Swedish, Finnish, English? Finland's Swedes in a changing world

Abstract

This paper explores the changing conditions of the Swedish minority in bilingual Finland. It describes the framework for Finland's bilingualism and the present situation of the Swedish minority in Finland. It concludes with a discussion of the recent debate in Finland about whether the increased use of languages other than L1 is to be seen as a factor ‘adding value’ to or devaluing national identity.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Statistics Finland, which provided the base map and the data for the map included in figure 1. Statistics Finland also gave permission for revisions of their map for purposes of this paper. Ola Österbacka skillfully made those revisions.

Notes

Kaj Sjöholm is Professor of Foreign Language Methodology in the Department of Teacher Education at Åbo Akademi University, Strandgatan 2, PB 311, FIN–65101 Vaasa, Finland; e‐mail: [email protected]. His research interests centre on second‐language classroom research, multilingual education, and the cultural dimension of foreign language learning/teaching in language‐minority settings.

For a comprehensive description and analysis of the development of bilingualism in Finland, see McRae (1999).

In practice, the flexible territoriality principle means that a commune would become bilingual if its official‐language minority reached 8% (originally 10%), or 3000 persons (originally 5000), and a bilingual commune would remain bilingual unless the minority fell below 6% (see McRae 1999: 228) Adjustments to a commune's linguistic status are made every 10 years.

In the early 1920s, the League of Nations recognized Finland's sovereignty over the Åland islands, but Åland was granted a semi‐independent status with a constitutionally supported protection of the Swedish language (see McRae 1999: 322–330).

Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are mutually comprehensible languages.

Swedes typically show positive attitudes towards Finnish‐speakers, whereas the Finns' attitudes towards Swedish are somewhat more negative. These negative attitudes towards the Swedish language may be partly historical in that the Swedish language has been associated, for some Finns, with a ruling élite. In the early‐20th century and before, the proportion of Swedish‐speaking white‐collar workers was larger than that of the Finns, but today the social stratification in the Finnish society is similar across the Finnish‐speaking and Swedish‐speaking population (Finnäs 1996, Østern 2001). It has been argued, however, that, in cultural and economic resources, Swedish speakers (especially in the south) have enjoyed the benefits of proportionately greater capital assets inherited from past generations (McRae 1999: 367). Laine (1995) argues that Finns do not learn Swedish because of the small size of the minority group.

The European Union has set up a system of mobility programmes addressed to pupils, students, and teachers in order to enhance intercultural understanding and to improve the language skills among EU citizens from different member states. The ERASMUS programme, the European action scheme for mobility of university students, was initiated in 1988. COMENIUS, which focuses on the first phase of education, from pre‐school and primary to secondary school, supports school partnerships, projects for the training of school staffs, as well as school education networks, and aims to enhance the quality of teaching, strengthen its European dimension, and promote language learning and mobility. English is the most common lingua franca in the implementation of these programmes. The Finnish school legislation from the early 1990s, which granted schools at different levels the right to decide whether to use a language of instruction other than L1, enabled the implementation of these programmes. As a result, a large number of experiments with different variants of bilingual education programmes have been set up at different school levels in Finland. Most of these experiments with content‐and‐languageintegrated learning and teaching (CLIL, a term favoured in Finland) are content courses with English as the language of instruction. Although (especially) parents have recognized the value of CLIL as an enhancement of traditional language‐teaching programmes, critical voices have been heard about the teachers' inadequate knowledge of the instructional language, mostly English. Some teachers (mostly mother‐tongue teachers) have also been worried about the implications for the future of Finnish/Swedish.

The reasons for this are probably that many Finnish‐speaking parents realize that Swedish, alongside English, are by far the most important languages in industry and commerce in Finland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

KAJ SJÖHOLM

Kaj Sjöholm is Professor of Foreign Language Methodology in the Department of Teacher Education at Åbo Akademi University, Strandgatan 2, PB 311, FIN–65101 Vaasa, Finland; e‐mail: [email protected]. His research interests centre on second‐language classroom research, multilingual education, and the cultural dimension of foreign language learning/teaching in language‐minority settings.