The Swedish Institute (SI) is tasked with encouraging university-level instruction of Swedish as a foreign language in other countries. This means, among other things, that SI provides support to academic institutions abroad that, with their own funding, provide education courses for Swedish and about Sweden. Promoting the international exchange of culture, literature and language is, and has always been, an important part of SI’s mission.
Due to increased costs and other issues, there will be an overhaul of SI’s operating budget before 2023. The efforts in support of Swedish language education abroad are some of the activities that we will be examining.
SI has no plans to reduce the overall service, including supporting guest lecturers, summer courses and learning materials, to foreign universities that teach Swedish. We will continue to offer broad support to the many students and the over 600 Swedish language instructors who work at institutions that offer Swedish courses around the world.
SI provides scholarships to instructors who teach Swedish at universities throughout Europe. These teachers and lecturers, of which there are currently 20, are employed by their respective departments. In order for SI’s costs to be accommodated within next year’s budgetary framework, we need to reduce the number of scholarships for instructors in Europe. The number of and the specific scholarships affected by the budget cuts will be decided in January of next year when we have taken note of the government’s decision on the regulatory letter and budget for SI’s operations. Preliminarily, we expect that the 2023 operating budget for support of Swedish language education will be SEK 8 million (excluding personnel costs), compared with this year’s SEK 10.9 million.
The resulting changes will come into effect in connection with the next academic year, starting in the autumn of 2023.