Swedish-speaking population of Finland
The Swedish-speaking population of Finland is a linguistic minority in Finland. Its members maintain a strong identity and are seen either as a separate cultural, ethnic or linguistic group or, occasionally, a distinct nationality. They speak Finland Swedish, which encompasses both a standard language and distinct dialects that are mutually intelligible with the dialects spoken in Sweden and, to a lesser extent, other Scandinavian languages.
According to Statistics Finland, Swedish is the mother tongue of about 260,000 people in mainland Finland and of about 26,000 people in Åland, a self-governing archipelago off the west coast of Finland, where Swedish is the sole official language. Swedish-speakers comprise 5% of the total Finnish population or about 4.9% without Åland. The proportion has been steadily diminishing since the early 19th century, when Swedish was the mother tongue of approximately 15% of the population and considered a prestige language.
According to a 2007 statistical analysis made by Fjalar Finnäs, the population of the minority group is stable, and may even be increasing slightly in total numbers since more parents from bilingual families tend to register their children as Swedish speakers. It is estimated that 70% of bilingual families—that is, ones with one parent Finnish-speaking and the other Swedish-speaking—register their children as Swedish-speaking.
Terminology
The Swedish-speaking population of Finland are called by many names, including Swedish-speaking Finns, Finland-Swedes or Finland Swedes.The Swedish name finlandssvensk, which is used by the group itself, is translated different in English. The Society of Swedish Authors in Finland and the main political institutions for the Swedish-speaking minority, such as the Swedish People's Party and Swedish Assembly of Finland, use the expression Swedish-speaking population of Finland, but Swedish-speaking NGOs often use the term Finland-Swedes.
The Research Institute for the Languages of Finland proposes Swedish-speaking Finns, Swedish Finns, or Finland-Swedes, the first of which is the sole form used on the institute's website. Other groups insist on the use of the more traditional English-language form, Finland-Swedes, as they view the labelling of them as Swedish-speaking Finns as a way of depriving them their ethnic affiliation, reducing it to merely a matter of language and deemphasizing the "Swedish part" of Finland-Swedish identity, i.e. their relations to Sweden.
Among Finnish Americans the term Swede-Finn became dominant before the independence of Finland in 1917, and the term has remained common to the present, despite later immigrants tending to use different terms such as Finland-Swede. The expressions Swedish-speaking Finns, Swedes of Finland, Finland Swedes, Finnish Swedes, and Swedish Finns are all used in academic literature. Swedo-Finnish has also been used as an attribute by English-language authors.
History
Medieval Swedish colonisation
The first Swedish arrivals in Finland have often been linked to the putative First Swedish Crusade which, if it took place, served to expand Christianity and annex Finnish territories to the kingdom of Sweden. Simultaneously the growth of population in Sweden, together with lack of land, resulted in Swedish settlements in Southern and Western coastal areas of Finland. The Second Swedish Crusade against the Tavastians in the 13th century extended the Swedish settlements to Nyland. During the 14th century, the population expansion from Sweden proper increasingly took the form of organised mass migration: the new settlers came in large numbers in large ships from various parts of Sweden's Eastern coast, from Småland to Hälsingland. Their departure from Sweden proper to Finland was encouraged and organized by the Swedish authorities. The coast of Ostrobothnia received large-scale Swedish settlements during the 13th and 15th centuries, in parallel with events that resulted in Swedish expansion to Norrland and Estonia's coastal area.Debate about the origin of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland
The origin of the Swedish-speaking population in the territory that today constitutes Finland was a subject of fierce debate in the early 20th century as a part of Finland's language strife. Some Finland-Swede scholars, such as, and Tor Karsten, used place names in trying to prove that the Swedish settlement in Finland dates back to prehistoric times. Their views were opposed mainly by in the 1920s.In 1966, the historian Hämäläinen addressed the strong correlation between the scholar's mother-tongue and the views on the Scandinavian settlement history of Finland.
"Whereas Finnish-speaking scholars tended to deny or minimize the presence of Swedish-speakers before the historically documented Swedish expeditions starting from the 12th century, Swedish-speaking scholars have found archeological and philological evidence for a continuous and Swedish or Germanic presence in Finland from pre-historic times."
