An survey by the opinion poll company Taloustutkimus has shown that around half of Finnish people are in favour of retaining compulsory Swedish language instruction in Finnish-language schools in Finland. The opinion poll, carried out for the Finnish-language evening tabloid newspaper Iltalehti, showed that only 12 per cent of respondents wanted to retain Swedish instruction in its current form. 40% supported keeping Swedish teaching if one allowed certain municipalities to have an exemption. 30% of those asked were prepared to see Swedish teaching become optional in the long term, whilst 20% were clearly opposed to obligatory Swedish teaching in Finnish-language schools.
Interestingly, support for Swedish teaching was strongest amongst the young. Those in the 15-24 age group were most positive towards Swedish; only one in ten were for the abolition of Swedish teaching. Greatest opposition was amongst those over 50 years old. This is important to note. Those over 50 most likely attended school before the reforms in Finland that turned our educational system into a comprehensive one. Before these reforms, Swedish was not compulsory and only the elite generally learnt the other national language at school. It thus seems that those who have actually been through compulsory Swedish teaching are less negatively disposed to it. This is surely positive news.
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Saturday 1.1.11 at 19:37
Timothy Bryan
That sounds like a good explanation for some of the hostility. It it perhaps the case people that never learned the language see absolutely no need for it, while younger folks see it as an advantage. With the solid enrollment figures in the Swedish schools you referred to in earlier posts, it offers a case for optimism.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 15:39
Jaakko
I am 26 and learned Swedish in high school and then needed it also in university. I do not understand why some people would be so stupid to throw away our past. There is a lot of historical revisionism in Finland to provide backing for a nationalist discourse. There seems to be a determination to deny that independent Finland grew out of the Nordic. We fought for our independence against the Russians to ensure that we could remain a land built upon the rule of law. Our values are far more akin to those of our western neighbours. The Swedish period contributed to who we are. We are a Nordic country. To throw away Swedish and to ignore its role in shaping us would be foolish and ignorant. We need Swedish to help anchor us in the Nordic world. Furthermore, both language groups fought together for Finland’s freedom. When our independent state’s constitution was formed, we Finnish-speakers promised to recognise that and it’s a matter of honour that we continue to respect the minority’s rights in what is our shared country. Swedish teaching needs changing: it’s often of bad quality and it begins far too late. So, changes are definitely needed. It’s abolition is not.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 15:59
jokuvaan
Young have spend a lot of time and effort into Swedish and keep spending it. It would be quite strange to admit that they have largely wasted their time and would do so years to come.
At later age they find out that they have been tricked by their Swedish teachers, Finland is not really bilingual and Swedish style teached in Finland is different from modern Swedish and besides, you mostly dont need Swedish in Sweden as they speak fine English. I know personally many who have originally been positive or neutral towards Swedish until they have seen the big picture of things.
Also girls, who have spend more time into Swedish and are generally more “obedient” are more Swedish positive. Girls do what they are told and do not question things like boys do. In Finnish culture teachers have high authority, this is one reason why political things are not allowed in schools as it’s feared that teachers could have influence into students.
I like to remind that Iltalehti’s poll was quite small, only 501 persons.
Just some weeks ago there was a poll in eastern Finland(2500 persons, all 18+) where:
-53% would give up forced Swedish
-33% would let to pick Swedish or Russian
-14% keep things as it is
Recently there was also a poll among Swedish speaking population:
-46% would keep forced Swedish
-39% would give it up, to reduce the tension
-15% no opinion
One vice chairman of SFP would give up forced Swedish in exchange of guaranteed Swedish services.
Former party boss of SFP has said that SFP must have a plan B ready and will to make compromises.
Center party has stalled the school hour allocation reform, it would have among many things advanced Swedish starting point from 7. or 8. to 6. grade. New allocation will be made after the election as current government could not agree on many things in it.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 17:59
Jaakko
Seriously? I don’t think I have been tricked by my teachers. Do you think young people are that stupid? Do you think teachers want to trick their pupils?
Sunday 2.1.11 at 18:28
jokuvaan
Well almost every teachers tries more or less to motive students in their particular subject, why they need it etc. If teacher would tell the big picture of things, he or she would face an disaster in learning results of the class.
I would not use word stupid, as most have perfectly functional brains, they simply dont have all necessary information at hand to make solid conclusions.
