Language as a Proxy in Inclusion and Exclusion: Rethinking Language Learning and Motivation

Language thus acts as a gatekeeper for in/exclusion in society, and speaking an official, national language is portrayed as a sign of loyalty towards the state and a proof of ‘integration’ and trustworthiness. In this, language practices become a site in which assumptions about belonging, competence and cultural alignment are imposed. This is also relevant in institutional encounters, where assessment, documentation and language requirements may shape access, participation and belonging. 

Research in language studies has, however, for several decades shown how language ideologies are always about more than language. In many state policies, language is used as a proxy for race, ethnicity, religion or other categories that cannot legally act as basis for differentiation. In this, certain populations and speakers are surveilled and marked more than others, maintaining colonial power asymmetries. ‘Language barriers’ thereby also reflect embedded power hierarchies and structures to in/exclude. 

Monolingual language ideologies are deeply embedded in conceptions of identity and belonging, as well as in how the host society interprets its existing linguistic diversity in relation to the linguistic integration of newcomers. At the same time, research shows that an individual’s language use reflects their linguistic citizenship: their agency, participation, and opportunities to exercise control over their linguistic resources and to construct new identities and communities.

This panel aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of language and migration studies to explore different ways in which language acts as a means for social inclusion/exclusion, through topics concerning for example:

• Language learning and teaching
• Language requirements and testing
• Language in institutional encounters
• Language ideologies
• Linguistic citizenship and activism

The language of the session is English, and we invite presentations from a range of contexts and angles.

This research explores immigrant language learning as identity negotiations in the context of integration training. Identity is defined as a socially constituted understanding of the self in relation to others which is constructed and negotiated across time and space (Norton, 2013). Language plays an essential and contradictory role in identity negotiation, particularly for immigrants, because it serves simultaneously as community gatekeeper and source of power and capital. More specifically, this research investigates how highly educated adult immigrants in Finland negotiate their context situated identities, their identities as capital and their identities as belonging through learning the Finnish language. The data consists of longitudinal interviews with seven highly educated adult immigrants learning Finnish as part of their integration path between the years 2022 and 2023. Using narrative methodologies as research tools and as spaces for identity negotiation, this research aims to answer: how do highly educated adult immigrants negotiate their identities in context situated language learning and practice? how do they negotiate the value of their identities as capital in relation to language learning? how do they negotiate participating and membership in target language communities? Published and preliminary results demonstrate that participants negotiate conflicting privileged and subjective identities at different stages of their learning. Context situated negotiations are more prevalent in narratives about the beginning of learning, while identities as capital and as belonging to communities of practice are negotiated across longer timeframes and even through imagined futures. These findings highlight the lifelong commitment participants make when learning the Finnish language and how these processes lead them to self-empowerment, critique of subjectifying integration processes, but also to the perpetuation of marginalising discourses related to immigrants as others.

This paper examines how long-term migrants in Iceland encounter, reproduce and question language ideologies that position Icelandic language knowledge as a measure of integration, participation and belonging. It draws on research conducted as part of the NordPlus project Multilingualism and Inclusion: Language Learning and Migrants in the Nordic Region, which works with on Bulgarian, Italian, Romanian and Serbian-speaking communities that remain underrepresented in research on migration and language learning in Iceland.

The discussed study approaches language learning as a social practice and draws on perspectives on linguistic repertoires, multilingualism as a resource, linguistic citizenship and language ideologies. It asks how participants understand the place of Icelandic in their own trajectories and how their accounts relate to public discourses in Iceland that associate knowledge of Icelandic with participation and integration. Particular attention is paid to the ways participants themselves invoke ideas of individual effort, relationships and responsibility for language learning, use and development of Icelandic.

The material was generated through community-based ethnographic research and citizen science methods. Adult participants took part in moderated group discussions organised through community visits to the Living Language Lab, the interactive exhibition of the Vigdís International Centre for Multilingualism and Intercultural Understanding. The exhibition functioned as a discussion-elicitation environment, prompting participants to reflect on their linguistic biographies, language learning, multilingual practices, and language endangerment. Discussions were conducted in participants’ first languages and moderated in collaboration with community members.

