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Today, 6 November, is Svenska dagen or ‘Swedish day’, an official flag-day in Finland. The day is to celebrate Finland’s Swedish-speaking culture. Last year was its 100th anniversary.
This year the main Swedish Day celebration is in Jakobstad, but events are occurring around the country in the form of parties which usually feature Swedish language music artists, theatre performances etc. In recent years, a whole Swedish Week has been organised in some cities with an aim of reaching out also to Finnish speakers who are interested in experiencing Swedish language cultural events or just in brushing up their Swedish language skills.
On the occasion of Swedish Day, I thought it would be interesting to tell you about the ‘Song of the Mother tongue’, Modersmålets sång. This is sung as Swedish-speaking events such as school graduation ceremonies and is a kind of unofficial anthem for Swedish-speaking Finns. It was performed for the first time in 1898 and has lyrics that praise the beauty of the ‘mother tongue’ (i.e. the Swedish language) and how it is our greatest inheritance and treasure. The chorus demands that it be heard loudly and freely from shore to shore in the land of the thousand lakes. You can hear it sung by a choir from Åboland via this link on the servers of Åbo Akademi University.
Finland’s highest circulation newspaper, the Finnish-language Helsingin Sanomat (HS), has published an editorial in which it states that the concerns of Swedish-speaking Finns over their rights are justified.
HS states in its leader that the last few years have seen an increasingly tougher climate for Swedish in Finland, primarily as a result of three reasons; an increase in hateful views on Swedish-speakers and Swedish in Finland on a number of internet-based discussion sites, a new generation of politicians who often no longer speak Swedish fluently and a view amongst many politicians that larger institutional units are as effective as small ones. The paper names Helsinki’s recent forced annexation of a significant part of western Sibbo (Sipoo), the decision to close down the maternity ward at Ekenäs hospital, the reform of court districts, the reform of the police’s administrative districts, the attempt to get bilingual Karleby (Kokkola) to join the unilingual Oulu state administrative district against its city council’s will, and the recent proposal for bilingual schools in Esbo (Espoo) as examples of recent policy decisions that cause harm to Swedish-speakers’ rights. The newspaper states that these decisions show that the right to receive services in one’s mother tongue has been relegated to secondary issue when decisions are made.
HS’ editorial states that Swedish-speaking Finns can be a part of the reason behind the change in attitude towards Swedish in FInland. The leader column states that “Swedish-speaking Finns have had a defensive attitude towards their linguistic rights. This has strengthened an understanding amongst Finnish-speakers that Swedish-speakers want to isolate themselves and are inflexible.”
However, HS goes on to state that is is hard for persons belonging to a linguistic majority (i.e. Finnish-speakers) to understand how things seem for a minority group that are constantly concerned about their cultural identity and rights.
Helsingin Sanomat states that is is time for decision-makers to take the rights of Swedish-speaking Finns seriously. The paper underlines that Swedish-speaking Finns are as Finnish as Finnish-speaking Finns and notes that the cultural roots of Swedish-speakers in Finland go back as far as the start of Finnish history.
Helsingin Sanomat’s leader is a welcome contribution and hopefully will provide a welcome call to Finnish-speaking decision makers and civil society who may not even have noticed how recent actions have effected the Swedish-speaking population. For Finland’s bilingualism to work, it needs champions in Finnish-speaking society and amongst Finnish-speaking politicians. We Swedish-speakers can not make it work on our own.
At the same time, the fact that the issue has become so clearly visible even on the radar of the leader pages of Finland’s most influential newspaper reveals just how serious the language climate is right now. We must hope that there are Finnish-speaking politicians, including those in the government, who have read this article today and have realised that constitutional rights must be upheld in order to ensure our law-based society continues to develop hand in hand with the values of fairness.
This is the conclusion of sociologist Thomas Rosenberg from Lovisa on why some of the Finnish-speaking population are irritated by their Swedish-speaking compatriots.
His remarks come in the wake of the story of an 18-year old Swedish-speaking woman being assaulted at a restaurant in Åbo/Turku by a Finnish-speaking man because she was speaking Swedish.
According to Rosenberg, such a case is nothing new. “I don’t even know how many times I myself have been forced to flee from a pub because I was speaking Swedish – but it’s many”, he told the new Swedish-speaking youth website Peppar.fi. “During the 1970s and 1980s, the aggression against us Swedish-speaking Finns was strong, perhaps stronger even than today.”
Few researchers are prepared to – or dare to – comment on the subject of aggression towards Swedish-speakers by Finnish-speakers, reports Peppar.fi.
