The Social Status of Languages in Finland and Lithuania: A Plurimethodological Empirical Survey on Language Climate Change

Finland and Lithuania stand for different ways of dealing with societal multilingualism and minority issues. However, in recent years, questions of language policy had been discussed more controversially in both countries. Thus our detailed surveys on Finland and Lithuania focused on how different population groups think about the lingual situation there. This publication presents the researchers’ results from between 2014 and 2016 regarding the attitudes towards the minority and majority languages. Key to the research was an especially developed methodological mixture, including the matched-guise technique. The surveys’ final reports to the German Research Foundation (DFG) are followed by contributions that give more details on the legal status of the languages in Finland and Lithuania or describe the specific features of urban multilingualism there.

Stephan Kessler holds the chair of Baltic Studies at the University of Greifswald. His research topics are in linguistics as well as in literary studies.

Marko Pantermöller is professor of Finnish philology at the University of Greifswald. He puts the main stress on language policy, contact linguistics and morphology.