The holy trinity of international student life at Lund consists of Kalmar Nation, ESN Lund, and a never-ending plethora of English-language student clubs (Student Theater or the Association of Foreign Affairs). This is the bubble carved out for our foreign visitors, including and insulating them at the same time.
Stepping out of the bubble is a lonely, exposed feeling — a collective loneliness. At least that’s what it felt like for Monika Dąbrowska, a second-year student studying Development Studies. Dąbrowska credits her “own initiative” for becoming involved with Lundagård, Lund University’s student newspaper. One of the publication’s few contributors that writes exclusively in English, Dąbrowska grew up in Warsaw where she went to music school and read humanities in French, fine tuning herself to the arts scene of her hometown. When she moved to Lund, the newspaper seemed like the logical next step, a platform for her to discuss the things she cared about. However, when she came face-to-face with an issue in her mailbox, it became apparent that the platform would come with cultural barriers of its own.
“I was so excited, and then I realized it was all in Swedish,” Dąbrowska recalls, “I could only flip through and look at the pictures.”
Recruitment for the news outlet happens on a case-by-case application basis. Prospective contributors are referred to a discreet page on the website, only available in Swedish, where they are presented with a cryptic email address to contact. That didn’t stop her. After some internal back and forth, Dąbrowska joined Lundagård last spring, just in time to report on the Eurovision 2024 contest in Malmö. She has been grateful for the opportunity, but she says she can’t expect to write in anything other than Swedish or English because of her “target audience.”
Lundagård doesn’t have an official language because it doesn’t need one. Lund’s Student Theater (LUST) and the Association of Foreign Affairs (UPF), on the other hand, are intentionally international because everything else is languidly local. Language exists as a form of distinction; it forms a rhetorical border between “us” and “them”. This figurative border is not militarized, neither are any of Sweden’s literal ones, but they still exist as markers of sovereignty. We spend our entire lives navigating these borders, internalizing labels to construct a sense of identity. We go about like a homesteader staking out boundaries, reminding others where our property starts and ourselves where it ends.
Usually, each print issue features one or two English articles, with the vast majority in Swedish. As of writing, there are only eight members in the Slack channel tagged “English-News-Tips” compared to 78 members of the organization included in the “general” channel. Isak Aho Nyman, one of Lundagård’s three “cross-sectional” editors, says most English-language contributors are exchange students who don’t have the “longevity” of local, Swedish degree program students. “The only time an article will be published in English is if the interviewees speak English,” Nyman says, “or if the topic is relevant for an international audience.”
With Nyman’s help, I reached out to a few English-language reporters at Lundagård to discuss the role of language in their work. Ella Kettula, hailing from Helsinki, is in the second year of her master’s program in Global Studies. Though her family is both Swedish and Finnish, she considers Swedish to be her mother tongue. Growing up among the Swedish-speaking minority population in Finland, she attended Swedish-language schools where she learned English and Finnish as second languages. Åbo Akademi University, where she studied her bachelor’s program, is “the only multidisciplinary Swedish-language university in Finland”, according to the Opetushallitus (Finnish National Agency for Education). Since she is currently away from Lund for a semester, we met virtually over Zoom. After a few minutes of small talk and jokes about “COVID-era technology”, she told me how writing in English feels different from Swedish.
“I feel much more comfortable writing in Swedish,” she says, before taking a pensive pause. “But sometimes there’s a benefit to journalistic writing in English.
English is a form of standardization for Kettula, who says the language is “slightly more detached from my heart.” When reporting on the arrival process for new international students, she says English “simplifies” her writing. But strictly hard news is not the only kind of writing that Kettula does. “When I’m writing student life columns, which have to be fun and personal, I write in Swedish,” she says.
Interested to explore if there was an ethnic basis for Kettula’s sentiment, I sat down with Hampus Ågren in his favourite spot on campus, Café Ariman. Originally from Lund, he is a proud globetrotter wrapping up his second year in political science. Sporting a windbreaker and meticulously trimmed beard, he brought to mind the rugged, survivalist type. The icing on the cake was the (albeit fleeting) Kiwi accent he picked up from the year he spent in a New Zealand elementary school. Like Dąbrowska, Ågren also knew he wanted to join the newspaper. “I knew I wanted to write for Panorama, LUPEF’s newspaper,” he said. But for him, the onboarding looked different.
