996:200). Drawing on

Foucault’s notions of power and discourse (1972, 1998 [1978]), this alternative approach

extends language planning to include all statements on language and society that circulate in

specific historical, socio-political and cultural contexts, at the same time as it ties language

planning to power as a multiplicity of force relations emanating from innumerable points.

Within this framework, language is no longer viewed as a mirror or marker of one given


national identity, nor is national identity viewed as the construction around one given

language. Rather, language, nation and national identity are treated as discursive constructions

within specific historical discourses of power.

By applying performativity theory (Butler 1990, 1993, 1997) to the issue of language

planning and national identity, one could claim that language planning as a discourse on

language and society is not merely ‘constative’. In fact, language does not represent a neutral

object described in discourse. Rather, language planning is ‘performative’. In fact, language is

the object of discourse at the same time as it is used to produce ideologically loaded

categories (e.g. nation, official language, etc.) through which human beings organise their

thoughts and their social lives (Billig 1995; Silverstein & Urban 1996:12; Gal & Woolard

2001).

The terms constative and performative were originally coined by the British language

philosopher J. L. Austin in How To Do Things With Words (1962). Austin’s main goal was to

illustrate that speech can be analysed not only from the point of view of what information it

communicates, but of what acts it performs. In order to substantiate his argumentation, Austin

drew a distinction between two types of utterances: constatives and performatives. A

constative is an utterance that conveys information. A performative, on the other hand, is an

utterance that “is, or is a part of, the doing of an action” (Austin 1962:5), as in the case of “I

name this ship Queen Elisabeth” and “I do” (uttered during a marriage ceremony). According

to Austin, while constatives can be true or false, performatives can be ‘happy’ (felicitous) or

‘unhappy’ depending on the presence or absence of a set of conventions in certain

circumstances.

Drawing on Austin, the American philosopher Judith Butler applies the notion of the

performative to gender, and inaugurates performativity as a mode of analysis or approach to

issues of language, culture and society. As Butler states:


“gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes […] Hence

gender proves to be a performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported

to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who

might be said to pre-exist the deed. […] There is no gender identity behind the

expressions of gender; […] identity is performatively constituted by the very

“expressions” that are said to be its results” (Butler 1999 [1990]:33)

Performativity aims to illustrate that categories such as subject, sex, gender, and identity are

not pre-existing entities, the cause or the origin of certain practices, but rather the effect of

institutions, practices and discourses within specific power relations. While most

sociolinguistic scholarship is concerned with actual, observable performances and their

indexical relationship to one or several given subjects, performativity shifts the focus from

language as the mirror of gender, age, ethnicity, and nationality to language as generative of

categories, discourses, and practices (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxix). At the same time,

performativity does not treat the subject as a pre-given entity. Rather, performativity seeks to

unveil the process through which the subject comes into being, by pointing to the link

between what is observably performed and what is not or cannot be performed (Butler

1993:95).

By exploring language planning debates in Sweden during 1970-2003, the present paper

seeks to investigate two issues: 1) the mechanisms through which language planning as a

discourse on language and society operates in a specific socio-historical context, and 2) the

relationship between language planning and national identity. The paper argues that these two

issues are interrelated and can be understood by way of reference to three semiotic processes

which constitute the core of performativity: 1) censorship, 2) interpellation, and 3) iterability.

Traditional accounts on the topic have underscored the absence of language planning and of

traditional national identity in Sweden until the mid-90s (Teleman & Westman 1997;


Teleman 2003), followed in the late 1990s by a nationalist revival mirrored in the draft action

plan to promote the Swedish language (SOU 2002; Oakes 2001; Oakes in press). By contrast,

a performativity approach illustrates, on the one hand, that language planning as a discourse

on language and society was present even when it was said to be absent. On the other hand, it

shows that national identity is not a pre-existing reality whose presence or absence is mirrored

in discourse. Rather, national identity is a dynamic reality that is produced in discourse and

depends on the interplay of a set of historical, ideological and socio-political conditions.

The following section (2) will present a historical overview of language planning

activities in Sweden during the period 1970-2003. The overview is carried out on the basis of

a corpus of documents containing: 1) government directives, legislative proposals, laws and

official reports related to home language teaching, second language teaching and status

planning; 2) the essays in Språkvård (Language cultivation), the official publication of the

Swedish Language Council, and the essays in Språk i Norden (Languages in the Nordic

Countries), the official publication of the Nordic Language Council. Policy documents and

the official publications of the Swedish and the Nordic Language Councils have been chosen

in order to shed light on the language debate both at the political and the academic level.

Section 3 goes on to discuss the data of the corpus in the light of performativity theory, with

particular focus on the production of Swedish national identity through the processes of

censorship, interpellation and iterability. Moreover, building on the Swedish data, Section 3.2

calls for a slight modification of performativity theory in order to account for the interplay

between multiple parallel discourses. The paper ends with a conclusion in Section 4.


