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Language in education

Fences, language and education

By May 10, 2019One Comment7 min read5,252 views

Building the Danish boar fence (Image credit: NDR)

Fences are popular these days: not only in the US with its border-wall-to-Mexico saga but also in Denmark, which recently started to build a fence to ‘secure’ is border to Germany. The official reason for the Danish fence is to keep out wild boars who might be crossing into Denmark from Germany. Its efficiency is highly contested … Although not directly related to issues of language, there are striking parallels between the swine fence and what I, a linguistic ethnographer with 15 years of experience in the area of multilingualism and linguistic diversity, have witnessed, researched and documented in Danish schools.

With the notable exception of English, Denmark is a country strongly beholden to the norm of monolingualism. That is, there is a wide-spread understanding that the normative situation is such that everybody speaks one language. In our case, this language is Danish. Monolingualism may seem paradoxical in Denmark, a country with only 5.7 million inhabitants, which is located in close proximity to countries such as Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland, and which depends on international trade and exchange. As a result, Denmark is home to people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and in terms of human mobility, efficient fences are even more of an illusion than a realistic substitute for policy. Yet, for the political establishment such insights seem hard to reach and to integrate with an increasingly strong focus on the idea of the nation.

The norm of monolingualism affects many citizens with a linguistic repertoire which includes resources associated with multiple languages. Despite this diversity, the monolingual norm is produced and reproduced in various ways and in many societal domains, but particularly in education. Accordingly, it is not uncommon to witness statements such as the following: “In Denmark we speak Danish. You have the right to learn all the languages you want, but it needs to take place in your spare time.” (Inger Støjberg, now Minister for Children, Gender Equality, Integration and Social affairs; the statement was made in 2012, when she was a member of the opposition). In the quote, “Danish” is used in three different meanings: as the first language of the majority population; as the official language of Denmark; and as the most important language taught in schools. The point argued for was that the state had no responsibility towards minority children’s mother tongue education.

In fact, there is only one educational setting where so-called immigrant languages are legitimate: Mother Tongue (MT) education. MT education is located within the regular school system but outside compulsory education  (for details on MT education in Denmark, see Salö et al. 2018). In my team’s research with MT classrooms in and around Copenhagen we found that MT education is still filtered through the lens of Danish monolingualism as MT education is almost exclusively viewed with regard to its effects on Danish.

The official aim of MT education is to ensure students’ linguistic competences in the language regarded as their mother tongue, and their cultural and societal competences with respect to what is formulated as their “country of origin”. Furthermore, MT education is supposed to foster metalinguistic development, enable general participation in school and society in the “host country,” i.e., Denmark, and encourage a global perspective on language and culture (Ministry of Education 2009: 3).

In terms of public opinion (as articulated in letters to the editor, editorials, interviews with politicians, and even academics), there is a general consensus to focus on MT education in terms of its effect on Danish. This aligns with the quote above. As everyone holds that in Denmark we speak Danish, the teaching of those other languages that are associated with immigrants needs to be justified with reference to Danish. This understanding of MT education is widely shared among both supporters and opponents.

The rationale for MT education according to the Danish Ministry of Education

Yet, such effects of positive transfer were never in focus in the classrooms we followed, nor were they part of regular assessment. In fact, MT classes are entirely marginalized. They are ‘fenced’ in relation to general education, and have no relation to whatever else goes on in schools. None of the mainstream teachers or school authorities seem interested in MT education classes. This makes it completely mysterious how the “effect on Danish” should ever come about. To us, there seemed to be more obvious ways to evaluate the relevance of such educational initiatives. For instance, in terms of the classes’ effects on the students’ Arabic, Persian, Polish, or Turkish competences.

Another point is that MT classrooms include participants from a range of backgrounds, a range of relations to the supposed country of origin, and to the language taught. Consequently, one cannot expect consensus about what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ language, or more or less ‘appropriate’ language (Karrebæk & Ghandchi, 2015).

In the Persian MT classrooms we followed, for example, children came from families who were political, religious, or other types of refugees, who were supporters of the current Iranian government, or who had no explicit political stance and had moved to Denmark for job opportunities or family reasons. In recognition of this diversity, the teacher aimed to create an “ideology free” space. This would enable all students to meet, regardless of their backgrounds. Yet, one way of doing this was to exclude anything that could be associated with the current Iranian government, and even with Arabic language and culture. The use of Arabic loanwords often caused controversy in the classroom. This approach made sourcing educational materials difficult because the teacher refused to use any materials that included pictures of women in hijab. Such images, he felt, would compromise his “ideology free” classroom. On the other hand, the traumas of refugee children went unrecognized. They largely remained unspoken and if they were articulated, they were ignored and suppressed. This created awkward situations and made it difficult for some children to find themselves reflected in the classes.

In the Turkish MT classroom, the diversity among the participants created other difficulties. In this class, the most striking difference concerned the teacher. He was of Kurdish origin and his Turkish language included features that revealed this background. In general, there are strong negative associations with Kurdish-Turkish, and we saw children, and a few parents, voice this in more or less direct ways (Karrebæk & Nergiz, 2019). The teacher, however, had few options to find another job, and we doubt that anybody had thought about how an internal Turkish conflict would play out in a Copenhagen MT classroom, and how this could or should have been handled by the employing authorities.

My work with linguistic diversity in education has shown how immigrants are evaluated and valorized in relation to their Danish competences; how languages other than Danish are, by and large, ignored, devalued and suppressed by the authorities; and how children growing up in this linguistically narrow-minded atmosphere struggle to integrate their mother tongues into an attractive public identity. This is not to say that these outcomes are planned or even desired by Danish authorities. Rather, they result from a severely limited imagination when it comes to multilingualism and cultural diversity. The discursive means to imagine cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity differently are currently lacking. After all, “in Denmark we speak Danish”. These beliefs and attitudes create a difficult work climate for MT teachers as they have to stay in fenced-in areas in a national setting very unfavorable to the use of immigrant languages. They curtail a good educational climate and obstruct any constructive engagement with MT education.

Nobody really seems to care what goes on in MT education because it is understood as being of little relevance and value – to society at large and ultimately to the children themselves. MT classes were fenced off from the children’s regular schooling experiences. Arguably, this neglect even paved the way for  “importing” conflicts from elsewhere.

In short, the orientation to standard Danish and monolingualism leads to marginalization of some children, alienation of others, poor learning conditions, and lots of missed learning opportunities, a linguistically poor society, and a society haunted by globalization and a world which it tries to keep out with a fence.

References:

Karrebæk, M.S. & Ö. Nergiz (2019). Language ideologies, the soft g, and parody in the Turkish mother tongue classroom. Multilingua https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0086

Karrebæk, M.S. & N. Ghandchi (2015). ‘Pure’ Farsi and political sensitivities: Language and ideologies in Farsi complementary language classrooms in Denmark. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(1): 62-90.

Sahlö, L., C. Hedman, N. Ganuza & M.S. Karrebæk (2018). Mother tongue instruction in Sweden and Denmark: Language policy, cross-field effects, and linguistic exchange rates. Language Policy 17(4), 591-616

Martha Sif Karrebæk

Author Martha Sif Karrebæk

Martha Sif Karrebæk is Associate Professor in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. She has conducted research on multilingualism and mobility in Denmark for almost 15 years. She received her PhD on a study of language socialization, play and (second) language acquisition in pre-school and continued to look at language socialization among school-starters in a public school characterized by great diversity. Subsequently, she was principal investigator on a project on mother tongue and heritage language education in Copenhagen. Karrebæk is also well-known for her innovative work on food and language.

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