6533b7d1fe1ef96bd125c070

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Language and Long Nation Building in Finnish Higher Education

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description

The chapter discusses the nation-building period of Finnish higher education. After presenting a short introduction to higher education and language policy developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I will analyse the role of language in Finnish higher education from mid-nineteenth century to Finnish independence in 1917. I will then move on to the interwar years and discuss language and nationalisms in the process of founding new universities and the particular case of the bilingual University of Helsinki in the 1920s and 1930s. The interweaved nature of nationalisms and internationalisms is discussed from the perspective of international politics in general and the post-World War II years in particular. The chapter closes by presenting the recycled discourses of threatened national languages, oppressed Finnish speakers, Swedish speakers as elite and Swedish as minority.