2. Language planning in Sweden

2.1 The absence (1970-1990)

A review of the Swedish legislation shows that the Swedish language is never explicitly

mentioned as the official or national language. Moreover, there are only few regulations

concerning the status and the use of the Swedish language in official domains. An explicit

reference to the Swedish language can be found in the Patent Law (patentlag, 1967:837) and

in the Patent Promulgation (patentkungörelse, 1967:838). They both require public documents

concerning patents to be drafted or translated into Swedish. An implicit reference to the

Swedish language can be found in the Administrative Procedure Act (förvaltningslag,

1986:223). According to paragraph 7 of the act, a public authority shall “endeavour to express

oneself in a comprehensible way”. No mention is made to what language the authority shall

use. The assumption that the Swedish language is de facto the language of public authorities

emerges implicitly from paragraph 8 of the same act which prescribes the aid of a translator or

an interpreter in case the authority “is dealing with someone who does not have a command of

the Swedish language”. Similarly, the Administrative Court Procedure Act

(förvaltningsprocesslag, 1971:271) and the Code of Judicial Procedure (rättegångsbalken,

chapter 33, paragraph 9) allow translations of documents that the court receives or sends out.

The interesting aspect that emerges from these documents is that the Swedish language is not

only an implicit presence, but also that this presence is made possible by way of reference to

“someone who does not have a command of the Swedish language”, namely the immigrant or

the foreigner.

Immigration and the immigrant represented two of the major topics in the academic and

political debates in the 1970s and 1980s. Although immigration was not a new phenomenon

for Sweden, the immigration flows in the 1970s and 1980s were different in nature and

volume from those in the 1950s. While in the 1950s immigration was numerically limited,


and the effect of Swedish economic expansion which needed to recruit foreign labour in order

to be sustained, immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s were numerous. Moreover, their presence

was not required by the needs of the Swedish industry. Rather, they were fleeing their

countries mainly for personal, economic and political reasons. While immigrants were

expected to be assimilated into Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, the nature of the new

immigration flows brought on the abandoning of assimilationism in favour of multicultural

policies in the late 1970s (SOU 1974; Hyltenstam 1996a, 1999a).

As far as language is concerned, in the late 1970s and 1980s Swedish academics became

interested in the field of bilingualism, second-language acquisition, language acquisition

planning, and language contact. Several debates emerged: on the right of immigrants to

acquire their ‘home language’, on semilingualism, on the instruction of Swedish to adult

immigrants (hereafter SFI), on the instruction of Swedish as a second language, and on

Rinkebyswedish (Rinkebysvenska), an ideologically laden label used to define the varieties of

Swedish spoken by teenagers with immigrant background in the Stockholm suburb of

Rinkeby (Hyltenstam 1996a; Stroud & Wingstedt 1998; Stroud 2004a; Stroud 2004b).

Another aspect that characterised the academic language debate in the 1980s was the

relationship between English and Swedish. In 1981 the project “English in Sweden” (EIS)

was started with the aim to explore uses of and attitudes towards English loanwords in the

Swedish language (Ljung 1986; Ellegård 1989). The results of the project were presented at a

conference held in 1985 under the title “English in the Swedish language as a language

cultivation problem”. The conference gathered together representatives of Swedish language

planning agencies, academics, journalists, and translators, and its proceedings were published

in an issue of Språkvård in 1986. As the title highlights, the focus of the conference was

exclusively on issues of corpus planning (in Swedish språkvård, language cultivation). In fact,

the lectures dealt with the influence of English on the Swedish vocabulary (pronunciation,


spelling, and grammar), in different linguistic areas (translation, daily press, mass media, and

the school system). Only Catharina Grünbaum made a mention of issues of status planning. In

her talk, Grünbaum pointed to the problems which may occur when entire linguistic domains

(e.g. natural sciences, trade and industry) “become permeated with English”. However, in

referring to the fear that Swedish would become a “sort of half-English”, she assured that “it

is not a real danger for our linguistic identity” (Grünbaum 1986:24).

2.3 The presence (1991-2003)

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Sweden considered the membership in the

European Community (which became the European Union after the Maastricht Treaty in

1991) as non-incompatible with its policy of neutrality. After the announcement by the

Swedish Government that Sweden should seek membership, the Prime Minister, Ingvar

Carlsson, submitted Sweden's application in July 1991. The negotiations, which commenced

in Brussels in February 1993, took almost a year, and an agreement between Sweden and the

European Union was signed at the summit meeting on Korfu in summer 1994. The question

of membership was finalised in a referendum in which 52.3 % of the voters were favourable

to membership, 46.8 against, 0.9 per cent blank. The decision was formally taken by the

Swedish Parliament on 15 December 1994.

