Every other Sunday a group of children along with their mothers assemble at our home for a session of homespun mother-tongue instruction. We who attend as mothers are a parody of Swedish-Iranian women born in the eighties: two researchers, one doctor and a poet, none of whom are particularly good at reading or writing in Persian. There are various reasons behind why these children have been denied their mother-tongue instruction at their schools. As far as my children are concerned, they attend a comparatively small independent school where the number of Persian speaking students does not meet the requisite “magic number” of five. Other schools require placement tests or demand that the children choose which one of their parents’ languages they prefer to learn.

One of our neighbors is an elderly woman who for many years taught a Romani-language class in an annex attached to the nearest public school. She was the first Romani woman in Sweden to obtain a teaching degree. We are not more well acquainted than that we occasionally say hello, but I often think about her with a sense of shared kinship. The history of discrimination against the Romani minority in Sweden dates back to the Middle Ages. We are relatively new here; we have arrived along different pathways, faced different obstacles, and have had experiences that are different in many ways—but in the struggle for minority rights, our respective roads converge.

For a long time, our understanding of minority rights has been dominated by two perspectives: universalism and particularism. All children in Sweden – including minority children – are required to attend compulsory education and are afforded a fundamental right to education, but not all children need mother-tongue instruction. This is a specific right granted to minority groups which serves the purpose to enable them to retain and develop their cultural identity. Yet I am skeptical to reducing this question to “identity politics”. Recognition is important, but in the current political debate mother-language instruction is increasingly formulated as an issue of costs. The critical point of contention is whether public funds should be allocated to the specific needs of our children. Mother-tongue instruction therefore raises the question of how society’s resources should be allocated as well as the right to avoid assimilation.

Mother-tongue instruction therefore raises the question of how society’s resources should be allocated as well as the right to avoid assimilation.

A recent government report concluded that receiving instruction in a mother-tongue language does not conflict with a child’s integration (SOU 2025:9). What is interesting about this report is not only the results of the research that is presented, but rather how the issue is formulated as a political problem. There is an unspoken premise that mother-tongue language instruction could undermine a child’s integration. Proficiency in Swedish is contrasted with the minority language, as if children would automatically become less proficient in Swedish simply because they are becoming more proficient in their mother-tongue language. This exposes an assimilation discourse which, sending a shiver down my spine, brings to mind the experiences of my Romani neighbors.

Prior to the 1960s, Sweden’s policies towards minority groups were characterized by required conformity and the entrenched expectation that these groups would all become “Swedes.” This only changed in the 1970s as a result of advocacy efforts by Romani, Sami, Jewish, Estonian, and Finnish minority organizations. They made demands for integration rather than assimilation: the right to preserve their culture and language while simultaneously having access to universal rights. This was when mother-tongue instruction was established as a public good. During this period, the so-called Swedish Commission on Immigration (that later formed the basis for the government’s bill) made use of the term “linguistic minorities” rather than distinguishing between “national minorities” and “immigrants”, and claimed that there was a fluid boundary between recent immigrants and established minorities in the country (SOU 1974:69 p 94).

As early as the 1980s, the pendulum swung again. My family arrived in Sweden just as the citizens of Sjöbo voiced their rejection of immigration. My mother studied at Stockholm University while the serial killer “Lasermannen” was running rampant[1]. In the small town of Visby where I grew up, the general mood was similar to the rest of the country. The constant feeling of being unwelcome and unwanted by majority society haunted me like a shadow throughout my childhood. It became internalized as a form of self-control which I only became aware of as an adult, resulting in an excessive concern for being viewed as well-behaved in the eyes of Swedes so that nobody would get the idea that one was an uncivilized savage. Included in this is the ability to speak a refined and an accent-free Swedish, but also to not speak in one’s mother-tongue language, since they are often pitted against each other. For my parents, who migrated to Sweden in their 40s, changing their mother-tongue language was not an option. During the twenty-three years he spent in Visby, every Sunday my father made it a habit to read the two Persian newspapers that were available at the city library. That this library maintained this subscription for just a few users certainly reveals something about the prevailing spirit of the times.

In Visby there was also a daycare center for immigrant children. As far as I recall, the staff spoke Arabic, Spanish, and Persian. One of the teachers also produced a Persian-language program on Gotland’s local radio station once a week—including a short segment for children. When I started school our mother-tongue language teacher was a man who by training was a geologist. He had fallen in love with a girl from Gotland when he was a university student who travelled to the island to view the limestone cliffs for which the island is famous. I was 25 years old when I realized that his wife, Lisa, was Swedish. She was the one who, as a representative for the municipality, welcomed my parents when they had recently been granted asylum and arrived on the island. At the time and at every following encounter when I met her at parties, she would speak Persian. As a child I never noticed her accent or that her skin and complexion was clearly paler than ours. All of this—parents who loved their native language, librarians, educators, local radio stations, and social workers who normalized multilingualism—served as a counterbalance to the racism of the 1990s.

All of this—parents who loved their native language, librarians, educators, local radio stations, and social workers who normalized multilingualism—served as a counterbalance to the racism of the 1990s.