Thomas Rosenberg suggests that the reasons behind the increase in anti-Swedish feelings amongst Finnish-speakers may be down to the fact that there has been an increase in Finnish chauvinism in recent times at the same time as populism has grown. According to Rosenberg, this is partly because Europe has become more international and all the more immigrants have arrived. This has caused a kickback reaction. Rosenberg says that we know from the past that negative attitudes towards other cultures have always been strong in Finland, “we are a young nation. What we see now is a strong will to defend Finnishness. It is somewhat comic that this aggression is often directed towards us Swedish-speakers instead of towards immigrants”.
On being asked what Swedish-speakers can do to counteract this aggression, Rosenberg replied that “it is hard because the Finnish-speakers have a picture of us as being happy, positive and pleasant people. This image that they have created of us creates envy. We are not really freed from the stamp of being “bättre talande folket”* just because we are so damned happy and integrated and social competent and cocktail-knowledgeable and succeed so well. We appear to seem as governors of the poor Finnish-speakers in their image. That can be irritating for them. The stamp of us being the elite remains.”
Rosenberg suggests that Swedish-speakers lower their demands in order to improve relations. He suggests that a regional dimension is bought to the fore and suggests that we should abandon the concept of “forcing” people to learn Swedish throughout the entire country.
“I belong to the those that spoke in favour of abandoning compulsory Swedish language lessons in Finnish-speaking schools. We paid a high price for ‘compulsory Swedish’ because it was so unpopular. In the coastal areas [where the majority of Swedish-speakers live], people absolutely ought to study the minority’s language, but I think it is politically unwise to do this in the whole country. We should think in regional terms and restrict Swedish in Finland to the coastal areas – but there we ought to get stronger rights”
On being asked whether he was speaking about a ‘reserve’, Rosenberg answered yes. “Svenskfinland [Swedish-speaking Finland] is already a reserve to a great extent. We ought to reach a historic compromise and wind down the demand for a bilingual Finland and give up ‘compulsory Swedish’, just so long as we do not need to beg an apology for speaking Swedish in Svenskfinland.
Rosenberg hopes that reaching such a compromise would be possible. “Swedish is currently continually being undermined as an official language. There is just an long series of loses, and it is certainly the fault of politicians. We have too long lived with the belief that we have a good language law – but it reflects an early twentieth century reality that we no longer live in. I do believe that in the long run, the historically dependant prejudice based on us being ‘occupants’ will disappear. But we’re not there yet”.
* Svenskatalande bättre folk – “Swedish-speaking better people”. A common stereotype held of the Swedish-speaking Finns, usually with a derogatory meaning. Based on an untrue image that the Swedish-speakers are all rich and perhaps snobbishly assume that they are a ‘better people’ than the Finnish-speakers.
This article is based heavily on Peppar.fi’s article, which can be found here [SV]. Thus, any errors and the woodenness of the translation are entirely my fault!
An 18-year-old woman was assaulted on Wednesday evening by a pair of Finnish-speakers because she was speaking Swedish. The incident happened in at restaurant Amarillo in Åbo-Turku.
According to news reports, the Finnish-speaking pair of a man and a woman first asked the 18-year-old woman to leave the restaurant. When she refused to leave, they pulled her by her hair.
The man escaped, however the woman was taken in for questioning by the police. The 18-year-old victim has repoted the incident as a crime to the police.
According to the police, such incidents are very unusual and this is an individual occurance. However, the chairman of the student union at Åbo Akademi, Finland’s largest Swedish-speaking university which is based in the city, said that he is aware of violence occuring against people just because they speak Swedish. He told the internet newspaper Peppar.fi, “If one is in town or in a pub in the evening, one often makes sure to speak Swedish quietly. It’s simply a matter of one’s own self preservation instict”.
SFP Party Conference 2009 in Helsingfors
The Swedish People’s Party (SFP) held its party conference at Arcada in Helsingfors this weekend.
The issues that have been most picked up in the media can all be said to be encompassed as equality related:
- Leader Stefan Wallin condemned the True Finns fishing for votes in the undercurrent of racist attitudes its campaign for the EU parliamentary elections in June. SFP can be said to have one of the least hostile policies on immigration of the Finnish political parties.
- SFP voted to propose that women also be included in military service, to a far greater degree than today.
- Most controversially, SFP voted to support adoption rights for same-sex couples (of any children put up for adoption, not just the children on one of the partners as Finnish law has just been changed to allow). The party voted 108-83 in favour of this motion.