The debate on the accession to the European Union (hereafter EU) generated anxiety

among Scandinavian academics about the destiny of Swedish and the other Scandinavian

languages in an integrated Europe (Eriksen 1992; Venås 1992; Teleman 1992; Stenbäck 1993;

Venås 1995). In October 1992, Ulf Teleman, Chairman of the Swedish Language Council

(Svenska språknämnden), delivered a lecture at the annual meeting of the Council, where he

examined the possible linguistic scenario following Sweden’s entry into the EU. Drawing on

the assumption that there is a formal equality but an actual inequality between the official


languages in the EU, Teleman envisaged the possibility of a development towards an even

stronger dominance of English, French and German in the EU institutions at the expense of

‘smaller’ languages such as Danish and Swedish. In the same year appeared two

groundbreaking works on the spreading of English as a global language and on language

endangerment: the book Linguistic Imperialism by Robert Phillipson and the article The

world’s languages in crisis by Michael Krauss. While the discussion about English and

Swedish revolved around problems of corpus planning in the 1980s (see 2.1), in the 1990s

academics shifted their focus to status planning issues, namely the ‘threat’ of English as a

global language, and the loss of functional domains (Phillipson 1992; Teleman & Westman

1997; Hyltenstam 1996b). Phillipson (1992) argued that English could be considered a

second, rather than a foreign language in Sweden, while Hyltenstam (1996b) discussed the

possibility of a development towards a diglossic situation with English as the high variety and

Swedish as the low variety.

Two relevant issues emerge here. First, English as a global language, conquering

functional domains, represents a threat to the future and the existence of Swedish. Second,

Swedish becomes one of the official languages of the EU, as an effect of Sweden’s

membership. However, Swedish occupies de facto the position of a minority language in

comparison to other larger EU languages, e.g. English, French and German (Teleman 1992;

Hyltenstam 1996b, 1999b).

Even politicians became concerned with the status of Swedish as one of the official

languages in the European Union. For example, in the legislative proposal advanced by Ylva

Annerstedt and others (Folkpartiet – the Swedish Liberal Party) it is stated that “Swedish

shall be one of the official languages in the EU. Individuals shall be able to participate in

politics at the European level irrespectively of their language knowledge” (1992/93:U514).

Similarly, the legislative proposal advanced by Marianne Samuelsson and others (Miljöpartiet


– the Green Party of Sweden) suggests that “Sweden ought to strive to uphold the equal status

of Swedish as an EU language and to oppose any proposal to limit the number of working

languages” (1994/95:U502).

Only five months after Sweden’s official membership in the EU, the Swedish

government appointed an official investigation which resulted in a report with the title

“Swedish in the EU” (Svenskan i EU, SOU 1998:114). The aim of the investigation was to

explore “the measures that need to be taken in the Swedish public administration and in the

EU, in order to secure the quality of Swedish EU-texts” (Dir. 1995:81). Furthermore, the

investigation should propose “which claims should be made on the use of Swedish as a

working language in the institutions of the EU” (ibid.).

The language issue acquired even more salience in the political debate in 1997, when

the Swedish government gave the Swedish Language Council the task of drawing up a draft

action plan for the promotion of the Swedish language. As stated in the government decision

(Regeringsbeslut 1997-04-30), at the centre of the decision lay those very concerns expressed

by academics about the future of the Swedish language in relation to the impact of “an

increased European and global integration” (ibid.). In the Draft action plan (Svenska

språknämnden 1998), the Swedish Language Council identified two main goals for Swedish

language planning: 1) Swedish should be a complete language and capable of supporting

Swedish society (samhällsbärande)1; 2) Swedish should remain an official language in the

European Union. Through an analysis of the history and the organisation of the language

planning authorities in Sweden, the Language Council pointed out that the status of Swedish

as principal national language has always been taken for granted. However, the Language

Council underlined that the status of Swedish is no longer obvious as a consequence of the

strong Anglo-American influence. Therefore, the Language Council recommended that the

1 The adjective samhällsbärande poses translation problems. It can be rendered by ‘the capacity of a language tosupport society’ (Nigel Musk, personal communication).


status of Swedish as the principal language (huvudspråk) should be ratified by the law, in

order to guarantee the use of the Swedish language in all official domains.

On the basis of the proposal of the Language Council, the Swedish government

recognised the necessity to continue the work about the promotion of the Swedish language

(Prop. 1998/99:1). In October 2000, a parliamentary committee was appointed with the aims

to formulate a concrete action plan for the promotion of Swedish on the basis of the proposals

of the Swedish Language Council, and to ensure that everybody in Sweden, irrespectively of

social and linguistic background, should be given the same possibilities to learn the Swedish

language (Dir. 2000:66). After two years’ work, the committee, which took the name of

Committee for the Swedish Language, published a report under the title Mål i Mun2 (SOU

2002:27). In the report, the committee presented a series of recommendations to guarantee

three conditions: 1) Swedish should be a complete language and capable of supporting

Swedish society, 2) official Swedish should be correct and effective; 3) everyone should have

a threefold ‘right to language’: Swedish, their mother tongue, and foreign languages.

