Shaping a Danish Multilingual University’s Language Policy: Gatekeepers and Drivers of Change

Within the last decade, many universities in non-Anglophone Europe have developed new language policies in order to sharpen their international profile. Since 2008, the University of Copenhagen has been guided by a parallel language strategy aiming at a balance between English and the national language Danish. In addition, the university has recently decided to develop a new strategy which introduces several other languages as potentially relevant for students in their academic programs and when they target the Danish or the international labor market. At an institutional level this is seen as a way of promoting quality of programs and securing the university’s position in the international market. However, neither all languages nor all four language skills are equally important for all purposes. Therefore a careful needs analysis is an important first step in order to decide which languages and language skills to include in the actual planning. At the University of Copenhagen the needs analyses involve students as well as instructors and members of study boards. These different participants in the academic community are often motivated by different perspectives on teaching and learning issues, e.g., on curricular priorities and traditions, but also hold individual preferences. Based on a language-in-education perspective, this paper will focus on the different organizational levels involved when developing and implementing a new language strategy and the possible alignments and mismatches between these levels. As an example it will look at the role of the French and German languages as mentioned by different stakeholders and compare this with the situation for English.