Whilst SFP’s position on all of these issues can be said to be steps in the right direction for equality and liberal thought, the pragmatist can put them into question by wondering to what degree they go along with what should be the party’s key aim: the winning of votes. After all, if SFP does not ensure support at elections, it won’t be in a position to speak out for liberal values to any extent at all. SFP must be careful not to forget its principal raison d’etre: the defence and safeguarding of the position of the Swedish-language in Finnish society. To be able to do this, it needs to unite the Swedish speaking electorate. They also form the party’s core voting bloc; risking alienating or splitting them is dangerous for the party’s future. Yet, some of these decisions, perhaps especially that on same-sex adoption risk just that. There is a serious risk that this decision will alienate a not insignificant core of conservative SFP supporters, particularly in Österbotten, an area where so-called ‘traditional’ religious values are still strong. Whilst I, and many in the liberal wing may support these recent policy decisions, they may run the risk of undermining the more important task of the party, safeguarding Swedish. Certainly, SFP may pick up extra votes from the other language group, for instance from Finnish-speakers appalled at the racism of the True Finns and seeing SFP as the only party to truly condemn them. But will these be enough to replace those votes lost from the party’s key electorate? I doubt it. And even if they are, they are unlikely to come from people who give as much importance to the protection of Swedish.
Time will tell. But I fear that in the current political climate, where Swedish is under threat more than at any point in the last twenty years, SFP can not afford to alienate its core supporters. It is time for the party to unite and concentrate on its key mission. I hope that’s the conclusion that this autumn’s special extraordinary conference will come to. It was announced this weekend as being a chance for SFP’s grassroots to involve themselves to an unprecedented degree in the party’s policy-making. A chance to shape the direction of the party for the next few years.
It would be fair to assume that the answer to this question is yes. At least if you base your conclusion on product packaging and many signs in Finland. All the more often, the Swedish version of text on product wrappers and on signs is less visible and often even less comprehensive than that of the Finnish version. More rarely, it’s simply badly or wrongly translated. So, it’s an often heard joke amongst Swedish speakers that a person has to have good eyesight to be Swedish-speaking.
The capital of our country, Helsingfors as we call it in Swedish, Helsinki in Finnish, is in fact Finland’s largest Swedish-speaking municipality if one goes by the raw number of Swedish-speaking Finns living there. There are roughly 30 000 Swedish-speakers in our capital, although it’s overall large population means that today these account for only slightly over 6% of the entire residents. But from its foundation by King Gustav Vasa in 1550 all the way until around the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish-speakers were in the majority. During the twentieth century, virtually the whole of Nyland (Uusimaa), but especially the capital, saw massive internal migration as thousands of Finnish-speakers from the interior of the country flocked to the more affluent south. Whilst they undoubtedly gave much to our nation’s economic progress, they had the side effect of irrevocably changing the language situation in many historically Swedish environs – a process that continues even today.
In today’s Helsinki, few Swedish-speaking Helsinki residents (at least those below around 60) bother to start conversations in Swedish in shops, businesses and often even with the authorities (who are legally obliged to offer services in both national languages). The frustration with being met by someone who does not understand or does not want to understand is just all too common. Yet, even in an ever more monolingual capital, there are still spaces that are exceptions to this rule. Places such as in branches of Aktia (a bank), certain known Swedish-speaking cafeteria hangouts and other traditionally Swedish-speaking-owned businesses and of course Stockmann are still thought, by many, to be places where one can naturally speak Swedish without causing oneself too many problems.
It has therefore caused a minor controversy – at least within the pages of Hufvudstadsbladet (slang: Husis) – that Stockmann (slang: Stokis) has, for the first time that at least anyone can remember, placed advertising signs outside its main central Helsinki department store in which the Swedish-text is not afforded equal coverage with the Finnish version. That the adverts also use the Finnish slang word ‘Stocka’ instead of the Swedish slang ‘Stokis’ even in the Swedish text just adds insult to injury. Stockmann’s marketing director brushes off criticism of both these matters saying that they had to make the Swedish text smaller as otherwise the advert’s picture would not have fit on the banner.
The title picture is taken a while back inside the then-newly opened extension of S-market in Borgå. The Finnish text directs the shopper towards the sugar (’sokerit’). The Swedish shopper is sent to buy socks (’sockor’, Swedish for sugar is ’socker’). Source: Borgåbladet
I recently discovered an interesting blog called ‘Migrant Tales‘. The author of which is clearly concerned with immigration matters and writes a lot on Finland’s migration politics. Often, in debates on how immigrants should be integrated into Finnish society, one hears the argument “When in Rome, do as the Romans”; in other words, that integration should mean that migrants to Finland so quickly as possibly forget their own background and take on entirely a Finnish lifestyle – essentially abandoning or replacing their own cultural values and taking on ours completely. This argument comes up in comments to Migrant Tales and in many other online and offline debates on immigration and integration policy.
