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

Abstract

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.