Contemporary multilingualism in Sweden led to the creation of a language law in 2009 (SFS 2009:600), making Swedish the official language and passing on the responsibility for protecting the continued use of Swedish in all domains of society to public sector institutions. Given the growing need for English in today’s globalized tertiary-level education and scientific research, Swedish universities now need to develop their own procedures and policies that attend both to the language law and to the need to be globalized.

This paper, then, which reports on part of a larger ethnographic/discourse analytic project, examines how ideologies about English and multilingualism are entextualized in a language policy that was developed by a committee at a major Swedish university. Using nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), we map the discourses in place reflected in the policy in order to lift forward how core language ideologies are intertwined with institutional language planning. Analysis brings to light intertextual connections to language ideologies reflected in the national language law, in particular (i) ‘clear language’ in all the university’s communication regardless of language used and (ii) Swedish as the main language to be used in all official documents that have legal force. Moreover, the need to be globalized and accessible to non- Swedish-speaking individuals is to be met by Swedish-English bilingualism, resemiotized (Scollon & Scollon 2004) in the policy as ‘parallel language use’, in most of the university’s communication. Further, Swedish is stipulated as the main medium of instruction in first-cycle undergraduate courses, with growing use of English at the second- and third-cycle levels, and in the university’s research activities. Finally, reflecting Sweden’s linguistic hierarchy (Hult 2012), multilingualism was backgrounded in the policy text but still framed as important asset to the university.