Swedish teachers are often also ideologically pro swedish language oriented, so when they say that “you need Swedish if you work in Helsinki” they dont deliberately lie, they just tell what they think.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 18:52
Jaakko
So, maybe you think then that only the over 50s should be able to vote in elections as the young don’t have all the information to make solid conclusions?
I don’t necessarily think I will need Swedish in my job. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t in the future. Just now it is useful in a small way. I probably won’t need to know about rivers and stuff I learned in Geography class either. It would be seriously weird if Swedish teachers weren’t pro-Swedish, they’d be pretty bad teachers otherwise. I wouldn’t want to be taught Finnish, Maths, Biology or whatever by teachers who did not see any point in what they were teaching. My Swedish teacher was okay in high school. She was not at all political though, well if she was she did not say. I don’t remember her ever saying we will need Swedish to do whatever. Maybe she did. I just remember that she taught us the language and that was that.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 19:49
jokuvaan
I think voting age should remain where it is, 18.
Difference between learning river names and language is that you can learn river names in few minutes before the quiz and if you go to high school after that then it’s again job of few minutes and that’s it.
Learning an entire language is an entirely different ball game and you need to know Swedish in every level of Finnish education system. So they are not really comparable at all when it comes to difficulty.
Math can be difficult for some but it’s also a universal, even beyond this planet, so it cannot be compared to small Swedish dialect.
Study of Nuorisofoorumi 2010, made for 2144 people aged between 16-21 gave following results:
“Swedish language in elementary school should be voluntary”
-30% strongly favor
-23% favor
-26% oppose
-14% strongly oppose
-7% dont know
Youth wont save current language policies of Finland.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 20:12
Jonas
Hi Jaakko,
Welcome to this blog. Thank you for your comments. I would certainly agree with your first comment. There is certainly a tendency to historical revisionism but perhaps also more simply ignorance. It is true that our pre-1809 history is not even a compulsory part of the curriculum in Finnish-speaking schools. We also here the odd myth that is common amongst some Finnish-speakers, Jokuvaan repeats it above, that somehow the Swedish taught in Finnish schools is not actually “proper Swedish”, that one can not make oneself understood with it in Sweden etc. I think this comes from a time when in Sweden it was not considered appropriate to hear regional accents in broadcasting, e.g. you would not get someone on television or radio speaking in any form of Finland-Swedish. But of course, nor would you have had someone speaking with an accent from Skåne or Norrland either. Today it’s quite fine and even the television coverage of the wedding of Sweden’s Crown Princess earlier last year on Sweden’s main television channel was hosted by a Swedish-speaking Finn.
Hi Jokuvaan,
Happy new year to you. I am glad to see that you have not given up commenting on this blog as you previously stated, but I must say that your first contribution to this discussion is a remarkably sexist one. It is certainly true that female Finnish-speaking students have a higher take-up rate towards Swedish than their male counterparts since it became optional in the student exam. But, I don’t think this is because girls are somehow “more obedient” or because they “do what they are told and do not question things like boys do”. I think that is a very outdated and sexist point of view, and I can tell you that after more than twenty years of marriage, it is very much not true! When I was at university (as is also the case today), it was more common for girls to be studying degrees in foreign languages as well, e.g. German, French etc. Then it was also less common for girls to study e.g. engineering than it is today. I don’t think either of those things are related to what you suggest – obedience/lack of questioning the merits of studying certain subjects.
I certainly don’t think Finnish-speaking students are stupid and are only positive towards Swedish because they don’t want to admit that have wasted their time. Do you think that Finnish-speaking students would en masse answer an anonymous survey in a way to avoid losing face? I give them more credit than that.
However, that said, I do utterly agree with you regarding the problems of opinion polls. Answers are notoriously easy to manipulate depending on how you set the question, a reason why political parties often fund polls with questions engineered to produce an answer that will back their policies. The recent poll amongst Swedish-speaking Finns is a very good example of such a type of question. The question asked was “Would it be better for language peace (literally) to abandon obligatory school Swedish?”. I think the results are hardly surprise given the wording of the question. I suspect you’d find very different results if you were to ask a question that concentrated more on the consequences of what doing so would have for services in Swedish and Finland’s bilingualism.
