Swedish-speaking population of Finland

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The Swedish-speaking population of Finland, known as Finland Swedes 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 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 (which is a direct translation of the Endonym and has equivalents in as well as in other languages).

The Swedish name (), 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, but is less common.

History

Medieval Swedish colonisation

The first Swedish arrivals in Finland have often been linked to the putative First Swedish Crusade (ca. 1150) 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 (Uusimaa). 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.

{| class="wikitable floatright"

|+ Swedish-speakers as a percentage of Finland's population

! 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%

thumb|350px|The number of Swedish speakers in Finland 1880–2009 by province. The population in Vaasa province declined in the early-20th century due to emigration to North America; and again in the 1960s due to emigration to Sweden.

thumb|Share of native speakers of Swedish in the population by municipality in Finland in 2020.

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 (in office 1840 to 1845) and the future Finnish Marshal and President Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim (1867-1951) - 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 (1922) and the language paragraphs (1919) 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 (Axel Lille and others) 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 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.

Developments since the late 19th century

The urbanization and industrialization that began in the late 19th century increased the interaction between people speaking different languages with each other, especially in the bigger towns. Helsinki ( in Swedish and predominantly used until the late 19th century), named after medieval settlers from the Swedish province of Hälsingland, still mainly Swedish-speaking in the beginning of the 19th century, attracted Finnish-speaking workers, civil servants and university students from other parts of Finland, as did other Swedish-speaking areas.

According to another view (e.g. Tarkiainen 2008) the two major areas of Swedish language speakers (Nyland and Ostrobothnia) were largely uninhabited at the time of the arrival of Swedes.

According to an interpretation based on the results of recent (2008) genome-wide SNP scans and on church records from the early modern period, Swedish-speaking peasantry has been overwhelmingly endogamous. Historian Tarkiainen (2008) presents that from the late Middle Ages onwards until relatively recent times, Swedish-speaking peasants tended to select their marriage partners from the same parish, often from the same village as themselves. This tends to be the rule among traditional peasant communities everywhere. As tightly knit peasant communities tend to assimilate potential newcomers very quickly, this has meant that most marriages within the Swedish-speaking peasantry during this period were contracted with members of the same language group. During the time of early immigration by Swedes to the coastal regions (approximately between 1150 and 1350), the situation was different and according to a study from the 1970s (as referenced by Tarkiainen, 2008) the intermarriage rate between local Finns and Swedish newcomers was considerable. According to Tarkiainen, in the areas of initial Swedish immigration, the local Finns were assimilated into the Swedish-speaking population.