This “When in Rome, do as the Romans attitude” got me thinking today when I heard a story on Yle Radio Västnyland (I’m on holiday at the moment in my wife’s home area near Ekenäs) this morning about the increase in people moving from the capital region to the rural municipality of Ingå. The report was about this high level of Finnish-speakers moving into Ingå causing the municipality’s sole Finnish-language school becoming overcrowded and featured a Kokoomus (National Coalition party) Finnish-speaking member of the Ingå council suggesting that Ingå ought to urgently look to constructing a new, second Finnish-language school in the municipaltiy as many Finnish-speaking families were “making do” with putting their children in Swedish-language Ingå schools to save them from travelling longer distances to the municipality’s one Finnish school.
Now, I wonder what the “When in Rome, do as the Romans” attitude holders would make of this. Surely if Rome were Ingå, and one was to do as the local ‘Romans’, one should be adopting the Swedish-language rather than insisting on Finnish language services. Today’s Ingå is a bilingual municipality with Swedish as the majority language (according to the municipal website, around 57% of the 5 458 residents speak Swedish – 40% have Finnish as their mother tongue.) If one went back to 1950, before any widescale immigration to the municipality had got underway, you would have found that 89,5% of Ingå’s residents spoke Swedish as their mother tongue (according to Folktinget’s statistics). Before the wars of the 40s, you would have found that the municipality was unilingually Swedish-speaking. So, presumably if you held the “When in Rome” attitude, you would be condemning those unthoughtful Finnish-speaking immigrants of today and the latter half of the 20th century for not integrating and insisting on the superceding of their own culture on to the Finland-Swedish. You would be accusing them of failing to act as one should in Rome.
Incidentally, this argument could be applied to many, many more districts – including municipalities that no Finnish speaker would think of as a traditionally Swedish-speaking area today; for instance, the capital region’s Esbo (Espoo) which is today’s second largest city in Finland with around 235 000 residents (mainly due to immigrants from the rest of the country moving to the capital region) was 43% Swedish-speaking still in 1950. Today it is 8,9%. Before the wars and in the first half of the 20th century it was still a very rural, sparsely populated unilingual Swedish municipality. Is this another example where the “When in Rome” attitude holders would see a failure?
Now, I’m not arguing for the application of the “When in Rome, do as the Romans” (i.e. integrate completely or stay away) attitude in official policy. Hopefully my thoughts here help expose such thinking as unrealistic at the very least. I would love to hear from some “When in Rome, do as the Romans” attitude holders as to whether their beliefs also cover their own Finnish-speaking compatriots when they have chosen to move to Swedish-speaking areas and often cause them to dramatically change in cultural and linguistic character.
Nearly 4 out of 10 Swedish-speaking Finns believe that an organised resistance exists towards Swedish-speaking Finns and Swedish-speaking culture in Finland.
This is revealed in a opinion survey that the Swedish department of Finland’s public service broadcaster Yle ordered from the Institute for Finland-Swedish Societal Research (IFS) at the university Åbo akademi.
38% of Swedish-speaking Finns believe there is an organised opposition to all things Finland-Swedish, 35% don not share this view and 27% chose not to answer this question.
According to Yle, IFS researcher Kjell Herberts thinks the trend is clear – Swedish-speaking Finns feel concerned and anxious and see that understanding for the Swedish-speaking element in Finland can no longer be taken for granted. Herberts believes that, for example, the handling of the restructuring of the municipalities and basic services can have contributed to this viewpoint. In the view of Herberts, things felt much more secure in the past. Now Swedish-speaking Finns often see that it’s just talk, not action, when decision makers promise to safe-guard Swedish-language services.
Low marks for almost all decision makers
As part of the survey, respondents were asked to rate various institutions and the parliamentary political parties, using a school-style grade (from 4-10), for how good they are in handling Swedish-speaking issues. Few got good grades.
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen’s (centre) coalition government received a low 5,9.
The Swedish Peoples’ Party (SFP) received the best grade, 8. This is quite a surprise as SFP has been criticised in recent times for not managing to succeed in defending Swedish-speaking interests well enough – it has sat in coalition governments that have removed Swedish as a compulsory element of the school graduation exam for Finnish-speaking students and that have reformed institutions in ways seen as marginalising the Swedish-speaking influence.
The other political parties received even worse grades. The Social Democrats (SDP) received 6,3. The Christian democrats got 6 and the Green party 5,9. The Left Alliance received 5,6. The two biggest parties in the current parliament, National Coalition (Kokoomus) and Centre received 5,5 and 5,4 respectively. The lowest grade was given to the True Finns party, who received 4,4.
85% think Swedish should be part of the school graduation exam
If it were up to Swedish-speaking Finns, Swedish would again be introduced as a compulsory element of the school graduation exam for Finnish-speaking students.
53% of respondents would make the other domestic language (i.e. Swedish for Finnish-speakers and Finnish for Swedish-speakers) obligatory in the test. 32% support making it compulsory but don’t believe it’s a realistic proposition. 15% thought it should not be compulsory.