3. The performativity of language planning

3.1 Censorship

Sweden during the 20th century has been described as a country characterised by a form

of ‘negative’ or ‘inverted’ nationalism (Herlitz 1995:54-6; Löfgren 1993:28; Lilliestam

1996:131; Oakes 2001:69-71; Teleman 2003:28-29). These authors point out that the nearly

uninterrupted social democratic rule since the 1930s and the evidence of the effects produced

by nationalism during World War II contributed to playing down nationalism and national

identity in Sweden. As Teleman claims: “one could say that the negation of traditional

nationalism grew as a specific Swedish form of nationalism” (2003:28-29). It is asserted that


social democracy, instead, promoted the image of Sweden as an active, modern, democratic

country in the international arena while toning down Swedishness in the national arena

(Dahlstedt 1976; Oakes 2001; Teleman 2003). According to Oakes (2001:70), there is an

evident link between language and national identity: national identity is reflected in language

planning activities. Therefore, on the one hand, he claims that the negation of national identity

in the national arena is mirrored in the lack of a political debate on the Swedish language. On

the other hand, the focus on modernity and internationalism as the main components of

national identity is reflected in the specific value attributed by the Swedes to their knowledge

of English. As Oakes puts it: “the Swedes have thus transformed their knowledge of English

into something very Swedish” (Oakes in press). This point is substantiated by referring to the

absence of the Swedish language from Swedish cultural politics (Teleman & Westman 1997),

and by the claim that Swedishness became more or less a taboo (Daun 1996:2). However, this

does not mean, as Karaveli (1997) asserts, that social democracy imposed a straitjacket on

Swedish society, prohibiting any discourse about Swedishness and the Swedish language as a

symbol of national identity. Behind such analyses there is the assumption that power and

censorship are prohibitive and repressive resources

By contrast, Foucault and Butler highlight the productive and generative aspect of

power and censorship. As Foucault puts it: “power produces; it produces reality; it produces

domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault 1998 [1977]:194). Similarly, Butler treats

censorship as a specific form of power that generates “discursive regimes through the

production of the unspeakable” (Butler 1997:139). In the case of Sweden, the absence of

central, state-driven language planning activities and the silence about the Swedish language,

pointed out by Teleman and Westman (1997), is itself significant. In fact, it is not an example

of “a plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it [is] a new regime of discourses”

2 The Swedish expression att ha mål i mun can be translated with ‘to have the ability to affirm oneself verbally’.


(Foucault 1998 [1978]:27). The social democratic taboo on Swedishness did not repress and

silence Swedishness and its manifestations. Instead, it generated a multiplicity of discourses

where Swedishness and the Swedish language are covert and implicit presences, enabled by

the reference to the ethnic Other, i.e. the immigrant.

As it was argued in a previous section (2.1), much of the political and academic debate

in the 1970s revolved around the immigrant. By paraphrasing Foucault (1998 [1978]:28), one

can assert that the immigrant in Sweden became a ‘public problem’ to be investigated, a

category to be defined, a ‘disorder’ to be systematised. Immigration and immigrants became

the object of a series of parliamentary investigations, and the object of study of several

disciplines, in which Swedishness is an implicit presence. The implicit definition of

Swedishness and the Swedish language resembles the role played by Black people in the

constitution of American literature explored by Toni Morrison in the essay Playing in the

Dark (1993). Morrison develops her argumentation around the presence, but in particular the

absence of an Africanist persona in American literature as a crucial referent for the creation of

the white American hero. Similarly, by describing phenomena related to the immigrant,

semilingualism, Rinkebyswedish, Swedish for immigrants represent ideologically loaded

categories that draw a boundary between what is Swedish and what is not(Stroud 2004a:330).

Thereby, they enable the production of the ‘Swedish persona’ through the description of the

ethnic Other. One can take as an example the old Swedish for immigrants (SFI) curriculum

(in force until July 2002), where it is stated that:

“SFI is not only a source of language knowledge and language development for

immigrants, but it is also a bridge to life in Sweden. Therefore, various aspects of

Swedish social life, culture and social organisation shall be integrated in language

teaching, in order for the students to participate in attitudes and traditions which

However, this expression is also a pun on the words mål which means ‘tongue’ but also ‘goal, objective’ and


characterise the country in which they live now” (Kursplan för svenska för invandrare,

my emphasis).

