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Abstract
Finland is a bilingual country with two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. The Form of Government (issued in 1919) stipulates that the cultural and economic needs of the two population groups of the republic must be provided for the same principles. Today Finland has a compulsory school which is divided on a language basis into a Finnish and Swedish educational system.
The Swedish spoken in Finland is a variant of standard Swedish and is generally referred to as Finland‐Swedish. What is most striking about the Swedish language in Finland today is that
| a. | it is the language of a minority in a bilingual country and | ||||
| b. | the language norm, especially the written norm is chiefly formed in another country, i.e. Sweden. | ||||
Finland‐Swedish lives also under pressure from the two other language systems, viz. Finnish and the Swedish dialects in Finland.
The language situation being summarised as above, great methodological problems are experienced by the Swedish‐medium educational system. This language—ecological variation therefore needs a special methodology as far as the teaching is concerned.
The conditions of the development of the mother‐tongue and the status of the subject in the Finland‐Swedish compulsory school today are discussed from an investigation under progress. The aims, contents and methods of the subject are examined from both cognitive and affective points of view in the curricula that have governed teaching in the compulsory school. Mother‐tongue teaching and school teaching on the whole are here related on a more general level to problems involving the identity of a minority as an ethnic group—in this case that of the Finland‐Swedes.