Language and Belonging

Language is widely understood as a key to integration in Finland, where public and policy discussions frequently emphasise migrants’ responsibility to acquire Finnish language skills as a pathway to employment and societal participation. In this context, Finnish language proficiency becomes a powerful marker through which belonging is evaluated.

In this presentation, we examine how migrants living in Finland narrate experiences of Finnish language use and learning. The analysis draws on 24 individual interviews and 9 focus group interviews with participants from diverse migration backgrounds. Using narrative positioning analysis, we explore how participants orient to, reproduce, negotiate, and resist dominant language ideals in their accounts of everyday life, work, education, and encounters with services.

Our findings show that participants repeatedly orient to a dominant language ideal that constructs fluent, native-level Finnish as a key marker of successful integration, employability, and belonging. This ideal is oriented to as taken-for-granted cultural knowledge in the interview interaction. Participants frequently explain and justify their level of Finnish proficiency, suggesting that falling short of the language ideal is treated as something that
requires explanation. At the same time, participants contest the ideal in different ways. Some highlight structural barriers and limited opportunities to learn and use Finnish, challenging individualised understandings of language learning. Others criticise the assumption that Finnish fluency should be a prerequisite for employment, social acceptance, access to services, or societal recognition.

The results suggest that prevailing language ideals establish expectations that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to meet under existing social conditions. The findings call for more inclusive integration training policies and practices that recognise language learning as a shared social process and address the institutional and interactional conditions shaping opportunities for participation and belonging.

Increasing linguistic diversity in Finnish early childhood education has created new demands for pedagogical practices that support children’s Finnish language development and collaboration with multilingual families. Previous research in Finland has shown considerable variation in how multilingualism is understood and addressed by early childhood education professionals and how language-aware practices are implemented in everyday educational environments (Honko & Mustonen, 2020; Aerila et al., 2024; Repo et al., 2024). Research has also highlighted the importance of collaboration between families and educational professionals in supporting children’s multilingual development (Bergroth & Palviainen, 2016). Based on this understanding, VOIKO focuses on two interconnected areas: (1) strengthening early childhood education professionals’ competence in supporting multilingual children’s Finnish language learning and (2) developing culturally responsive practices for engaging and supporting multilingual families.

VOIKO is a multi-year development and intervention project conducted in collaboration with early childhood education centres. It follows an iterative, practice-based process in which the needs of professionals, children and families are identified through engagement with participating ECEC settings. These findings inform the development and piloting of pedagogical and family-engagement practices, which are further refined and evaluated through their implementation in everyday ECEC environments.

The project includes three main areas of development. Moksu (Monikielisyys suomen oppimisen tukena), an adaptation of the research-based ProBiMuc intervention to the Finnish early childhood education context, is developed and piloted to support multilingual children’s Finnish language learning. In addition, music-based activities are integrated into pedagogical practice, and culturally responsive practices for collaboration with multilingual families are developed and tested.

The presentation introduces the VOIKO project design and emerging needs identified among its target groups and discusses how these inform the approaches being developed and piloted. Particular attention is given to how language-support and family-engagement approaches can be translated into practical tools for early childhood education professionals.

As the project progresses, the developed approaches will be brought together into a scalable toolkit comprising pedagogical methods, training materials and implementation guidelines. Through these outputs, VOIKO aims to strengthen professional competence, support multilingual families’ participation and inclusion, and enhance opportunities for children’s Finnish language development. The project also explores the applicability of selected approaches to primary-level S2 education and preparatory instruction.

Language learning is a social activity, and oral practice in real-life situations is key to developing spoken language skills. In this presentation, which is based on my dissertation study, I examine how adult basic education students navigate learning the Finnish language in Finland. Specifically, I wish to draw attention to one of the key findings of my dissertation: How differently the students were able to mobilise their acquired linguistic capital (i.e. use Finnish to communicate) in and outside of school, and how this finding could be linked to the notions of empathy and trust. The theoretical underpinnings of the presentation are Bourdieu’s forms of capital and Norton’s theory of language learning investment.

