Swedish Finns

There are still Scandinavians who get surprised when they see Swedish street signs in Helsinki and Swedish texts on all the food wrappers. Here’s why.

Swedish Finns are Finns who have Swedish as their first language. Six percent of the population of Finland today, - 300 000 of the total of five million, claim to be Swedish Finns. A hundred years ago a full fifteen percent of the population was Swedish Finns.

10 000 years ago, when Scandinavia was emerging from under the ice cover, there were already scattered settlements in Finland of people that racially and linguistically belonged to the Finno-Ugrian group (like the Hungarians). At the beginning of the Christian calendar, parts of the country were populated by these Finns from the reaches of the Gulf of Finland with an increasing immigration from the west and from the south of the Baltic Sea. The new inhabitants of mostly Germanic origin adopted various dialects of Finnish.

Viking expeditions (800-1000AD) along the southern coast of Finland to Novgorod and even to Constantinople established Swedish-speaking trading posts. In the 12th century King Erik and St. Henry, Bishop of Uppsala from England, brought Christianity to Finland, which developed into the easterly province of Sweden, with Åbo (in Finnish Turku) as the main city. The early English influence was replaced by German merchant culture, with the nobility from the Baltic and even further afield filling military and legal positions in Sweden, and thus also in Finland. Swedish became the official language of Finnish civil servants, while the majority of the population remained Finnish speaking.

Swedish speaking peasant settlements grew up along the coastal areas in the south (Nyland) and west (Ostrobothnia), side by side with Finnish settlements, creating a unified Finnish culture despite the two languages. In the mid 16th century the bible was translated ny Mikael Agricola into both Swedish and Finnish. In 1640 the first university, Åbo Akademi was established in the then capital city of Åbo.

Czar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 on territory that was still formally Swedish. For the rest of the century Finland continued to serve as a battlefield for the Swedes and Russians, sometimes being occupied by Russia for as long as a decade at a time. It was during this time that the idea of Finland breaking away from Sweden began to emerge.

At the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Czar Alexander I and Napoleon agreed on their respective spheres of interest, and decided that Finland should be shifted from Sweden to Russia. Sweden put up a half-hearted fight, but two years later Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy of Imperial Russia.

Swedish remained the language of the civil servants. There were even Swedish-speaking Finns serving as Russia’s governors in Alaska in the mid-19th century. The czar wanted the capital of Finland to be closer to Russia so Helsinki replaced Åbo as the capital city.

In 1840 it was decided that civil servants in Finland must have a command of the Finnish language, and it was as late as in 1863 that Czar Alexander II decreed that both Finnish and Swedish were to be the official languages of administration and legal proceedings. Finland’s bilingual status was re-enforced in the constitution of 1919. According to the constitution the needs of the Finnish- and Swedish-speaking population must be satisfied on equal grounds.

Government proposals to parliament and parliament’s replies, petitions, recommendations and other communications to and from the government, are drawn up in both languages. The same applies to all laws.

A municipality is considered unilingual when the population speaks the same language, or when less than 8 percent of the population speaks the minority language. The municipality is bilingual, if the minority language group exceeds the limit of 8 percent, or consists of at least 3 000 people.

Schooling in Swedish is provided at all levels. Institutions of higher education for Swedish-speaking people include Åbo Academy University with Swedish as the sole language and a Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki.

The Swedish Assembly of Finland is a semi-official representative body of the Swedish-speaking population. It was founded in 1919. The assembly is elected every four years among candidates nominated by political parties which are either bilingual or Swedish-speaking. The assembly has as its two main functions to offer a forum for political discussions on matters concerning Swedish Finns and to function as a kind of pressure group in matters essential to the interests of the Swedish-speaking population.

The Swedish Finns have not always had an easy ride in Finland. There have through the years been fierce language battles and the preservation of Swedish as an official language has often been threatened.

It is estimated that about 300 000 Finns emigrated to the USA during the period 1870-1920. In the early years it was mainly famine and economic difficulties that fuelled the "America fever". Later many emigrated to avoid the forced conscription by the Russian army. The majority of the emigrants left from Ostrobothnia, and it is therefore not surprising that one fifth of the emigrants were Swedish-speaking Finns. On arrival here they often called themselves Swedes. The fact that they had Russian passports added to the confusion. Finland did not become an independent nation until 1917.

Immigrants also came from the Åland islands, a unique area in the Gulf of Bothnia, halfway between Stockholm and Åbo. Completely Swedish, it was also lost to Russia in 1809. In 1917 the islanders wanted to again become a part of Sweden, but Finland considered them part of the new independent nation. The League of Nations intervened and made Åland a special autonomous province of Finland, with Swedish as the only official language there.

Meanwhile in Finland today the Swedish Finns continue to be a vibrant minority that actively works for the preservation of its culture and language. There are more than one hundred museums in the Swedish-speaking regions of Finland. Theatre is performed on six permanent stages. This small ethnic minority of 300 000 can boast 12 daily newspapers with the largest one of them being Hufvudstadsbladet boasting a circulation of 65 000. The reason for this is probably that many more Finns besides the Swedish Finns read Swedish and Hufvudstadsbladet also represents a linguistic link with the rest of the Nordic countries.

The demand for people who can speak Swedish has greatly increased within business circles during the past decades ever since Sweden became Finland’s second largest trading partner. Tourism is another important field. Taking into account the trade across the frontier and the ever expanding tourist industry, the number of visitors from Sweden exceeds by far those of other foreign visitors which certainly helps in the preservation of the Swedish language and culture in Finland. Norman Westerberg