A Survey of The Linguistic Landscape of Stockholm University

Abstract: There is a great prevalence of English in Swedish society, education as well as the research community. Recently, Stockholm University has revised its language policy in order to promote parallel use of Swedish and English. With this background, the current thesis aims to survey the linguistic landscape of Stockholm University in order to find out if there are any patterns that can be observed within it. Some inspiration was drawn from previous research into linguistic landscapes. The main discussion points of the current thesis are the linguistic landscape of Stockholm University, the relation between top-down and bottom-up signs as well as the relation between language use and language policy in light of the data gathered. In order to analyse and discuss this, data was gathered on two separate occasions in the form of signs placed into different categories. The first set of data was gathered in February and March of 2013 and the second set of data was gathered in October of 2015. There are visible patterns in the data, especially when making comparisons over time. Generally, Swedish is the most prevalent language in the linguistic landscape of Stockholm University, the lowest instance being just over 70%, but this prevalence shows a small decrease along with an increase in English and mixed language items going from 2013 to 2015. Also, mixed and English items are more common in bottom-up signs than they are in top-down signs. These English and mixed signs also increase or decrease locally from 2013 to 2015. There was also a local anomaly in that there was one area with a majority of bottom-up signs when the other areas had a majority of top-down signs. Given that this survey was explorative in its nature, it is difficult to draw many firm conclusions based upon the discussion points. However, it appears that there is a difference between language practices and the language policy documents at Stockholm University. The communications policy appears more close to reality however. Swedish also appears to be the language associated with power at said university.