Currently there appears to be a recurring feedback tendency in the political debate on minority rights in general, especially regarding mother-tongue language instruction, but the academic research field is continuously evolving. Concepts such as translanguaging and heritage language have been developed in order to improve understanding of the behavior and educational needs of multilingual students. Whereas it was previously assumed that multilingual children were at risk of becoming “semi-lingual” and not fully mastering any language, it is now widely accepted that multilingual children have the ability to switch between languages and transcend language barriers in a way that can prove to be an advantage. The term “heritage language” can describes the experience of groups who have experienced language loss. Children’s book author Minoo Shams uses the word ”grandma-language” to describe how a child can feel a strong connection to a language due to the fact that elderly relatives speak it. In a language learning group focused on language heritage, no prior knowledge is required—just a sense of connection to the language, even if the participants don’t speak it fluently. The goal is not to attain the same level of proficiency as children in the home country, but rather to heal the sense of loss that can be the result of a lost heritage. If this group would be included among those eligible for mother-tongue language instruction, a growing segment of the population would find themselves needing support. This would require developing teaching with differentiated and adjusted levels of instruction and updated goals that cater to a wider range of new student groups.

Many Romani, Sami and Tornedal activists have described how older relatives experienced a shameful stigma connected to belonging to a minority, that this was something one would rather keep concealed and forget about. Shame and silence were accompanied with a grief which is now being worked through by a generation who are unable to understand their grandparents. This is the course that political commentators and pundits are charting for us, the new minorities. A Sweden Democrat recently made headlines by saying that there are too many people living in Sweden who are not ethnic Swedes. Social democrats are discussing language requirements for citizenship and describing linguistically isolated minorities with a rhetoric which is reminiscent of the 1960s, but that goes even further. Back then, Swedish language courses for immigrants were voluntary. Now proposals are being made which would prohibit municipalities and regional governments from employing people who lack sufficient proficiency in Swedish. It is not clear how this is meant to facilitate further integration. Rather, it is a demand that is possible to articulate since the very existence of minorities is viewed as a problem.

Given the current state of the world, it may seem trivial to even mention the right to mother-tongue language education. What will happen if my children are never allowed to be taught by a qualified teacher, and are forced to keep putting up with the makeshift, improvised lesson plans prepared by me and the other moms? Well at least no one will die as a result. However large segments of our shared welfare system might be dismantled if we would apply this kind of reasoning consistently. We who have an immigrant background and were born abroad comprise twenty percent of the Swedish population, this share is even greater if one includes the children of immigrants. It is unfair that we are suddenly counted as part of the wider community as far as the staffing of hospital wards is concerned, but in all other respects expected to erase our mother-tongue language and its connected heritage.

In the 1970s, the Social Democrats advocated for international solidarity by promoting equal rights for minorities. These political visions went way beyond mother-tongue language education, and included the right to partake of a living culture by way of this language, as well as the maintenance of contacts and exchanges with the countries of origin. Half a century later many people with an immigrant background are advised against travelling to their country of origin due to a deteriorating security situation, whilst their relatives are denied a travel visa to Sweden. This also effects cultural workers who want to attend festivals and present their work. Exchange programs are out of the question. Complicated sanctions make it hard to even order books. If the country of origin happens to be dictatorship, which countries that generate refugees have a tendency to be, further obstacles occur in the form of censorship. Mother-tongue language instruction has a unique potential to bridge these impediments; to be both a source of knowledge for children here and by extension a support for those who fight for their freedom in other countries. It’s also a way of ensuring that embassies and their ideologically biased cultural organizations are not allowed exclusive access to a market that offers families this type of service.

I am calling for a policy on minorities which makes it easier for us “ordinary citizens” to lead a “normal life”, to paraphrase the Iranian protest song Baraaye by Shervin Hajipour. I wish for initiatives that provides our children a semblance of normality despite the geopolitical wreckage, the epicenter of which, is located in our home countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and so on. Imagine if my children could invite their aunt over to visit some time? She has always been denied a visa to Sweden, due to that she, being a young and unmarried woman, is perceived as lacking a connection to Iran. For that reason, the migration authorities believe she will refuse to return once the visa has expired. My children are forced to make do with video calls. Sometimes they're sitting on the couch when I get home from work, laughing hysterically at group chats where grandma, grandpa, and auntie all have different visual filters—extra-big eyes, smiling or sad mouths, dog ears, or bird beaks. Mother-tongue language instruction is a fundamental right that I fight for, because I value these relationships. It is not the language in itself, but rather what it represents, what it brings into being, in the form of life and love. Is that not the sticking point for the opponents of mother-tongue language instruction? That possibility that one-fifth of the population would feel a sense of connection to people and places beyond Sweden's borders.

This past summer my son found a book about the Spanish civil war at a secondhand store. He asked me what ”the falangists” meant. When I explained, he asked if the situation was similar to the Swedish political parties today. I told him about my friend who was once the chair of the Liberal Party’s youth wing and who, at the time, supported unrestricted immigration. Once she questioned how much we ought to build systems that force people to adapt to nation states, when national borders were becoming less and less important. This might sound like an echo from a different time, but this really is how I think when I make plans for the autumn lessons in our little mother-tongue language class. We will continue to meet in my kitchen. Perhaps we will see my aging Romani neighbors through the window, she who started her own school back in the day, and maybe we'll nod to each other in silent acknowledgement. The world is bigger than Sweden and our children are part of it. This homemade language class is not exactly the international brigade, but a small act of resistance that we can perform in our daily lives.

Baharan Kazemi is a writer, social worker and holds a Ph.D. in social work. Her research focuses on children’s vulnerability and migration-related topics. She has been organizing Persian-language children’s cultural activities in Stockholm since 2016, often in collaboration with the public library. She has also written children’s books in Persian using the Latin alphabet and is currently working on an adaptation of the poet Attar’s work “The Conference of the Birds” for the anthology *Sagovärldar* (Lilla Piratförlaget). Baharan has been active in the public discourse on mother-tongue language education and the rights of multilingual children to be granted cultural representation public space and cultural programming. She has contributed opinion pieces and participated in panel discussions, including at the IBBY event during the Gothenburg Book Fair in 2024.