Many Swedish-speaking callers are still being requested to speak Finnish when making emergency alarm calls to the 112 emergency alarm centres. That’s according to a report on Yle’s website. 112 is the number of the police/fire/ambulance in Finland. Several years ago, the 112 alarm centres were reorganised and amalgamated into larger regional centres covering relatively large areas. Previously they were organised as much smaller and more local units. 112-alarm centres that contain Swedish-speaking areas are meant to be able to handle calls in both national languages.

However, since the amalgamation which has meant that 112 alarm centres are often located far away from callers, there have been numerous reports of Swedish-language service deteriorating seriously – especially in southern Finland. In one case, one elderly man from Borgå (Porvoo) reported that he was put on hold for 15 minutes after calling for an ambulance whilst in distress. He was unable to speak his limited Finnish because he was so panicked. Even after finally being connected to someone who spoke Swedish, the alarm centre still demanded his address in Finnish. Mercifully, he survived (it turned out he was suffering bleeding in the stomach and an acute urine infection, both potentially fatal conditions if not treated immediately) – but incidents like this could easily cost lives. This case was bought up in parliament by Mikaela Nylander (Swedish People’s Party, Sfp) last year. There have been similar cases reported in the media.

The problem seems to be that the Interior Ministry refuses to recognise the problem as real. In the past, all 112 alarm centre operators were required to be able to speak both Finnish and Swedish. Today, the employment demand is that alarm centre staff must be educated as either a police officer or alarm centre operator; there is no language requirement.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the training course for alarm centre operators is only offered in Kuopio and Tampere; locations both long distances from Swedish-speaking Finland. This means that few functionally bilingual or Swedish-speaking Finns are signing up for the course. Surely, the opening of a course somewhere in Swedish-speaking Finland (why not in the capital area, which surely has a polytechnic with room for such a thing) would help solve the shortage of operators with language skills. Additionally, the 112 alarm centre are not always located in the most logical of places. The alarm centre coving the whole of eastern Nyland/Uusimaa (a district in which a third of the population have Swedish as their mother tongue) is located in Kerava – a unilingual Finnish-speaking munipality. It’s hardly rocket science to realise that they might have more difficulty finding linguistically able staff in such a location than if they had located it somewhere with a significant Swedish-speaking population.

From reading this blog, you might – especially if you’re ungenerous! – get the impression that Swedish-speaking Finns spend too much time moaning about language services. Perhaps that’s sometimes true. But, in this case, it is quite literally a matter of life and death. When one is panicked, and one is often in such a situation when one needs to ring 112, it’s hard enough to speak in a sensible way in one’s mother tongue let alone another language. Therefore, even forgetting the not insignifcant numbers of Swedish-speaking Finns who do lack a good command of the Finnish language (and many of these are amongst the elderly, a demographic perhaps more likely to need to ring for an ambulance), Swedish-speaking Finns with a workable – even fluent – command of Finnish need to be able to rely on being able to speak Swedish when dialing 112. This is one area of language service provision where it is completely irresponsible for the authorities to deny there is a problem.