TRANSACCIONES EN MONEDA EXTRANJERA - LOS ESTADOS FINANCIEROS INDIVIDUALES DE CADA SUBSIDIARIA DE LA COMPAÑÍA SE PREPARAN EN LA MONEDA DEL AMBIENTE ECONÓMICO PRIMARIO EN

Sweden implemented their current Educational Act in June 2010. The regulations regarding the provision of MTI in primary school are stated as follows:

«A student who has a caretaker with a mother tongue other than Swedish will be offered mother tongue instruction in this language if

1. the language is the student’s everyday language of interaction in the home, and 2. the student has basic knowledge in the language.

[...] The Government or the authority appointed by the Government will announce the administrative regulations of mother tongue instruction. Such administrative regulations involve mother tongue instruction in a language to be offered only if a specific amount of pupils request such instruction in that language⁹. (Translation from the official document Ministry of Education, 2010, chapter 10, 7 §)

9 Original Swedish text: «En elev som har en vårdnadshavare med ett annat modersmål än svenska ska erbjudas modersmålsundervisning i detta språk om

1. språket är elevens dagliga umgängesspråk i hemmet, och 2. eleven har grundläggande kunskaper i språket.

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In accordance with this legislation, all immigrant minority pupils in primary schools in Sweden have the right to receive voluntary mother-tongue instruction on certain conditions.

Which are, firstly, that the pupil must have at least one caretaker that has a mother tongue other than Swedish, and secondly, that there is a minimum amount of pupils (currently 5) within a municipality who request instruction in one particular language. If these criterions are met, like in Norway, each municipality is accountable for providing MTI as long as it is financially and practically feisable. Regulations on how MTI can be organized are provided in the official School Regulation document of 2011 (Skolförordning 2011:185). Four options are stated: (1) MTI can be provided as a subject of choice where the pupil chooses to learn his/her mother tongue instead of a foreign language; (2) as the language choice of the pupil where he/she can choose his/her mother tongue as the medium of instruction for a particular subject;

(3) as the language choice of the school where the schools freely singles out a subjects to be taught; and finally (4) as lessons provided outside the regular school timetable for a duration of a maximum of seven years. The organizational option that most municipalities had opted for by 2012 (Vetenskapsrådet, 2012, p. 56) was in the latter form, that is, MTI has generally been provided as sixty minute lessons outside of regular school schedule in small groups.

The current policies on MTI in Sweden can be viewed in light of the political discourses on two central policy documents: the Immigrant Report: Immigrants and minorities (Statens Offentliga Utredningar, 1974) from 1974, with which all official policies on immigration commenced; and the Home Language Reform (Riksdagen, 1975/1976) from 1977, which is, despite having been altered over the years, the current basis for minority language instruction.

In 1974, the very first Swedish policy to be directed towards the education of immigrant minorities commenced. It was a response to the growing migrant population that settled in the country. Sally Boyd (2007), states that the discourse in this report was of a multicultural and pluralistic nature. At the time, it was quite unusual in the Western world as one aimed at integration rather than the assimilation of immigrants; and thus moved away from the general nationalist ideology trends where nation-building discourses dominated. In Sweden, the educational policy discourses had individualist orientations and a view on schooling as the primary actor for the development of a pluralistic democracy where individual self realization and education for the private good was in focus (Aasen, 2003). These discourses were

[...] Regeringen eller den myndighet som regeringen bestämmer får meddela föreskrifter om

modersmålsundervisning. Sådana föreskrifter får innebära att modersmålsundervisning ska erbjudas i ett språk bara om ett visst antal elever önskar sådan undervisning i det språket.”

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As an extension of this principle, in 1977, Sweden legislated the Home Language Reform that explicitly stated that MTI was to be provided for all immigrant minority pupils with the purpose of facilitating bilingualism. This reform thus promoted maintenance-based bilingual models. Evidently, the educational policy-makers stressed the importance of preserving the county’s linguistic diversity and thus undergirded a pluralist ideology related to the provision of MTI. This was ten years before any discourses of this sort were to be traced in Norwegian educational policies. However, towards the end of the 1970s, Sweden faced economic recession which resulted in restrictions in eligibility requirements for MTI. By 1987, it became a fact that the expressed intentions and guidelines in the reform were not realized in practice (Ingigerd Municio 1987). This was the result of an alteration in the reform in 1985 that led to stricter eligibility requirements¹⁰ that were reinforced in 1997 when the name

’home language’ was changed to ’mother tongue’¹¹.

In the mid 1990s, as a response to Sweden’s entry into the European Union, new discourses on MTI arose. Like elsewhere in Europe, the English language started becoming more central in public life in Sweden. Hence, policy makers saw the need for strengthening the status of the Swedish language. In 2009 The Language Act (Ministry of Education, 2009) was legislated and the nationalist ideology supported by monolingual discourses was a fact in all aspects of language policy, including those related to MTI. The dual purpose of the policy was to regulate and safeguard the position of the Swedish language as the country’s official lingua franca, and the country’s language diversity (Boyd, 2011). However, Boyd argues that, in reality, the policy counteracted the latter on the basis of what Boyd refers to as the policy’s monolingual bias which confers that ”Swedish is and should be the obvious language of choice in public interaction” (ibid, p.34). The type of diversity that the policy refers to is

”with regards to high-status languages rather than [the] language diversity represented by

10 The minimum number of students who requested MTI in a particular language was set at five.

11 The reform required that the parents declare a mother tongue for their child with which they communicated in the home.

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most of the other languages spoken in the country” (ibid). In regards to the current political discourses related to the provision of MTI in Sweden, Boyd states the following:

”The policies aimed at managing Sweden’s multilingualism seem to have as their strategy to maintain a basically monolingual Swedish discourse in the public sector [...], while multilingualism is related to the private sector (the concept of ’home language’) and limited, marginalized parts of the public and independent school offerings. The community thus envisaged is monolingual in the public sphere and multilingual in the private sphere” (p.

151).

In light of the preceding discussion, it is safe to say that the current educational policy contexts in Norway and Sweden are dissimilar in certain respects and similar in others. The fundamental and most explicit difference can be found in the formulations on the right to MTI in the two countries’ Educational Acts which consequently facilitate differing bilingual educational models; the Norwegian system provides transitional language programs, while the Swedish system’s model is more in line with a maintenance based model. The similarities between the two countries are manifested in their language ideologies and political discourses whereby both countries have monolingually oriented language policies. While the political contexts and language ideologies in the two countries have changed over the past four decades, so has their demographic composition, whereby Kurdish refugee immigrants have added to the countries’ linguistic and cultural diversity.