The subtext here is that of integration of the newly arrived immigrant with no knowledge of

Swedish. The immigrant is pictured as if s/he stood in a no man’s land. The Swedish language

is imagined as an instrument, a bridge – in other policy documents the metaphor is that of a

‘key’ (1997/98:Ub18; Prop. 1997/98:16) – that leads the immigrant into life in Sweden. In

this text immigrants are defined by a set of differences from ‘the Swede’ (attitudes and

traditions), and by the lack of knowledge of the Swedish language. At the same time,

immigrants represent what Derrida calls the ‘constitutive outside’. As Butler puts it:

“constitutive outside is the defining limit or exteriority to a given symbolic universe, one

which, were imported to that universe, would destroy its integrity and coherence. In

other words, what is set outside or repudiated from the symbolic universe in question is

precisely what binds that universe together through its exclusion” (Butler 1997:180,

emphasis in the original).

In other words, the presence of the ethnic Other enables the emergence of the ‘Swedish

persona’ through an act of identification. Identification is a concept borrowed from

psychoanalysis that defines the process through which a subject comes into being, by

internalising an aspect or property of another. Identification is partly unconscious and is

structured not only by affirmations, but also by rejections, foreclosures, refusals and

disavowals. (Kulick 2001; Cameron & Kulick 2003). As in the case of Rinkebyswedish and

semilingualism described by Stroud (2004a; 2004b), by defining immigrants through

mun, ‘mouth’ (Nigel Musk and Don Kulick, personal communication).


differences and lacks, the ‘Swedish persona’ emerges through a process of identification with

what it is not (immigrant) and through the absence of a lack (the lack of knowledge of the

Swedish language).


3.2 Interpellation

By joining the European Union in 1995, Swedish became one of the official languages

in the EU institutions, as it is stated in Council Regulation No 1 (also called The European

Union’s Language Charter). Regulation 1 recognises the equality of all EU languages as both

official and working languages in EU institutions. However, what is not and cannot be said

explicitly – because it would go against the EU policy of multilingualism – is that some

languages are de facto ‘more equal’ than others. As a matter of fact, English, French and

German are most often used for drafting texts and in less formal communication among EU

officials (Henriksen 1992; Labrie 1993, De Swaan 1999; Melander 2001, Phillipson 2003).

The proclamation of Swedish as one of the official and working languages in the EU is

an example of what Bourdieu (1991) calls an act of institution or act of authority. According

to Bourdieu (1991), an act of institution is a performative through which a language variety is

recognised as legitimate. In fact, the proclamation of Swedish as official language is not

merely descriptive of a state. Instead, it enacts Swedish as a legitimate language to be used in

the EU. In his account of the performative Bourdieu focuses on two aspects: 1) the authority

underlying the performative; 2) the exercise of power based on acts of recognition and

misrecognition, i.e. on shared belief. Thus, the performative is felicitous only if it is backed

by a pre-existing power that is recognised as legitimate. What Bourdieu does not take into

consideration is that power relations and social positions are themselves enacted by

performatives (Butler 1997).

Butler argues that the performative needs to be rethought as “one of the powerful and

insidious ways in which subjects are called into social being from diffuse social quarters,

inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations” (Butler 159ff).

Butler’s main point is to shift the attention from power and authority as the conditions that

guarantee the performative to the effects produced by the performative, whatever authority it


may have. Thus, according to Butler the performative is not the act of a pre-given subject.

Rather, Butler draws on Althusser’s notion of interpellation and views the performative as the

act through which the subject is brought into being.

By appropriating Althusser’s notion of interpellation (1972) – as Butler does – one

could claim that, by ‘hailing’ Swedish as an official and working language of the EU, Council

Regulation No 1 is a performative which functions as an interpellation. Based on the

assumption that the contexts of an interpellation are not determined in advance, interpellation

“is not descriptive, but inaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an

existing one” (Butler 1997:33). Similarly, Council Regulation No 1 brings to surface the

category of official language, which was previously covertly and implicitly defined. At the

same time, it inaugurates a new reality with a number of practical implications that Swedish

as official language in the EU entails, e.g. the establishment and management of translation

and interpretation services. In this way, Council Regulation No 1 interpellates and brings into

salience a variety of actors in the social field who respond to the ‘hailing’ of interpellation:

academics (e.g. Teleman, Hyltenstam) and politicians (e.g. those involved in the Committee

for the Swedish language). Thereby, the accession to the EU inaugurates a new regime of

discourse, characterised by an overt debate on the status of the Swedish language.

While Butler accounts for the authority of a single and isolated performative by its

possibility to break with previous contexts, this does not take into consideration the presence

of other parallel and/or competing discourses. As Foucault states: “we are dealing […] with a

multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different

institutions” (Foucault 1998 [1978]:33). The overt debate on language in Sweden is not

exclusively the effect of Sweden’s accession to the EU. Rather, it is the effect of the interplay

of different concomitant discourses. Swedish became de iure official language through

Sweden’s accession to the EU. However, Swedish went de facto to occupy the weaker


position of a ‘minority’ language (in relation to English, French and German) (Hyltenstam

1999b). As it is stated in the Draft action plan to promote the Swedish language: “when we

joined the EU, we became incorporated into a political, administrative and juridical

organisation, where other languages, especially English and French, play a major role” (SOU

2002:52). The actual position of Swedish as a weaker language in the EU stressed the element

of ‘threat’ exerted by English, present in the academic debate on English as a global language

(see section 2.2). As a matter of fact, policy documents refer to European and global

integration as a common phenomenon characterised by the high status of English and by the

loss of domains of use for the Swedish language (Regeringsbeslut 1997-04-30; SOU 2002:47-

48). The accession to the EU played a major role in amplifying and extending to the political

arena a debate which generated in academic circles.

