Lo, a long-time lurker peeks into the thread to add the perspective of a Swedish-speaking Finn. waves at auRa and Torpid Beast from the duck pond
Whether or not a municipality is considered bilingual is determined once every ten years. You’ve got more than 8 % minority speakers or at least 3000 inhabitants registered as speaking the minority language as your mother tongue, you’re considered bilingual and have to put up street signs in two languages. If the level drops below 6 %, you’ll have to change the signs, because you’ve become monolingual. There are fortysomething bilingual municipalities, mostly scattered along the Western coast, and around twenty monolingually Swedish (most of those are on Åland).
Historians use to say that water unites people, and in the days when Finland belonged to Sweden it was certainly easier and more profitable for any merchant or rich farmer along the Western coast to load a ship with pine tar and sell it in Stockholm than trying to get it to Southern Finland or inland. So that’s a big reason why the Swedish-speaking minority has been kept live and kicking. Later, Swedish media spilled over as well, to the rather bizarre effect that teenagers are better informed about the Swedish music scene than the Finnish one (and as an Eva Dahlgren and Imperiet fangirl back in the days, I don’t have much room to talk.)
Entering the discussion from an outside-of Helsinki perspective, I’ll add that there’s a Swedish-speaking middle and working class too (still well-represented in the shipping and boat-building trades), as well as a sizable rural community, and that the dulcet Moomintroll tones most people associate with Swedish-speaking Finns is in fact the accent of the well-bred and de facto bilingual Helsinki elite (which for someone from the boonies barely counts as real Swedish-speakers anyway). I grew up in the small-town, West-coast Swedish fringe and didn’t grok Finnish at all until I was old enough to suss the grammatic system behind the words. Functionally bilingual as a reader and speaker now, though I have to pay attention when writing.
The duck pond phenomenon (I made the Freudian slip of writing suck pond earlier) is like most any duck ponds in the world - if you stir the waters, it’s going to get smelly. It seems to have more than its allotted share of an old-boy network spanning over academia, culture, finance and politics, an over-developed Cult of Nice, and too little space for more than one opinion at a time. (Besides, I like to do my partying without interruptions by drinking songs.)
Since sunspace asked about separatist movements, not so much on the mainland, since the municipalities with Swedish majorities are going to have a decent-size Finnish minority as well, and the monolingual communities are too scattered. Åland is the exception - one of the first things the League of Nations had to solve was a dispute between Finland and Sweden about where Åland was to belong. The question of full independence gets raised every now and then, but doesn’t really get on the serious political agenda. Swedish speakers on the mainland are more concerned with how to guarantee a reasonable level of administrative, medical and judicial services in Swedish. As mentioned, I’m functionally bilingual, but would I still be if I’d been in a serious accident and came to the ER with a head trauma, conscious but severely addled?
Now off to** prideguy’s **thread to uncomfortably straddle the linguistic fence there as well. One last thing, just so no one has to ask - no Swedish speaker in Finland would ever dream about supporting Tre Kronor in ice hockey. No way, not ever. Well, maybe if one is seriously russophobic, Sweden plays Russia in the final game, and Finland got creamed by Russia instead of Sweden.