Since the late 20th century, several Swedish-speaking philologists, archaeologists and historians from Finland have criticized the theories of Germanic/Scandinavian continuity in Finland. Current research has established that the Swedish-speaking population and Swedish place names in Finland date to the Swedish colonisation of Nyland and Ostrobothnia coastal regions of Finland in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Nationalism and language strife
The proportion of Swedish-speakers in Finland has declined since the 18th century, when almost 20% of the population spoke Swedish. When the Russian Empire set up the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809 and Karelia was reunited with Finland in 1812, the share of Swedish speakers was 15% of the population.During the 19th century a national awakening occurred in Finland. The Russian central administration in Saint Petersburg supported it for practical reasons, as a security measure to weaken Swedish influence in Finland. The national cultural trend was reinforced by the general wave of nationalism in Europe in the mid-19th century. As a result, under the influence of the German idea of one national language, a strong movement arose that promoted the use of the Finnish language in education, research and administration. Many influential Swedish-speaking families learned Finnish, fennicized their names and switched to using Finnish as their everyday language. This linguistic change had many similarities with the linguistic and cultural revival of 19th-century Lithuania, where many former Polish speakers expressed their affiliation with the Lithuanian nation by adopting Lithuanian as their spoken language. As the educated class in Finland was almost entirely Swedish-speaking, the first generation of the Finnish nationalists and Fennomans came predominantly from a Swedish-speaking background.
| Year | Percent |
| 1610 | 17.5% |
| 1749 | 16.3% |
| 1815 | 14.6% |
| 1880 | 14.3% |
| 1900 | 12.9% |
| 1920 | 11.0% |
| 1940 | 9.5% |
| 1950 | 8.6% |
| 1960 | 7.4% |
| 1980 | 6.3% |
| 1990 | 5.9% |
| 2000 | 5.6% |
| 2010 | 5.4% |
| 2020 | 5.2% |
The language issue was not primarily an issue of ethnicity, but an ideological and philosophical issue as to what language policy would best preserve Finland as a nation. This explains why so many academically educated Swedish speakers changed to Finnish, motivated by ideology. Both parties had the same patriotic objectives, but their methods were completely the opposite. The language strife would continue up until World War II.
The majority of the population—both Swedish- and Finnish-speakers—were farmers, fishermen and other workers. The farmers lived mainly in unilingual areas, while the other workers lived in bilingual areas such as Helsinki. This co-existence gave birth to Helsinki slang—a Finnish slang with novel slang-words of Finnish, local and common Swedish and Russian origin. Helsinki was primarily Swedish-speaking until the late-19th century, see: Fennicization of Helsinki.
Apart from the Swedish/Finnish interactions within the Grand Duchy of Finland, some Swedish-speaking Finns - such as the Governor of Russian Alaska Arvid Adolf Etholén and the future Finnish Marshal and President Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim - made careers within the wider Russian-speaking tsarist system.
The Swedish nationality and quest for territorial recognition
The Finnish-speaking parties, under the lead of Senator E. N. Setälä who played a major role in the drafting the language act and the language paragraphs in the Finnish constitution, interpreted the language provisions so that they are not supposed to suggest the existence of two nationalities. According to this view Finland has two national languages but only one nationality. This view was never shared in the Swedish-speaking political circles and paved the way for a linguistic conflict. Contrary to the Finnish-speaking view the leaders of the Swedish nationality movement maintained that the Swedish population of Finland constituted a nationality of its own and the provisions of the constitution act were seen to support the view. The Finnish-speaking political circles denoted the cultural rights of Finland-Swedes as minority rights. The Finland-Swedish political view emphasized the equality of the Swedish nationality next to the Finnish-speaking nationality and the fact the national languages of Finland were the languages of the respective nationalities of the country, not the languages of the state itself. The concept of minority, although de facto the case for Swedish speakers, was perceived as being against the spirit of the constitution. However, gradually after the Second World War, the concept of minority has been increasingly applied to Swedish speakers, even within the Finland-Swedish political discourse.The Swedish nationality movement was effectively mobilized during the aftermath of Finnish independence and the civil war that shortly followed. The Swedish assembly of Finland was founded to protect the linguistic integrity of Swedish-speakers and seek fixed territorial guarantees for the Swedish language for those parts of the country where Swedish speakers made up the local majority. The Finnish-speaking parties and leadership studiously avoided self-government for Swedish speakers in the Finnish mainland. Of the broader wishes of the Swedish-speaking political movement only cultural concessions—most notably administrative autonomy for Swedish schools and a Swedish diocese—were realized, which nevertheless were sufficient to prevent more thorough conflict between the ethno-linguistic groups.