Sobre el sueco en Finlandia (está en inglés de una respuesta de quora):
Is Swedish a dying language in Finland?
Yes. Not very soon, but it is. I have lived in and around Helsinki for 69 years. I, my family and almost all our friends are and have always been Swedish-speakers, but bilingual. I also have a few friends who have moved to this region from parts of the coast where Swedish is completely dominating, and they find it a lot more difficult to communicate in Finnish.
When I was a child we lived in an apartment building in Helsinki where most people spoke Swedish. You could speak Swedish in every shop, on the buses and trams, in the department stores. The city was actually functioning in both languages. The schools were, and still are, Swedish. There are separate schools for Swedish-speaking children. All my classmates were from Swedish-speaking families, and you didn’t hear any Finnish in schools in those days. I knew precisely three words of Finnish before I went to school.
We spent (and I still do) most of the summers in a summer house in the archipelago outside Helsinki, and there actually was a Finnish-speaking family not far away on another island, but that was it. Swedish all around. We used to go sailing for a few weeks every summer - you could spend a month sailing along the coast, and you would hear Finnish once or twice - or not at all.
Swedish speaking young people normally married other Swedish-speakers. Not everybody, but most. It was a question of identity - you wanted your children to have the cultural background you had yourself. The same language, books, stories, songs etc. Because even if the differences in cultures weren’t huge, they still existed.
So why do I think Swedish is dying? Here’s why: Most Swedish-speakers are living a bilingual life in a Finnish environment. You can’t expect to speak Swedish on the town any more. Many public services, which the communities and the state are obliged by law to provide in both languages, are outsourced to private companies, and they don’t need to provide any service in Swedish, so they don’t. Since the sixties and seventies people from rural Finland have moved into the cities, and they have mostly been from Finnish parts of the country. New suburbs have been built, and you seldom hear Swedish there. This means that the percentage of Finnish-speakers has increased in most of the places where Swedish used to be a functioning language in society.
Even in Swedish schools many children prefer Finnish, and speak Finnish with each other. The number of summer cottages in the archipelago has skyrocketed, as the number of sailboats and motorboats, but almost everybody speaks Finnish nowadays. If you start a conversation with somebody in the archipelago today, you do it in Finnish. That would have been an absurd idea only 50 years ago.
These changes have affected the marrying habits: when you don’t normally meet mostly Swedish-speaking candidates any more, you are more likely to marry a Finn if you speak Swedish yourself. This means that mixed marriages in bilingual areas are more common than marriages between Swedish-speakers. About 60 % of the children in mixed families are registered as Swedish-speaking, but in dominantly Finnish places they will not end up with a Swedish-speaking identity, and even in bilingual places only some will, and some won’t.
Here we get back to the identity thing. If most Swedish-speaking young adults have children of whom the majority get a Finnish identity, this will eliminate the population with a Swedish-speaking identity in only a few generations. This happens quicker in Finnish-dominated areas, and slower in Swedish-dominated areas. But it happens. And there will come a point when it is no longer possible to keep up the legislature making Finland bilingual, because there will be no practical need for that, and certainly no political backing.
The Swedish-speaking coastal areas will suffer from that, but I think it is inevitable. It is only a question of time. Many from those places will move to Sweden, as they have done for centuries, and those areas will end up being Finnish.
So yes, Swedish is dying in Finland.
Yes. Not very soon, but it is. I have lived in and around Helsinki for 69 years. I, my family and almost all our friends are and have always been Swedish-speakers, but bilingual. I also have a few friends who have moved to this region from parts of the coast where Swedish is completely dominating, and they find it a lot more difficult to communicate in Finnish.
When I was a child we lived in an apartment building in Helsinki where most people spoke Swedish. You could speak Swedish in every shop, on the buses and trams, in the department stores. The city was actually functioning in both languages. The schools were, and still are, Swedish. There are separate schools for Swedish-speaking children. All my classmates were from Swedish-speaking families, and you didn’t hear any Finnish in schools in those days. I knew precisely three words of Finnish before I went to school.
We spent (and I still do) most of the summers in a summer house in the archipelago outside Helsinki, and there actually was a Finnish-speaking family not far away on another island, but that was it. Swedish all around. We used to go sailing for a few weeks every summer - you could spend a month sailing along the coast, and you would hear Finnish once or twice - or not at all.
Swedish speaking young people normally married other Swedish-speakers. Not everybody, but most. It was a question of identity - you wanted your children to have the cultural background you had yourself. The same language, books, stories, songs etc. Because even if the differences in cultures weren’t huge, they still existed.
So why do I think Swedish is dying? Here’s why: Most Swedish-speakers are living a bilingual life in a Finnish environment. You can’t expect to speak Swedish on the town any more. Many public services, which the communities and the state are obliged by law to provide in both languages, are outsourced to private companies, and they don’t need to provide any service in Swedish, so they don’t. Since the sixties and seventies people from rural Finland have moved into the cities, and they have mostly been from Finnish parts of the country. New suburbs have been built, and you seldom hear Swedish there. This means that the percentage of Finnish-speakers has increased in most of the places where Swedish used to be a functioning language in society.
Even in Swedish schools many children prefer Finnish, and speak Finnish with each other. The number of summer cottages in the archipelago has skyrocketed, as the number of sailboats and motorboats, but almost everybody speaks Finnish nowadays. If you start a conversation with somebody in the archipelago today, you do it in Finnish. That would have been an absurd idea only 50 years ago.
These changes have affected the marrying habits: when you don’t normally meet mostly Swedish-speaking candidates any more, you are more likely to marry a Finn if you speak Swedish yourself. This means that mixed marriages in bilingual areas are more common than marriages between Swedish-speakers. About 60 % of the children in mixed families are registered as Swedish-speaking, but in dominantly Finnish places they will not end up with a Swedish-speaking identity, and even in bilingual places only some will, and some won’t.
Here we get back to the identity thing. If most Swedish-speaking young adults have children of whom the majority get a Finnish identity, this will eliminate the population with a Swedish-speaking identity in only a few generations. This happens quicker in Finnish-dominated areas, and slower in Swedish-dominated areas. But it happens. And there will come a point when it is no longer possible to keep up the legislature making Finland bilingual, because there will be no practical need for that, and certainly no political backing.
The Swedish-speaking coastal areas will suffer from that, but I think it is inevitable. It is only a question of time. Many from those places will move to Sweden, as they have done for centuries, and those areas will end up being Finnish.
So yes, Swedish is dying in Finland.