The presentation and discussion of preliminary findings is centred on migrant engagement with language ideologies not simply in terms of acceptance or resistance, but as a process of reproducing, negotiating and questioning ideas about language, participation and belonging.

This autoethnographic paper draws on my experience as a fourth-generation Finnish-Canadian participating in online Finnish languages classes offered by the Sudbury Finn School (SFS) seeking to reclaim my heritage language. I approach Finnish, or “Finn” as it is often called in Northern Ontario, not simply as a linguistic skill to be acquired, but as a site through which questions of identity, ancestry, and belonging are negotiated. What does it mean to reclaim a language when linguistic transmission has been interrupted across generations? And can language learning itself constitute a form of diasporic belonging?

The Sudbury Finn School was established in 1971 with the aim of ensuring that “the Finnish tongue would live on in the Sudbury area,” alongside cultural institutions developed by Finnish immigrants following the First and Second World Wars. As vice-chair Norma Rautiainen explains, immigrant communities established halls, churches, businesses, bakeries, and spaces for sport and recreation, but “a small group of people decided we should have something to preserve the Finnish language as well.” More than fifty years later, the school offers adult classes through zoom, bringing together learners whose relationships to Finnish are often several generations removed from migration. This history makes the school a productive site for examining how diasporic language is preserved, adapted, and reclaimed.

Drawing on Stuart Hall’s understanding of identity as continually produced and Homi Bhabha’s work on cultural hybridity, I consider belonging as relational rather than inherited. I bring these perspectives into conversation with Suresh Canagarajah’s scholarship on heritage-language practices in diaspora and consider the SFS’s publicly available mandate and relationship to Finnish state funding, asking how institutions participate in defining linguistic and cultural membership and how learning a heritage language may create new forms of diasporic belonging.

This presentation is inspired by a “Daniel”, an East African-origin student in a Finnish Adult Basic Education (ABE) center, who told me in an interview: “I’ll study more Finnish, then everything will be fine”. Triggered by this statement and the larger school-wide/societal discourse of overextended hopes into Finnish proficiency that it echoes, I discuss the (perceived/imposed) responsibility of students to learn and of teachers to teach, first and foremost, Finnish language.

For this discussion, I draw on data from a 5-year ethnographic study (2020-2025, Research Council of Finland), which examined epistemic and linguistic resources, ideologies, and negotiations in an adult basic education (ABE) center. The school served adult learners with forced migration background, most of whom resettled to Finland from West Asian and African countries. We, a team of 2-5 researchers, worked with 55 students and 12 teachers and gathered data from about 120 hours of participant observations, 10 unstructured and 35 semi-structured interviews, 88 hours of classroom recordings, and 12 hours of teacher workshops. Drawing on decolonial work (e.g., Cusicanqui, 2012; Dotson, 2014; Mitova, 2020; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, 2021), we analyzed and theorized our data in several different ways, mostly leaning on thematic, moment, and discourse analysis.

For examining and problematizing (or developing distrust towards) the “(Finnish) language as key to (Finnish) society” discourse, I share data from classroom recordings and interviews that document students’ desire for Finnish language skills, an exaggerated hope in dominant language proficiency, and the Finnish learning agenda seeping into many areas of schooling, including break times and subjects other than Finnish. I also consider systemic color- and pain-evasiveness (Author & Co-Author, 2026; Author, 2024) and a narrow understanding of language teaching as the backdrop for my argument. Finally, I discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of multilingual and language aware pedagogies, particularly the mantra proclaiming that “every teacher is a language teacher” and their problematic origin in or appropriation by neonationalist/assimilationist ideologies. I explain why multilingual and language aware approaches do not suffice if the goal is educational, epistemic, and social justice and end with a vision for epistemically and linguistically (more) just education.