This article is about holding beliefs about (or assigning subjective meanings to) two languages, L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English). The study was carried out as part of a larger project, and it is discursive in its starting points and longitudinal in its research design. A group of university students, English majors or minors, were asked to do sentence completion tasks twice, while they were studying on a five-year MA degree programme: at the beginning of their studies and just before or after graduation. Overall, the students resorted to a total of four interpretative repertoires in comparing and contrasting the two languages: 1) Affection, 2) Aesthetics, 3) Vitality, and 4) Challenge repertoires, and some dilemmas (or controversies) especially within Repertoires 3 and 4 were resolved over a period of four or five years.peerReviewe