3.3 Iterability

A social identity approach interprets the emergence of an overt cultural and political

debate on the Swedish language in the 1990s as a sign of “a new awareness of the importance

of the Swedish language for Swedish national identity” (Oakes in press, my emphasis). Oakes

goes on to argue that: “economic theories of globalisation have underestimated the force of

national identity, which has contributed to nationalist revivals in a variety of countries, with

obvious consequences for the emphasis placed on language as a symbol of national identity”

(ibid., my emphasis). The claim that Sweden and other countries are experiencing a new

awareness and a nationalist revival as a response to internationalisation and globalisation fits

within an academic approach that interprets the struggle for independence in certain parts of

the world as “the return of the repressed” (Ignatieff 1993:2). In the case of Sweden, it has

been argued that ‘traditional’ national identity has returned after having gone ‘underground’

since the 1960s (Oakes 2001:71). This means that national identity is viewed as a fixed, pre-


existing reality – a thing one possesses or a psychological state, a sense of attachment to

primordial blood ties – whose presence or absence is mirrored in discourse.

By contrast, a performativity account views national identity as forms of social life

produced and reproduced within a grid of power relations. These forms of social life include

(but are not exclusively) ways of using language to think and talk about the self and the

community (Billig 1995). By paraphrasing Butler’s definition of gender identity, one could

claim that national identity is “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame

that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being”

(Butler 1999 [1990]). National identity as a natural fact emerges from the repetition and the

sedimentation through time of a set of acts of signification, what Billig (1995) calls the

‘waved’ and ‘unwaved’ flags of nationalism, i.e. the explicit and implicit reminding of

belonging to a nation. According to Derrida (1991 [1972]), however, repetition is not a static

process of replication. Repetition implies the breaking with the original context and the

inauguration of new contexts, and hence of new meanings – what Derrida calls ‘iterability’.

Consequently, national identity is not a static given, but a product in process which is

embodied in the iteration of linguistic practices. Iterability, together with censorship and

interpellation, helps to explain the relationship between power and discursive regimes in

Sweden. In fact, they shed light on the reasons and conditions that contributed to a shift from

a covert and implicit to an overt and explicit definition of Swedishness and the Swedish

language.

In the 1970s and 1980s the discursive regime in Sweden was regulated by the taboo on

Swedishness (Daun 1996:2). While the Swedish language, as one of the symbols of Sweden,

constituted the domain of the unspeakable, the academic and political debate focused on the

immigrant. As far as language was concerned, the domain of the speakable included Swedish

as a second language, Swedish for immigrants, semilingualism, and Rinkebyswedish. As it


was argued in the previous section (3.1), this did not mean that Swedishness was absent.

Rather, Swedish national identity in the 1970s and the 1980s was a covert presence. It was

implicitly produced and reproduced (among other things) through those very categories that

were connected to the immigrant. At the same time, in the academic debate the relationship

between English and Swedish was viewed only from a corpus planning perspective.

In the beginning of the 1990s, the debate on the accession to the EU brought to surface

the category of official language and underscored, together with the debate on English as a

global language, the status of Swedish as a weaker language in the EU. By acting as

interpellations, these two debates inaugurated a new regime of discourses, in which the nation

and the Swedish language became explicit, as in the reference to “our national identity, and its

utmost expression, the common language” (1994/95:Kr260), or to the Swedish language as

“our most important upholder of culture and […] one of the most important prerequisites of

cultural identity for everyone” (Bet. 1997/98:Kru05).

However, the force of interpellation in generating an overt debate on the status of the

Swedish language is not in interpellation per se. Rather, as Butler (1997) claims, the

performative force of interpellation lies in iterability, i.e. the never-ending chain of repetition

and resignification operated by different social actors. As an example, one can take the lecture

given by Teleman in 1992 (see section 2.2). Teleman claimed: “I find the influence on

Swedish, mostly through loanwords, still rather innocuous. The interesting and important

aspect is what is going to happen with the functional domains of Swedish” (1992:12). He

went on to declare that: “English will be the language – together with French and German – in

which the political and administrative problems in an integrated Europe will be discussed”

(1992:14). Teleman here cites the previous debates on the English influence on Swedish, and

ties them to the possibility of the Swedish accession to the EU. Through repetition and

citation, Teleman opens up a new context, and thereby resignifies, the debate on English and


Swedish. Similarly, the government decision (1997-04-30) which entrusts the Swedish

Language Council to elaborate a draft action plan for the promotion of the Swedish language

cites the fear expressed by the Swedish Academy and the Swedish Language Council for the

future of the Swedish language. The government decision, through repetition and citation,

resignifies and extends the academic fears into the political field.

