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Finland Swedish-speaking Finns
Unavailable
Figure 11. Areas Inhabited by Swedish-speaking Finns up to 1910
Source: Based on information from Erik Allardt and Karl Johan Miemois,
Roots Both in the Center and the Periphery: The Swedish Speaking Population
in Finland, Helsinki, 1979, 7.
Unavailable
Figure 12. Language Areas of Finland, 1976
Source: Based on information from Erik Allardt and Karl Johan Miemois,
The Swedish-Speaking Minority in Finland, Helsinki, 1981, 56.
The largest minority group in Finland was the Swedish-
speaking Finns, who numbered about 250,000 in the late
1980s. The
first evidence of their presence in the country, dating
from the
eighth century, comes from the Aland Islands. After the
thirteenth century, colonization from Sweden began in
earnest,
and within two centuries there was a band of territory
occupied
by Swedish speakers that ran along the western and the
southern
coasts and had an average width of about thirty kilometers
(see
fig. 11). Cycles of Finnish and Swedish assimilation have
changed
the linguistic makeup of this strip of land. In
Ostrobothnia, for
example, the area of Swedish settlement extended inland as
much
as sixty kilometers and still existed in the late 1980s,
while
other areas had eventually reverted to being once again
overwhelmingly inhabited by Finnish speakers. By the end
of the
nineteenth century, the areas of Swedish settlement had
shrunk to
basically what they were in the second half of the 1980s:
Ostrobothnia, the Aland Islands, and a strip along the
southern
coast that included the capital
(see
fig. 12). The
settlers from
Sweden gradually lost contact with their relatives in the
old
country and came to regard Finland as their country. They
were
distinguished from other Finns only by their language,
Swedish,
which they retained even after hundreds of years of
separation
from Sweden.
Although most Swedish-speaking Finns worked as farmers
and
fishermen, for centuries they also made up the country's
governing elite. Even after the country was ceded to
Russia in
1809, the aristocracy and nearly all those active in
commerce, in
the courts, and in education had Swedish as their native
language. The country's bureaucracy did virtually all its
written
work in Swedish. Finnish speakers who desired to enter
these
groups learned Swedish. Only the clergy used Finnish on a
regular
basis, for they dealt with the bulk of the population who,
for
the most part, knew only that language. There were no
campaigns
to force Swedish on Finnish speakers however, and the
problem of
language as a social issue did not exist during the period
of
Swedish rule.
Swedish retained its primacy until the second half of
the
nineteenth century, when, as a result of budding
nationalism, it
was gradually displaced by Finnish. A good many of the
strongest
advocates of Finnish nationalism were Swedish speakers who
used
their own language in the patriotic pamphlets and journals
of the
time because few of them could write Finnish. By the end
of the
century, the nationalist movement had been successful in
fostering the birth of Finnish as a written language and
in
bringing about the formation of an educated
Finnish-speaking
elite. Numbering 350,000 and constituting 13 percent of
the
country's population in 1900, Swedish-speaking Finns were
still
disproportionately influential and wealthy, but they were
no
longer dominant in the country of their birth.
Independent Finland's new Constitution protected the
Swedish-
speaking minority, in that it made both Finnish and
Swedish
national languages of equal official status, stipulating
that a
citizen be able to use either language in courts and have
government documents relating to him or her issued in his
or her
language, and that the cultural and economic needs of both
language groups be treated equally. The Language Act of
1922
covered many of the practical questions engendered by
these
constitutional rights. Despite these legal provisions,
however,
there were still currents of Finnish opinion that wished
to see a
curtailment of the Swedish-speaking minority's right to
protect
its cultural identity. Attempts at Finnicization failed,
however,
and the advent of the national crisis of World War II
submerged
disagreements about the language issue. Since the war,
there have
been occasional squabbles about practical measures for
realizing
the minority's economic and cultural rights, but none
about the
inherent value of the policy of equality.
The Language Act of 1922, and its subsequent revisions,
arranged for the realization of the rights of the Swedish-
speaking minority. The basic units for protecting and
furthering
the exercise of these rights were the self-governing
municipalities. After each ten-year census, Finland's
nearly 500
municipalities were classified as either unilingual or
bilingual
with a majority language. In the 1980s, there were 461
municipalities: 396 Finnish-speaking; 21 bilingual with a
Finnish-speaking majority; 24 Swedish-speaking; 20
bilingual with
Swedish as the majority language. A municipality was
bilingual if
the number of speakers of the minority language exceeded
either
3,000 or 8 percent of its population. If a municipality
had been
classified as bilingual, it could not revert to unilingual
status
until the minority population declined to less than 6
percent.
Language classification had important consequences for
the
inhabitants of a municipality, for it determined which
language
was to be used for government business. In bilingual
municipalities, all documents affecting the general
public--tax
forms, for example--had to be published in both languages.
