Following large scale investment in so-called green energy, a few selected places in northern Sweden are expected to need thousands of new inhabitants in the upcoming years. Considering decades of depopulation in the rural north, as well as growing anti-immigration tendencies in European politics, many now ask how this population change will be managed. The question is not only who will want to move to what for long has been described as the regional backwaters of Europe (Eriksson, 2010), but also who will actually be welcome when a new future is being constructed on the former outskirts.

In this paper, I will discuss three cases where mediatized discourses (Androutsopoulos, 2014) on language, rurality and migration in the peripheralized North seem to play different and partly conflicting roles. The analysis indicates that the “economization” of refugee migration in municipalities not directly affected by the green investments, is complicated by nationalistic language ideologies. In these declining rural towns, the newcomers are expected to unidirectionally adjust to a supposedly monolingual, Swedish-speaking reality (Nuottaniemi, 2023). In places where the green investments are taking place, however, multilingualism is viewed in a much more favorable light. Here, it is rather the already existing residents that are striving to adapt to a new multilingual, and largely English-speaking, world.

References

Androutsopoulos, J. (2014) ‘Mediatization and sociolinguistic change. Key concepts, research traditions, open issues’, in J. Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, pp. 3–48.

Eriksson, M. (2010) (Re)producing a periphery popular representations of the Swedish North. Umeå: Umeå university.

Nuottaniemi, A. (2023) Flerspråkighetens gränser: språkdidaktik på (o)jämlik grund i migrationernas tid. Umeå: H:ström Text & Kultur.