4. Conclusions

The paper set out to explore two issues: 1) language planning as a discourse on language

and society, and 2) the relationship between language planning and national identity in

Sweden during the period 1970-2003. By way of reference to Judith Butler’s performativity

theory, it has been possible to illustrate three discursive processes (censorship, interpellation

and iterability) by which national identity is produced, instead of viewing national identity as

pre-existing language. On the one hand, censorship has shown how the grid of multiple and

dispersed power relations regulate the domains of the unspeakable, and thereby the production

of the speakable in specific socio-historical contexts. On the other hand, through interpellation

and iterability it has been possible to illustrate how power relations and identity are dynamic

and changeable. In the case of Sweden, this has meant a shift from a covert and implicit to an

overt and explicit definition of Swedishness and the Swedish language.


Literature

Althusser L. (1971), Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: L. Althusser, Lenin and

Philosophy. New York/London: Monthly Review Press.

Austin J. L. (1962), How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press.

Bet. 1997/98, Kulturutskottets betänkande, Språkfrågor.

Billig M. (1995), Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

Blommaert J. (1996), Language planning as a discourse on language and society: The

linguistic ideology of a scholarly tradition. Language Problems and Language Planning,

20/3, 199-222.

Bourdieu P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power. Cambrigde, Mass.: Harvard University

Press.

Butler J. (1999 [1990]), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

York/London: Routledge.

Butler J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York/London:

Routledge.

Butler J. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York/London:

Routledge.

Cameron D. & Kulick D. (2003), Language and Sexuality. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Cooper R. L. (1989), Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Dahlstedt K.-H. (1976), Societal ideology and language cultivation: The case of Swedish.

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 10, 17-50.

Daun Å. (1996), Swedish Mentality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Derrida J. (1991 [1972]), Signature Event Context. In: P. Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida reader:

behind the blinds. New York. Columbia University Press, 80-111.

De Swaan A. (1999), The European constellation of languages. In: European Cultural

Foundation (ed.), Which languages for Europe? Report of the conference held in

Oestgeest. Oestgeest: European Cultural Foundation.

Dir. 1995:81, Kommittédirektiv. Svenskan i EU.

Dir. 2000:66, Kommittédirektiv. Handlingsprogram för det svenska språket.

Ellergård (1989), Engelskan i svenskan. Språk i Norden, 67-76.


Eriksen E. (1992), Det danske sprogs fremtid. Språk i Norden, 84-89.

Förvaltningslag, 1986:223.

Förvaltningsprocesslag, 1971:271.

Fishman J. (ed.) (1974), Advances in Language Planning. The Hague: Mouton.

Fishman J., Ferguson R. & Das Gupta J. (eds.) (1968), Language Problems of Developing

Nations. New York: Wiley.

Foucault M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New

York: Pantheon.

Foucault M. (1998 [1977]), Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London. Penguin.

Foucault M. (1998 [1978]), The Will to Knowledge; The Hustory of Sexuality: Vol 1. London:

Penguin.

Gal S. & Woolard K. A. (2001), Constructing languages and publics. Authority and

representation. In: S. Gal & K. Woolard (eds.), Languages and Publics. The Making of

Authority. Manchester, UK/Northampton, MA: St. Jerome Publishing.

Grünbaum C. (1986), Hur vill vi ha det i det allmänna språkbruket? Språkvård 1, 24-27.

Henriksen C. (1992), The Scandinavian languages and the European Community.

Scandinavian Studies, 64:4, 685-698.

Herlitz G. (1995), Swedes: What we are like and why we are as we are. Uppsala:

Konsultförlaget.

Hyltenstam K. (ed.) (1996a), Tvåspråkighet med förhinder? Invandrar- och

minoritetsundervisning i Sverige. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Hyltenstam K. (1996b), Svenskan, ett minoritetsspråk i Europa – och i världen? In: A.-M.

Ivars, A.-M. Londen, L. Nyholm, M. Saari & M. Tandefelt (eds.), Svenskans beskrivning

21. Förhandlingar vid tjugoförsta sammankomsten för svenskans beskrivning, Helsingfors

den 11-12 maj 1995. Lund: Stundentlitteratur, 9-33.

Hyltenstam K. (1999a), Ideologi, politik och minoritetsspråk. In: K. Hyltenstam (ed.),

Sveriges sju inhemska språk. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Hyltenstam K. (1999b), Svenskan i minoritetsspråksperspektiv. In: K. Hyltenstam (ed.),

Sveriges sju inhemska språk. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Ignatieff M. (1993), Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. London:

Chatto & Windus.

