During the last year, language and education have been frequent topics of debate in Finnish media. The parallel school system of the nation, with separate schools for the Swedish and the Finnish language groups, has been questioned in ways not present earlier. According to the Finnish constitution, the two official language groups in Finland should be taught separately, which means that the Finnish schools are monolingual. Currently, only a few of these monolingual Finnish-medium and Swedish-medium schools are co-located in the same school buildings. The possibility to increase the number of co-located schools is being discussed at the administrative level in many of the bilingual regions.

In media discussions on co-located schools, the debate has focused on the one hand on the possibilities of increased contact and better language learning across language borders that the co-located schools could offer, and on the other hand, on the risk of co-co-location marginalizing the Swedish language.

However, so far there are hardly any empirical studies about the contact between the students from the different language groups in their everyday lives. Students, sharing dinner hall, sports hall och schoolyard have possibilities to meet each other, but do they meet? Do they want to meet? Are they supposed or encouraged by teachers, parents and friends to be in contact with each other?

Building both on a school-ethnographic framework, including conversation analysis of video recordings, and media analyses, this paper aims at identifying and analyzing meetings between the students in Finnish and Swedish schools sharing school buildings.

The research questions are: If and when students meet during the school day, how are these meetings constructed? How do they talk about the possible contact with the students from the other language group? How do the teachers and the parents orient towards the possible contact between the students? How is the possible contact between the language groups argued for, and against, in the media?

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