Adult basic education is intended for adults with interrupted formal education backgrounds or limited formal literacy skills. Over 85% of students are migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers. My dissertation study, a critical linguistic ethnography, was located in a school in rural Finland. The school community was diverse in terms of languages, cultures, ages, abilities etc. Students used Finnish as their lingua franca to communicate on the school premises, but when it came to using Finnish in the larger community, they faced multiple issues.

In this presentation, I investigate the matter of mobilising linguistic capital in communicative situations with different people in connection to the notions of empathy and trust. I argue that diversity in a school community can foster empathy among its participants. I also argue that trust needs to be negotiated in communicative situations, where several different power hierarchies can be at play simultaneously.

Contemporary societies are increasingly shaped by global and local developments that generate insecurity, uncertainty, and concerns about the future. In this context, distrust and social polarization have become significant features of the societal climate. For minority populations, these developments may be particularly acute due to their position within society. Older adults with migrant backgrounds, especially those originating from outside the European Union, often remain marginalized and largely invisible in public discourse, service systems, media representations, and population-level ageing research in Finland. Furthermore, limited attention has been paid to the experiences of loneliness and social exclusion among foreign-language-speaking older adults.

This presentation draws on findings from an NGO-based research initiative examining loneliness, exclusion, and the possibilities for fostering community, trust, and agency among older migrants in Finland. The study was conducted in Jade Community Association (Jade yhteisö ry), a multilingual organization that promotes inclusion, participation, agency, and well-being among older foreign-language speakers in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The association organizes age-friendly peer group activities in nine languages, with a particular focus on language groups and older people from outside the EU.

Qualitative data were collected through focus group discussions with participants from five language groups (N = 50). The findings highlight experiences of otherness, exclusion, and marginalization, which contribute to feelings of loneliness and social isolation. At the same time, the discussions brought up the importance of community-based participation in strengthening feelings of safety, belonging, and trust in both other people and society more broadly. Opportunities to engage in meaningful activities and social interaction in one’s own language emerged as particularly important for maintaining social connections and promoting agency in later life. The results demonstrate that low-threshold, community-based practices can play a crucial role in supporting the everyday well-being and social participation of older migrants.

We argue that a minority-language perspective is essential for developing a more comprehensive and equitable understanding of ageing in Finland. Research and public discussions on ageing must better recognize the diversity of older populations and create opportunities for older adults from different backgrounds to express their experiences in their own terms. By amplifying the voices of foreign-language-speaking older adults, this study contributes to ongoing debates on inclusive ageing and seeks to inform future research, service development, and policymaking aimed at building a more equal, multilingual, and diverse society.

Language is institutionally regarded as a crucial factor in facilitating integration; for immigrants, it simultaneously functions as a gatekeeper through which access to information, perceived trustworthiness, a sense of belonging, and inclusion are evaluated. Drawing on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with long-term Finnish residents, this study elucidates how linguistic exclusion operates not as a singular event, but as a cumulative process. Some participants who were unable to navigate Finnish-language digital portals were not merely technically disadvantaged; they were also symbolically positioned as outsiders within systems designed for native speakers. Repeated experiences, being assumed illiterate for not speaking Finnish, receiving systematically inferior information through English-language portals, and relying on informal interpreters for critical institutional decisions, gradually eroded both institutional trust and their sense of being legitimate participants in Finnish society. Crucially, trust was most consistently rebuilt through relational encounters: a culturally responsive officer, a Finnish friend who bridged informational gaps, or a digital interaction that communicated recognition rather than suspicion. These findings present a significant policy challenge. The proliferation of parallel or multilingual portals entails substantial resource expenditures, poses risks of data fragmentation, and may inadvertently perpetuate segregation rather than promote inclusion. This paper advocates a single, inclusive digital gateway: a transparent interface that actively supports language learning, fosters digital literacy across cultural backgrounds, and accommodates diverse communicative needs within one equitable system. Such an approach mitigates digital discrimination, strengthens trust through equal access, and frames language not as a barrier to be circumvented but as a competence to be developed through meaningful institutional participation.