Karaveli M. (1997), Blågul framtid. Essä om nationen och det svenska. Stockholm. Arena.

Krauss M. (1992), The world’s languages in crisis. Language, 68, 4-10.

Kulick D. (2003), No. Language and Communication, 32/2: 139-159.


Kursplan för svenska för invandrare,

http://www.skolverket.se/vux/dokument/kurspl_sfi_020103.pdf.

Labrie N. (1993), La construction linguistique de la Communauté européenne. Paris:

Champion.

Lilliestam L. (1996), Nordman och ’det svenska’. In: Tyst, nu talar jag! Tradition,

information och humanister. Populärvetenskapliga föreläsningar hållna under

Humanistdagarna den 12-13 oktober1996. Göteborg: Humanistiska fakultetsnämnden:

Göteborgs universitet.

Ljung M. (1986), Undersökningen Engelskan i Sverige. Språkvård, 1, 5-10.

Löfgren O. (1993), Nationella arenor. In: B. Ehn, J. Fyrkman & O. Löfgren (eds.),

Försvenskningen av Sverige. Det nationellas förvandlingar. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.

Melander B. (2001), Politikersvenska men tjänstemannaengelska. In: B. Melander (ed.),

Svenskan som EU-språk. Uppsala: Hallgren & Fallgren.

Morrison T. (1993), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York:

Vintage Books.

Motion till riksdagen 1992/93:U514 av Ylva Annerstedt med flera (fp).

Motion till riksdagen 1994/95:U502 av Marianne Samuelsson med flera (mp).

Motion till riksdagen 1994/95:Kr260 av Lennart Fridén (m).

Motion till riksdagen 1997/98:Ub18 av Britt-Marie Danestig med flera (v)

Oakes L. (2001), Language and National Identity: Comparing France and Sweden.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Oakes L. (in press), From internationalisation to globalisation: Language and nationalism

revival in Sweden. In: Language and Identity: Selected Papers (from American Society of

Geolinguistics International Conference, October 2-5, 2002). New York: Cummings and

Hathaway.

Patentkungörelse, 1967:838

Patentlag, 1967:837

Phillipson R. (1992), Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillipson R. (2003), English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London/New

York: Routledge.

Prop. 1997/98:16, Sverige, framtiden och mångfalden från invandrarpolitik till

integrationspolitik.

Prop. 1998/99:1, Budgetpropositionen för 1999.


Regeringsbeslut (1997-04-30), Uppdrag till Svenska språknämnden att utarbeta förslag till

handlingsprogram för att främja svenska språket. Stockholm: Riksdagen.

Rättegångsbalken.

Silverstein M. & Urban G. (1996), The natural history of discourse. In. M. Silverstein & G.

Urban, Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago

Press.

SOU (1974), Invandrarutredningen. Invandrarna och minoriteterna. Huvudbetänkande av

invandrarutredningen. Stockholm.

SOU (1998), Svenskan i EU. Hur vi kan främja kvaliteten på de svenska EU-texterna. Statens

Offentliga Utredningar (SOU), 1998:114. Stockholm: Fritze.

SOU (2002), Mål i Mun. Förslag till handlinsprogram för att främja svenska språket. Statens

Offentliga Utredningar (SOU), 2002:27. Stockholm: Fritze.

Stenbäck P. (1993), De nordiska språkens ställning i det nya Europa. Språk i Norden, 5-12.

Stroud C. & Wingstedt M. (1989), Språklig chauvinism. Invandrare och minoriteter, 4-5, 5-8.

Stroud C. (2004a), Halvspråkighet och rinkebysvenska som språkideologiska begrepp. In: K.

Hyltenstam & I. Lindberg (eds.), Svenska som andraspråk – i forskning, undervisning och

samhälle. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 329-387.

Stroud C. (2004b), Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates: A

Bourdieuean perspective. Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 8:2, 163-230.

Svenska språknämnden (1998), Förslag till handlingsprogram för att främja svenska språket.

Stockholm: Svenska språknämnden.

Teleman U. (1992), Det svenska riksspråkets utsikter i ett integrerat Europa. Språkvård, 4, 7-

16.

Teleman U. (2003), Tradis och funkis. Svensk språkvård och språkpolitik efter 1800.

Stockholm: Nordstedts Ordbok.

Teleman U. & Westman M. (1997), Behöver Sverige en nationell språkpolitik? Språk i

Norden, 5-22.

Tollefson J. W. (1981). Centralised and decntralised language planning. Language Problems

and Language Planning, 5/2, 175-181.

Venås K. (1992), Nynorsk mål i eit integrert Europa. Språk i Norden, 55-69.

Venås K. (1995), Norsk språk før og etter 28 november 1994. Språk i Norden, 5-23.

Language planning and national identity in Sweden: a ... · Language planning and national identity in Sweden: a performativity approach ... issues of language, culture and society.

Documents