National minorities are provided certain rights related to language and schooling in European minority policies and national legislation (cf. Council of Europe, 2013). Despite of national minorities often being paralleled on a policy level, Ball et al. (2003) highlight minority ethnic as a diverse category, with significant differences among the minority students in terms of socio-economical backgrounds within and between groups. The subjectivities within a nation-space are constructed in relation to a variety of differences, such as ethnicity, language and social class (cf. Yuval-Davis, 2007). As for example Rajander (2010) notes, policies related to ’multiculturalism’ can also be viewed as a means to govern difference and maintain the legitimacy of the majority culture. This paper focuses on the minority language policies in Finland and Sweden and particularly the educational spaces of two national minorities; the Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland and the Sweden-Finns in Sweden. In Finland, the legislation provides a strong cultural and political autonomy for the Swedish-speaking Finns, whose position in the Finnish society is politically established and dates back to the era when Finland was a part of the Swedish kingdom. Swedish is the second national language in Finland and Swedish-speaking education is provided in a monolingual public school institution. (cf. Engman, 1995; Ihalainen & Saarinen, 2015.) In Sweden, the history of the Finnish minority is often perceived as linked to work-related migration to industrial urban areas during the post-war decades, even if the history of Finns in Sweden is both socially and geographically more diverse (Korkiasaari & Tarkiainen, 2000). Children with a Finnish background are, as one of Sweden’s five national minorities, entitled to receive education partly or fully in Finnish. However, the Finnish-speaking schools function as bilingual free schools outside the public school system. Thus the education in Finnish is also framed by the local school market and parental choice.

This paper examines how educational policies concerning these minority languages, Swedish in Finland and Finnish in Sweden, materialise and become embodied in the educational discourse and practice in both countries. Ethnographic research conducted in both national contexts serves a starting point for the analysis. A particular emphasis is put on the formations of social class and their intersections with other differences in the discourses and practices of a bilingual school space. With a focus on language and class in social and material orders of minority education, this paper aims to ask what kind of classed subjectivities are constructed within those spaces.

Within the borders of a nation-state, language is a profound marker of identity that functions as an administrative and cultural precondition of legitimate citizenship. Language frames the cultural space with and within which a nation is constructed to exist and regenerate its narrative and shared identity. (cf. Anderson, 2006; From & Sahlström, in press.) Language and social class have been extensively theorised in the field of traditional sociological class analysis (cf. Bourdieu, 1991; Bernstein, 1990) as well as in the field of sociolinguistics (cf. Skuttnabb-Kangas, 2000; Baker, 2011). In addition to viewing social class as fixed social and economic categories there is a need to look at the continual processes through which social class is made in the national and local spaces of education. According to Beverley Skeggs (1997; 2004) value related to social class is generated through processes of inscription, exchange, evaluation and perspective, which are central in understanding how differences and inequalities are produced.

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