LUPEF refers to Lund University’s Political and Economic Association. On the second day of novisch week, he approached one of Panorama’s editors, asking how he could join, and walked away with a clear answer. There was no beating around the bush. He took to Panorama (a fully Swedish-language publication) and Lundagård like a duck takes to water. Or, for lack of a better simile, like a teknolog takes to the mossy depths of Sjön-sjön, egged on by their peers ashore. Cultural security hinges on this “egging on”, this projection and subsequent internalization of social capital funded by friends, family, and colleagues.
I asked if he ever felt a cultural obligation to prioritize Swedish in his writing. The question seemed to catch him off guard. “No,” he said, “There was this long phase after returning from New Zealand when I thought English was a much better language. For four years I only read in English.” He went on to recall how English felt more “varied” and “novel”, encapsulated new and exciting emotions, and framed his passion for international politics. The U.S. presidential election was undoubtedly a lot more entertaining than procedural correctness in the Riksdag.
Even if some writers feel more comfortable writing in one or another, it may never be possible to quantify how “Swedish” or “English” an environment is. Ågren’s Swedishness is constant, taken for granted, notwithstanding a tidal ebb and flow. It is the espousal of globalism and cosmopolitanism — precisely postnational values. These values can be communicated by borrowing upon both languages, contrary to the “either or” dilemma pushed with nationalist fervour elsewhere in the world. He has a claim to a culture that reciprocates this claim upon him, no matter if he’s home or abroad. He has the luxury of “rediscovering” Swedish through stand-up comedy or new authors “that use language differently”— a process that’s wholly incomparable to those like Dąbrowska, who is learning Swedish on the other side of the looking-glass. Ågren and Kettula write in English because their interviewees are international students, like Nyman says. When Dąbrowska writes in English, it’s because she’s subverting this exact unspoken norm that international students are interviewees — becoming the interviewer instead.
When one is culturally secure, everything feels effortless. That was the case for Justin Smertin. Though he doesn’t remember much of learning Swedish, he remembers how different Sweden felt — much like how different New Zealand felt for Ågren. Like Kettula, Smertin comes from a multiethnic background. He is half Lithuanian and half Russian, having attended Jewish school in Vilnius before moving to Stockholm.
“I definitely consider myself more Swedish than Lithuanian now,” he proclaimed, though with a slightly imperious, almost American flair to his tone. In his personal life, however, he favours neither — opting instead for English, which he terms “the language of science.” Trained as a mathematician, he now studies a postgraduate engineering program in Copenhagen. Commenting on his years at Lund, he expressed his appreciation at the programs being fully English-taught.
“We’re not doing things in a vacuum anymore,” he says. “I don’t think any particular culture is tied to language. Language communicates culture. You just have to find equivalent concepts in each.”
By this time, he had worked himself up to a near frenzy and launched a fresh tirade on the problem with belief systems. How everyone believes different things, courtesy of different socialization experiences, and all we can do is salvage what’s left of the “imperfect Venn diagram”. Things like IKEA and meatballs, for example, and take that to be culture.
“What is Swedishness, then?” I prodded.
“It’s a bullshit concept we made up,” he replied without missing a beat. “It’s a cacophony of things that are vaguely related to this geographic area.”
Both Kettula and Smertin believe in English as a form of standardization. But for Kettula, the language is more of an internal benchmark to align her writing with. Smertin sees it as a throughline that can be used to bind others. “I really want people to come together,” he remarks, “We’re all humans and we’re all going to die one day.” He’s much more adamant than the others on unity, and for good reason.
In Smertin’s raw and unbridled language lies cautious optimism that everyone — Swedish-speaking or not— can be stakeholders in this land, irrespective of their past. For Smertin, Swedish culture can be anything, just not what’s across the sea. And for that reason, English is a relief language — not simply a utility. It’s an alternative, a reminder of something he’s not, a culture he doesn’t want to be part of anymore. If “Swenglish” is just a benign conversational aid in Lund’s student cafés, an emblem of an increasingly interconnected future, then English in Lithuania is a political statement — distinctly juxtaposed against the neighbour next door. Just as it is elsewhere in the Russosphere, especially Ukraine and the Baltic states.
It’s politics that, Smertin hopes, can only be separate from culture. What the latter is, he’s still not sure.
By Yuhuan Xie
October 18, 2024
