This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the motivations that key policy documents have put forward as justifications for Sweden's mother-tongue instruction in immigrant and historical minority languages as a multicultural policy that has endured for nearly half a century. The diachronic development of these motivations is analysed in four…

This article investigates mother tongue instruction (MTI) in Sweden and Denmark in a historical, comparative perspective, with a view to accounting for key differences in language policy enacted in educational fields. Whereas in Sweden, MTI is offered to linguistic minority children irrespective of their linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, in…

This article deals with the politics of classification in contemporary Sweden. It analyses the language political dispute that has developed over the language political regulation of Övdalsk, a non-standard form of Scandinavian spoken in Älvdalen in northern central Sweden. The analysis focuses on the ways in which a discursive exchange over…