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Drawing on theories of agency in LPP (e.g., Bouchard and Glasgow, in: Bouchard,Glasgow (eds) Agency in language policy and planning. Critical inquiries, Routledge,2019) and educational governance (e.g., Ramiel and Lefstein in Camb JEduc 52(2):217–233, 2022), this study investigates the conditions under whichheritage language schools operate outside national support structures. It is basedon a linguistic ethnographic case study of a Greek community-run complementaryschool in Sweden that abruptly lost access to its premises in the spring of 2023.We examine the key stakeholders’ understandings of this period of turbulence, andthe individual and collective agentive responses they enacted to secure the school’ssurvival and to overcome adversity. Data were collected over two years and includepolicy documents, interviews with key stakeholders, fieldnotes and recordings ofclassroom interactions, as well as fieldnotes from board, parent and teacher meetings.The findings exemplify how bottom-up governance practices, individual andcollective agency and emotional investments contribute to the Greek school’s organisationalsustainability, and enable it to persist in the face of acute challengesand the changing political conditions in Sweden. Ultimately, we discuss how thesefindings can inform language policy more broadly to strengthen support for heritagelanguage education and multilingualism in society.

This study investigates two distinct ways of organising heritage language education within one national context. More specifically, we investigate the teaching of Greek in Sweden through: (a) mother tongue instruction provided by the national education system and (b) a complementary school run by a parental organisation. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenetic approach (1995), where structure, culture and agency are seen as separate but interrelated analytical layers, we investigate key actors’ agentive responses to structural and cultural enablements and constraints. The study includes a historical overview and a linguistic ethnography conducted in both contexts. The data encompass policy documents, classroom observations and interviews with teachers, board members, parents and students. The findings show that the educational contexts have different legal statuses and are governed at different policy levels (national vs. transnational), while sharing many structural constraints at the level of praxis, such as being based on voluntary participation, limited instruction time and inconvenient scheduling. However, the key actors navigate the constraints of each setting in different ways, thus pointing to distinctive differences between them. Ultimately, the study shows how both educational systems complement each other and serve important roles in supporting the maintenance and development of heritage language and culture in Sweden.

This article examines the literary representation of contemporary urban vernaculars (CUV) in fiction. It focuses specifically on four Swedish novels published in the last ten years, whose narratives are set in the urban and increasingly multilingual, migrant-rich and class-stratified peripheral areas of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The analysis centers on how they are situated in these urban peripheries, using written representations of spoken, non-standard Swedish CUV as symbolic resources to give authenticity to the narratives. We examine the distinctive linguistic features that are employed to evoke the imagination of CUV, and how these are used to build the fictional characters and to create certain recognizable social personas and practices. We also discuss the linguistic features that are available but are not exploited to represent the fictional characters’ ways of speaking, and possible reasons why this is so. Finally, we examine how the novels exploit contrasts between registers, particularly between CUV and adult second-language speaker styles and between CUV and standard Swedish, and with what effects. The findings are discussed in the context of the broader social discourses about language, migration, CUV and adult second-language speakers in present-day Sweden.

This article uses contemporary Swedish fiction to explore sociolinguistic phenomena, and argues that literature constitutes an important arena for studying the (re)production and circulation of sociolinguistic experiences and ideas at a particular time and place. It builds on qualitative analysis of 65 Swedish books, published between 2000 and 2020, which depict protagonists with multilingual and migrant backgrounds. The study examines patterns of repetition in these works of fiction. It foregrounds recurring sociolinguistic experiences that are made relevant in the depiction of the fictional characters’ lives, and how they are emotionally interpreted. The analysis shows that the narrated experiences are often told and organized in similar ways and they tend to use the same social images of speakers to highlight processes of boundary-making and social differentiation. Language is used as an important part of the entextualization of these social experiences. For example, the authors often depict “the immigrant” and" the Swede” as binary opposites, which are linked to certain typical forms of speaking and being. By way of repetition, we argue, these recurring fictional experiences contribute to the formation of a grander narrative about language, belonging and social boundary-making in contemporary Sweden, and to the construction of Sweden as a society that is increasingly segregated and stratified.

This article explores practices of evaluation in academic recruitment in Swedish as a Second Language (SSL), an expanding and transdisciplinary subject area. As is common elsewhere, Swedish academia relies on a tradition of external expert review intended to ensure a meritocratic process. Here, we present an analysis of 109 written expert reports concerning recruitment to 57 positions in SSL during 2000–20. Because SSL lacks institutional autonomy, and is spread across several sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the material encompasses experts with diverse academic backgrounds. The SSL reports are broadly characterized by qualitative assessment. In contrast to other fields, the SSL experts seldom use quantitative proxy measures. Instead, they mainly rely on received conceptions of the boundaries of SSL as a means of justifying their inclusion and exclusion of candidates. This dominant regularity consists of attempts to define and delimit SSL and its core research areas, to locate the candidates in a core-to-periphery scheme with respect to these boundaries, and to rank them accordingly. This mechanism of social closure serves to restrict access to SSL to candidates with qualifications that conform to the experts’ own conceptions of SSL. As we show, the experts’ internally ambiguous conceptions of SSL tend to be constructed in relation to their own scientific habitus and investments. Beyond evaluating applicants’ possession of scientific capital, their distinctive style of reasoning around research qualifications and skills thus involves power-laden boundary-work, which leaves ample room for individual, yet habitus-specific arbitrariness.

This chapter presents an overview of sociolinguistic research from the Nordic region, which consists of five sovereign countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In all these countries, sociolinguistics was established on a strong tradition of dialectology in the official languages of each country. To this base was added variationism, so dialectology and variationism were dominant themes of research through the 1990s.

Since then, two major international developments have had a significant impact on sociolinguistics. One is international migration. Multilingualism and the integration and education of migrants and their children in all the Nordic countries have been important themes in sociolinguistic research in recent years. The other major development is what could be called linguistic globalization, which has led to a greater interest in the study of the role of English in the Nordic countries, but also in studying sociolinguistic phenomena outside of the Nordic region.