In
addition, national and local government officials had to
be
bilingual--a requirement not always met, however--and
public
notices and road signs had to be in both languages. In
unilingual
communities this was not the case. Documents relating
directly to
an individual case could be translated, but otherwise
official
business was transacted in the municipality's language. If
someone were involved in a court case, however, and did
not know
the prevailing language, translation would be provided.
The method used to classify municipalities had to be
regarded
as successful because, although the overwhelming majority
of
municipalities were unilingual Finnish-speaking
communities, only
4 percent of the Swedish-speaking minority lived in
municipalities where their language was not used. Finnish-
speaking Finns fared even better, for less than 1 percent
of them
lived where their language was not used officially. Some
of the
Swedish speakers who lived apart from their fellows did so
voluntarily because they had management positions at
factories
and plants in regions that were nearly entirely
Finnish-speaking
areas. Because they were educated, these managers knew
Finnish.
They were also representatives of the tradition of
"brukssvenskar" (literally, "factory Swedes"), and
were
sometimes the only Swedish speakers their brother Finns
knew.
On the national level, all laws and decrees had to be
issued
in both languages, and the Swedish-speaking minority had
the
right to have Swedish-language programs on the state radio
and
television networks. Swedish-language schools had to be
established wherever there was a sufficient number of
pupils.
There were several Swedish-language institutions of higher
learning, and a specified number of the professorial
chairs at
the University of Helsinki was reserved for Swedish
speakers, as
was one brigade in the army. A drawback for the
Swedish-speaking
minority, though, was that because of its small size, the
national government could not, for practical reasons,
publish in
Swedish all parliamentary deliberations, committee
reports, and
official documents.
The Swedish-speaking minority was well represented in
various
sectors of society. The moderate Swedish People's Party
(Svenska
Folkpartiet--SFP) got the votes of most Swedish speakers,
with
the exception of workers who more often than not voted for
socialist parties. The SFP polled enough support to hold a
number
of seats in the Eduskunta that usually matched closely the
percentage of Swedish speakers in the country's total
population.
It very often had ministers in the cabinet as well
(see The Swedish People's Party
, ch. 4). An unofficial special
body, the
Swedish People's Assembly (Svenska Finlands Folkting),
representing all members of the minority, functioned in an
advisory capacity to regular governing institutions. Most
national organizations, whether economic, academic,
social, or
religious, had branches or separate equivalents for
Swedish
speakers. Because of its long commercial and maritime
traditions,
the Swedish-speaking minority was disproportionately
strong in
some sectors of the financial community and the shipping
industry. In general, however, with the exception of the
upper
middle class, where there were more Swedish speakers than
usual,
the class distribution of the minority matched fairly
closely
that of the larger community.
The size of the Swedish-speaking minority increased
fairly
steadily until 1940, when it numbered 354,000 persons, or
9.6
percent of the country's total population. Since then it
has
declined, dropping to 296,000, or 6.1 percent of the
population,
in 1987. In relative terms, however, it has been in
decline for
centuries, dropping from 17.5 percent in 1610, and it was
expected to go below 6 percent by the end of the twentieth
century. The decline stemmed from a variety of factors: a
slightly lower birth rate than the rest of the population
during
some periods; a greater rate of emigration to the United
States
before World War I; a large loss of some 50,000 persons
who
settled permanently in Sweden in the decades after World
War II;
and frequent marriages with Finnish speakers.
By the 1980s, more than half the marriages of Swedish-
speaking Finns were to persons from outside their language
group.
In urban areas, especially in Helsinki, the rate was over
60
percent. This was not surprising because the members of
the
minority group were usually bilingual, and there were no
legal
constraints (although there were sometimes social and
familial
constraints) against marrying those speaking the majority
language. The bilingualism of the minority was caused by
compulsory schooling in the majority language from the
third
school year on, and from living in a society where, with
the
exception of some rural areas, speaking only Swedish was a
serious handicap because the majority group usually had a
poor
knowledge of Swedish, despite compulsory study of it for
several
years. Swedish-speaking Finns were easily able then to
cross from
one language group to another. However highly they valued
their
mother tongue and their group's cultural identity, they
were not
bound by them when selecting friends or spouses. A survey
of the
late 1970s found, for example, that Swedish-speaking
natives of
Helsinki felt they had more in common with natives of
their city
who did not speak their language than they did with
Swedish
speakers from other regions. More often than not, Swedish-
speaking Finns married outside their group. These
marriages posed
a danger to their language community in that the resulting
offspring were usually registered as speakers of the
majority
language, even when they were truly bilingual. Thus the
Finnish
practice of counting speakers of a language by the
principle of
personality, that is on an individual basis, rather than
by the
principle of territoriality, as was done only for the
Aland
Islands, was leading to a decline in the size of the
Swedish-
speaking minority.
Data as of December 1988
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