Certainly Nils Torvalds, one of the three deputy chairmen of SFP, wrote a debate article in Hufvudstadsbladet stating he’d be prepared to give up school Swedish under certain conditions that would guarantee bilingualism. Torvalds has a history of independent thinking, he was previously a member of the communist party from Helsinki. His views are not widely shared elsewhere in the party, and certainly not outside of Helsinki, if you judge the reaction. Although it is notable that Torvalds himself has commented that he has been disappointed by some of the reporting of his remarks, reporting which he judges has been often inaccurate. Of course, it is not in any case for SFP to single-handedly determine this matter just as it was not SFP that introduced both national languages as a part of the compulsory curriculum.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 21:02
jokuvaan
Hanna-Leena Hemming, a retiring parliamentarian and a former high school language teacher, said in FST5 program that we should start learning Swedish as a foreign language, not as domestic like now. If those are one and the same thing, what on earth is she talking about?
Main problem is that pronunciation teached here is not Swedish-Swedish. There are also some word problems between the countries. If I go to Sweden and ask “batong”, do I get something to eat or a big bruise?
Then there’s the problem that there’s large number of different Swedish dialects inside Finland, some of them so strong that when such speaking person has gone to Sweden and used his Swedish, he has got English in return.
Languages evolve more or less all the time, I remember some Swedish(as a country) professor calling their youth as idiots when they could not handle Norway anymore.
Sunday 2.1.11 at 22:13
Jonas
I have frankly no idea what she is talking about. There are plenty of words in Sweden that are regional and not understood widely outside of there areas. Frankly, from the context most Swedes should probably realise you don’t want a bash on the head. But of course, there are certainly some differences, but they are minor, comparable to those between American and British English.
Yes, there are many dialects of Swedish in Finland. I can’t understand people from e.g. Närpes if they speak their local dialect. But, I have never come across a Swedish-speaking Finn who can not communicate in what we call ‘högsvenska’, the standard form of Finland-Swedish. And that is completely understandable to Swedish-speakers wherever they find themselves, be it Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Umeå or Helsingfors, Vasa or Borgå. Where such myths that people in Sweden can’t understand Finland-Swedish come from I don’t know. I lived in Sweden during two periods of my life, and can assure you I’ve not had a problem. It hasn’t prevented tv presenters like Mark Levengood or Andrea Reuter or actresses like Stina Rautelin and Stina Ekblad from making highly successful careers.
Friday 7.1.11 at 5:17
Timothy Bryan
I would like to add, in relation to the language issue from Finland to Sweden, that Finland Swedish is very well thought of in Sweden. I have now queried scores of people that I know in Uppsala and Jönkoping, what they think of the accent in your country, and whether they find it hard to understand. To a person they have all said they liked the accent (to varying degrees), and and they had no problem underestanding it.
So, obviously the interoperability of the languages is not a concern. Have you had any problems being understood in Sweden? I certainly hope not, because everything I have learned is from Sweden.
As an aside, I recently met an Irishman at my job, and had to question him about numerous issues of his past. He had a really strong way of mixing his words, and thus there were numerous occasions where I needed to ask and receive the questions and answers again. I wonder if his dialect of English would be considered lesser for it? (The answer is “no” as I am merely illustrating a point).
Friday 7.1.11 at 10:45
Jonas
I have never had any problems being understood in Sweden. I actually work for a Sweden-Swedish company and have worked in the headquarters in Stockholm before, so I have some experience of the Swedes
. No, we don’t have any problems at all communicating. There are, however, a surprising number of Swedes who are not aware that Finland has a Swedish-speaking population. I remember one person who thought the signs in Swedish in Helsinki were just for the convenience of cruise ship passengers!
Sunday 9.1.11 at 20:45
Timothy Bryan
My best friend in Uppsala–from a conversation three days ago: “I think the Finnish Swede’s speak better Swedish than we do” (only half-jokingly). I would guess that is because there are seen to speak more properly when they interact with Swedish people?
Monday 10.1.11 at 17:41
Jonas
I have heard Swedes say that before, usually referring to the fact that we tend to be a bit more conservative with language use, i.e. using less English loan words for instance.
But yes, you may also have a point. We almost certainly at times – particularly for those who have a more ‘unusual’ dialect as their ‘real’ mother tongue – subconsciously and consciously try to speak a very ‘proper’ form of högsvenska when speaking with Swedes from Sweden. Who knows.
