Text 1-18. ENGLISH IN FINLAND

(Based on Ella Hujala’s study “English as a lingua franca in the workplace: one-size-fits-all?”)

English in Scandinavia has an extremely high profile and can be said to be almost like a ‘second language’ at least for the younger generation. It worries some of us that the number of students learning other languages at school is decreasing. The utility factor of English is high, i.e. it has high value in so many domains that it spreads faster than other languages.

Meierkord (2004) investigated the use of English as an international lingua franca among students from outer and inner circle countries. She studied their informal spoken data. 95 per cent of all productions observed with competent speakers of English from the countries in the expanding circle can be said to be regular (i.e. following native speaker norms). Conformity to native norms is thus overwhelming. Generally, younger generations of Finns can be said to be quite proficient in English. According to Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities (2009), in fourteen of the twenty one Member States for which data were available, English was the most commonly spoken foreign language among adults aged 25 to 64 years. 99.8% of students in upper secondary education in Finland in 2007 studied two or more foreign languages and the most studied foreign language was English. In 2007, the highest shares of the population aged 25 to 64 who perceived they spoke two or more foreign languages were found in Slovenia (72%), Finland and Slovakia (both 68%). In Finland, the best known foreign language among this age group was English.

However, being able to speak or understand one variety of English is not enough. One must be able to understand the countless varieties of English in order to be able to succeed in working life etc. A lot of Finns have to communicate with people from all over the world on a daily basis in business life. The English classroom in Finland rarely offers the students a chance to hear all these varieties. Nor have they been included in the recorded teaching material. This is, however, changing at least in the Business English teaching materials and for a good reason. Nevertheless, it is likely to take some time before the attitude change reaches schools and all the teachers. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages does not have much of the ELF perspective either. This is discussed more thoroughly in Hynninen’s (2007) Master’s thesis.

English is actively sought out by people in Finland and all over the world (Brutt-Griffler 2002). But is there a notably Finnish variety of English developing? Is English adapted to reflect our own cultural norms or is it just a communicative tool? Do people in any way show their identities through their English? Also, is there a difference when Finns are using ELF intranationally or internationally? These are all questions that interest me. In Finland the majority of learners are normally taught by local teachers. In their professional lives, a great number of people are using English as a lingua franca intranationally and internationally.

Kirkpatrick (2006) argues that this state of the matters provides a process that leads to new varieties of English. In my study I am interested in the subjects’ experiences of their own ‘Finnish English’ as well as how it relates to other varieties in their workplace. Schell (2008) says ‘The low internal colingual level among anglophones within their respective countries means that new national varieties are not being created in Northern Europe despite the abundance of communication in English there.” I think the internal colingual level among Finns working in companies where English is the language of business must be quite high. Perhaps this communication does not have a high enough status for its speakers for it to be perceived as a variety of its own. In my study I seek to find out whether the respondents think they speak the Finnish English variety or a kind of interlanguage. Schell asks if the community’s internal colingual level is a good theoretical measure of the pace of norm generation. It will also be interesting to hear if the participants in this study think there is a specific CompanyA variety.

I will now have a look at an increasingly common phenomenon in the world and in Finland, namely that of having English as the official language of corporations. This is also the context for my interview study.

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Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of English in European education	\|	English as the official corporate language in Finland

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