The internationalisation of higher education in two different contexts: Catalan and Estonian sociolinguistic perspectives

In recent years, the topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance (J...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Soler Carbonell, Josep, Gallego Balsà, Lídia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/56834
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2016.1132656
http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/56834
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Internacionalització
Universitat
Multilingüisme
Educació superior
Política lingüística
Internacionalisme
Multilingualism
Higher education
Language policy
Internationalism
Descripción
Sumario:In recent years, the topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance (Jaffe, 2009) and language attitudes towards the different languages present in their immediate contexts. In particular, we compare Lleida University (Catalonia, Spain) with the University of Tartu (Estonia), analysing several key parameters. The purpose of the comparison is to contrast, from a sociolinguistic point of view, the higher education setting of two medium-sized language contexts in Europe (Vila & Bretxa, 2015) with different demolinguistic and language political features. The results show that both institutions adopt a similar stance in connection to their respective national language (a protectionist attitude), but they take different approaches towards the other societal language, on the one hand, and English, on the other. We read these differences in light of the broader historical and socio-political backgrounds, which we suggest are reflected in the microcosm of the universities here analysed.