Guest Post: Bilingualism in Finland

Today I'm really excited to have my first guest post on this blog! My friend James, who went with me on my recent trip to Finland had some thoughts about bilingualism, so I asked him to write about it for my blog and he wrote a lovely reflection on his experience in Finland.


It's weird carrying around with you a bit of foreigness - something which doesn't fit into the usual character description of your peers and community. I have a Polish surname and I grew up in a conservative, southern English town and the amount of times I have had to spell out my surname after getting confused looks from the person I'm talking to has become rather innumerable. Despite all the southern middle-class attributes I exhibit - a fondness for whisky and wine, an RP accent and a grammar school education, this little bit of me which shows that I have heritage outside these isles, probably, is some sort of reason for why foreign languages and the concept of being in contact with outside cultures and ways of life interests me.

Unfortunately I didn't grow up bilingual - English is very much my mother language and the one I can best express myself in. Of course, within the British Isles we have native L1 speakers of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic - as well as all the hundreds of languages brought in by the migrant families which has enriched our national cultures. I've always been rather jealous of the fact that there are people in my society who are able to converse in other weird noises that I myself am not acquainted with.

In fact, in many countries, bilingualism is either enforced or at least part and parcel of our surroundings and every day life. Go to Catalonia, and although you might legally be in Spain, Catalan signage and media is everywhere. In some areas, any trace of Castillian Spanish is not to be found.

There are many more examples - but imagine the situation where you have a language you speak at home and a language so tightly engrained in to your personal culture, and yet you go outside and there is evidence of other linguistic communities which you share your territory with. To me, it's an alien concept. Everything back in Buckinghamshire is in English. It's so monotonous - the same language everywhere. That's why my visit with Catherine and Emma to Finland was rather exciting in the nerdiest way possible.

As a student of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, doing a course in Scandinavian languages and translation was a part of my second year. Although I specialise in Norwegian Bokmål, I also have learned over the year to read Norwegian Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish. They are all very similar written languages and with a dictionary and/or a little bit of intuition, getting the jist of what you're reading isn't difficult at all. We were told briefly about the minority of Swedish speakers in Finland - that is, Finnish citizens who have Swedish as their L1 language - and how the state affords a certain policy of enforced bilingualism in regions and towns where there is a sizable minority of speakers of the national language (either Swedish or Finnish), which, obviously, isn't the majority language in that place.

Fennoswedes - Swedish-speakers who are Finnish citizens - congregate primarily in three areas in the Republic of Finland. On the southern coast in Uusimaa/Nyland, on the western coast in Ostrobothnia and in the autonomous collection of islets and islands off the south-west coast of Finland in Åland. These areas will have the state bilingual policy enforced where ~6-8% of that population, or at least 3,000 citizens need to be speakers of the other language so that provisions can be put in place to enact changes which recognise the linguistic diversity in that one area. Road signage is in both languages. Citizens can contact local administration in either of the languages without discrimination. There are protections in place for businesses and concerns which make use of the minority language. It's an interesting little settlement indeed.

That all being said, actually conducting enquriries in Scandinavian wasn't as successful as I had envisaged it to have been. Any attempt I may have made to buy things at the shops in Scandinavian or even saying goodbye and hello in Swedish was completely rebuffed. Either the recipient of the conversation would continue in Finnish or revert to English, knowing that it was my first language.

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Which is a shame I guess - despite the national bilingualism in Finland, Swedish only inhabits certain domains in areas where it is the minority language. I'd be very sure, however, that in other parts of Finland where Swedish is the complete majority language, this would not be the case - but alas, I have yet to visit these places in Åland and Ostrobothnia. In sociolinguistics and in the sociology of language, we can refer to how a language is used and its survival by talking about its 'loss of domains'. It's a given that Swedish in Finland has a domestic domain - literally meaning that it is spoken at home, that books are read in it etc. It has a domain in organs of authority - government and town councils. But in areas where Finnish dominates, such as in and around Helsinki, the domain that Swedish seems to have not gained so much is the domain of national vernacular. It's not a language that you can simply use when you go up to a random stranger to conduct enquiries. It might be a language to which there are plenty of government-backed protections, but in this case one notes a very unique case of domain-specific 'diglossia', with Finnish being the acrolect [language with higher status] and Swedish being the basilect [language with lower status].

To imagine myself growing up in an area with two functioning languages, such as an officially 'bilingual' area of Finland, would make me very excited indeed. The idea that everywhere you go there is that little bit of another culture - it's simply fascinating. Nevertheless, claims about what makes a place bilingual can seem to be very vague when it is observable - simply by going there - that the 'bilingualism' exists in different faculties and domains. With language having a social role in our communities, we always have different modes of communication between friends, family and strangers. There did not seem to be any active discrimination against either national language of Finland, but the biases put in place through how people conduct their affairs in either language indicate that naturally necessitated employment of one or the other in certain situations is in this case unavoidable. Finnish people are not actively bilingual, but the geographical territories and government agencies are. They accomodate for that little bit of diversity, but that is not however reflected in the linguistic habits of the citizen body.

For me, my little holiday to Finland was marvellous. I don't know Finnish - and being a speaker of a mainland Scandinavian language meant that it became very easy to know where Emma was driving us to and what sort of places we would drive past. Even when we were in supermarkets, on the streets of Helsinki and in the terminal to go to Tallinn, the signposts were readable because of the Swedish translations, especially where there was no English available. My tutors at the University of Edinburgh are right - by taking a degree with Scandinavian Studies, you get three languages (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) for the price of one (my specialism in Norwegian).