In several European countries, students who speak a language other than the official language of instruction at home can request heritage language (HL) instruction as part of their mainstream education (Alisaari et al., 2023; Iversen, 2024; Salö et al., 2018). However, the eligibility conditions for HL education vary significantly among countries and even between different categories of languages within the same education system. For example, Denmark distinguishes between EU languages and non-EU languages in its legislation concerning HL education (Daugaard, 2020). Norway features a clear distinction between the rights to HL education offered to the Indigenous Sámi people and speakers of languages associated with recent migration. Little research has explored how different forms of organising HL education may influence students’ experiences. In this article, I investigate the following research questions: How do language policies in education influence the conditions for Arabic and Sámi HL education, and what consequences can these conditions have for students’ experiences? 

Framing the study within a critical poststructuralist tradition, I operationalise policies, conditions, and experiences in the following way:

Policies: Language policy can be defined as public policy related to the management of languages within a given territory (e.g. Gazzola, 2023). However, language policy and planning have implications extending far beyond issues of language (e.g. Tollefsen, 1991). Currently, most researchers acknowledge that language policy also involves the distribution of privilege, status and power in society, particularly when determining which languages to teach as part of mainstream education. Hence, from a critical poststructuralist perspective, language policy is interpreted as an exercise of power that attempts to regulate people’s behaviour. As such, some researchers see language policies as ‘mostly intended to strengthen the state and its grip on the population and the territory it governs and represents’ (Mamadouh, 2024, p. 137). 

Conditions: Rather than seeing language policies as working unidirectionally from ‘the pen of the policy’s signer to the choices of the teacher’ (Johnson, 2024, p. 24), I see language policy as setting certain boundaries and creating specific conditions upon which teachers and students can act (e.g. Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, 2024). Specifically, I see the organisational and material conditions for HL education as enactments of language policies.

Experiences: Student experiences are studied drawing on Brigitta Busch's (2017) concept of a lived experience of language, which ‘emphasizes the intersubjective dimension of language as a gesture toward the other and casts light on the often neglected bodily and emotional dimensions of perception and speech’ (p. 340). As such, the concept highlights the emotional consequences of how speakers’ languages are met in education and society.

In order to investigate how language policies in education influence the conditions for Arabic and Sámi HL education and what consequences this organisation can have for students’ experiences, I designed a multi-sited ethnography (e.g. Falzon, 2009; McCarty, 2011) involving fieldwork in two research settings: two peripatetic Sámi HL teachers based in mainstream schools in a city in Norway and one Arabic HL teacher based in a mosque in the same city. The study consisted of three steps. Initially, I reviewed the documents leading up to the Norwegian Language Act (2021), with particular attention to the regulation of Sámi and Arabic HL education. I also considered how the policies outlined in the Language Act were reflected in the Norwegian Education Act (1998). Since my fieldwork, Norway has implemented a new Education Act (2024) that did not make any significant changes to the rights to HL education awarded to different groups of students. Next, I conducted ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how these language policies were enacted in the field. During my fieldwork in the Arabic complementary school, I followed one Arabic HL teacher’s weekly lessons. Although the number of students varied somewhat from week to week, no more than 16 students were ever present at the same time. My fieldwork in the Sámi HL education involved two teachers, ambulating among 14 mainstream schools. Finally, towards the end of the fieldwork, I conducted individual interviews with teachers and students to learn more about their experiences of HL education. The analysis proceeded in three phases corresponding to the study’s attention to language policies, organisational and material conditions and students’ lived experience of HL education. In the first phase, I reviewed the policy documents and conducted a thorough reading to identify how they regulated the teaching of Arabic and Sámi in education. In the second phase, I began categorising the practical challenges that the participants reported and that I observed during the fieldwork. This analysis took the form of an abductive process of thematically categorising the teachers’ and students’ concerns, as presented in the empirical material. In the third phase, I coded and categorised the student interviews and focused my attention on the discrepancies between the lived experiences of the four HL students of Arabic and the HL education experiences of the eight HL students of Sámi.

Researchers have long acknowledged that language policy involves the distribution of privilege, status and power in society (Mamadouh, 2024; Tollefsen, 1991). Even though students in Norway have a right to HL education in Sámi, it is restricted by several organisational and material restraints (Hermansen & Olsen, 2020; Kosner, 2024). My review of the Norwegian language policies demonstrates that students speaking languages associated with recent migration, such as Arabic, have intentionally been awarded fewer rights to HL education due to a lack of protection in international conventions, pacts and treaties. From a critical poststructuralist perspective, this regulation is considered an exercise of power and an expression of language ideologies (e.g. Mamadouh, 2024). The enactments of language policies in HL students’ lives lead to ‘habitualized patterns of language practice’ (Busch, 2017, p. 350). My analysis indicates that students may develop more positive attitudes towards their heritage when HL education is organised within mainstream education than if HL education is organised outside mainstream education. This finding is supported by the HL students of Sámi, who despite unconducive organisation and limited resources (e.g. Hermansen & Olsen, 2020; Kosner, 2024), still benefited from receiving HL education as part of their mainstream education. In the words of Busch (2017, p. 340), the exclusion of Arabic HL education from mainstream education served as a ‘gesture’ towards the students, which led them to refrain from speaking Arabic in mainstream education and keep their attendance at the complementary school secret from peers and teachers in mainstream school.

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