Since the late 1990s the question of whether to ratify the status of Swedish as the “principal” language of Sweden by means of a language law has been subject to considerable public dispute. Drawing on Blommaert’s concept of a “language ideological debate,” we explore how and why this particular debate seemingly ground to a halt without achieving any kind of tangible closure. In order to do so, we introduce Habermas’s notion of “legitimation crisis” and describe how such crises are, according to Habermas, typically underpinned by one or more “rationality deficits,” i.e. discursive paradoxes that emerge in a given historical, cultural, social and economic context. We then propose that the concept of “legitimation crisis” not only may help to explain why some language ideological debates sometimes reach a stalemate at a specific historical moment as in the Swedish case, but also constitutes a theoretical framework that could be productively incorporated into the study of language politics more generally.
2020. Disrupting Dual Monolingualisms? Language Ideological Ordering in an Internationalizing Swedish University. In Language Perceptions and Practices in Multilingual Universities, ► pp. 269 ff.
Karlsson, Susanna & Tom S. Karlsson
2020. Language policy as ‘frozen’ ideology: exploring the administrative function in Swedish higher education. Current Issues in Language Planning 21:1 ► pp. 67 ff.
Karlander, David
2018. State categories, state vision and vernacular woes in Sweden’s language politics. Language Policy 17:3 ► pp. 343 ff.
Wei, Ming
2016. Language Ideology and Identity Seeking: Perceptions of College Learners of English in China. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 15:2 ► pp. 100 ff.
Zhao, Shouhui & Guowen Shang
2016. Language planning agency in China: from the perspective of the language academies. Current Issues in Language Planning 17:1 ► pp. 23 ff.
2013. English in contemporary Sweden: Perceptions, policies, and narrated practices. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17:1 ► pp. 93 ff.
Hultgren, Anna Kristina
2013. Lexical borrowing from English into Danish in the Sciences: An empirical investigation of ‘domain loss’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23:2 ► pp. 166 ff.
Olsson, Anna & Vera Sheridan
2012. A Case Study of Swedish Scholars’ Experiences With and Perceptions of the Use of English in Academic Publishing. Written Communication 29:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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