Swedish television as a mechanism for language planning and policy

The function of the public service broadcasting company Sveriges Television (Swedish Television) as a component of the Swedish ecology of language planning and policy is examined. Analysis of recent policy documents as well as data about television programming illuminates how television serves as a language planning mechanism. It is shown that television is explicitly framed as a tool for status planning through regulations about the relative positions of different languages in this domain. The management of content in Swedish, national minority languages, and other languages, in turn, suggests that Sveriges Television is also implicitly engaged in discourse planning that (re)produces the current linguistic hierarchy in Sweden through the representation of multilingualism.