One thing I can say is that Danes and Norwegians have been known to find non-dialectal finlandssvenska easier to understand than rikssvenska.
Tuesday 11.1.11 at 17:16
Jonas
Going back to the subject of Swedish-speaking Finns and opinion polls regarding Swedish teaching in Finnish-language schools, we can see how the way the question is set is so important in framing the result. A fresh survey shows that very few Swedish-speakers are in favour of abandoning Swedish teaching. In the latest survey, only 9 per cent of Swedish-speakers believe that Swedish should be a voluntary subject in the Finnish-speaking schools, 12% were partially of that opinion.
Tuesday 11.1.11 at 19:57
Timothy Bryan
That is a huge difference, and as you say, one’s opinion will often affect the way a survey is carried out.
Saturday 22.1.11 at 5:02
Troels-Peter
I agree wit Jonas that finlandssvenska is definitely the easiest kind of Swedish to understand for the rest of us in Scandinavia. The Finnish minister for Nordic cooperation even (jokingly) asserted that it should be the main language of a united Scandinavia. I sometimes wonder if Icelanders who are not content with thir compulsory Danish should simply learn Norwegian or even Swedish with a finlandssvensk accent instead.
Joking aside, I also agree with Jokuvaan that as a tourist you can get by with English all over Scandinavia. But my point is: being Scandinavian is more than that. If you want to engage in a conversation with more than two people in the other country, you can’t expect them all to stick to English for your sake. If you want to read the literature (which is always best without translation) and use the media, both written, broadcast or on the internet, if you want to study or even live and work in the rest of Scandinavia, English just won’t do.
I know that when it comes to talking/listening, Swedish as a foreign language might not take you far outside Sweden unless you live there for some time, but there’s still the whole written language.
I know I keep repeating my Scandinavian perspective. I really think it should be a natural part of all language debates in the Nordic countries. Maybe school Swedish should include knowledge about the other Scandinavian languages as well …?
Saturday 22.1.11 at 15:53
Timothy Bryan
One thing I note about Swedish, in spite of some people that say it is not very difficult, is that is not at all easy to master. I think the basics are not very hard, but when one is inclined to try to get to a very high level of competency, it is harder than other languages I have studied.
I have noticed that it seems to have many more words to say one thing than English.
Wednesday 16.2.11 at 22:02
Anonym
According to FNB today, around 500 students chose Russian in the student exam last year. Around 1200 took Spanish. Both slight increases but hardly massive numbers. Same report shows that German and French decreased. Anyhow, shows how stupid this whole discussion about changing Swedish for Russian is.
Monday 7.3.11 at 9:34
Lars
What people truly need is a freedom of choise in the languages they study. Finland is a anomaly among nordic countries + around baltic sea. Where in the world do we have a country where the majority of the population is being forced to read the language of the extremely small minority? This distortion is responsible for the sad fact that finns speak less and less languages since the average person is able to learn only one language well and second relatively. Therefore compulsory swedish prohibits finns from leaning languages which are actually important on the world scale. For instance in Sweden about 30% of the sudents learn (after english) some other major language (spanish, french, german etc.). However in Finland this percentage is about three. So the situation is not durable in the long run. Just for the sake of our nation we need to give people the freedom of choise.
Monday 7.3.11 at 11:43
Jonas
Hello again Lars,
Do you have any studies to back up your assertion that the “average person is able to learn only one language well”? I have only read academic reports that suggest the exact opposite, that the more languages one already knows, the easier it is to learn further languages.
With regards to the low number of students that study other foreign languages aside from English today, you note a problem that I have raised previously. This is not to do with Swedish or Finnish teaching in Finnish schools. It seemingly has largely come about from poor planning by municipalities. Very few actually offer a wide-range of foreign languages today. Previously, far more students took other languages (German, French etc as you suggest). It has been shrinking for many years.
Swedish teaching in Finnish schools can certainly not be the problem, Swedish-speaking schools devote far more time to the teaching of Finnish than Finnish schools do to Swedish, yet Swedish-speaking students on average still find time to study more foreign languages than their Finnish-speaking compatriots. Finnish-speaking students are certainly not less intelligent than Swedish-speaking ones, so there is no reason why they should not study more languages as well without needing to give up any existing subjects.