Swedish in Finland

Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. There are 300,000 Swedish-speakers living in the regions of Österbotten (on the western coast), Nyland (on the southern coast), and in the archipelago areas of Åboland and Åland on the south-west.

Swedish-speaking people have lived in Åland since circa 600 A.D., and on the Finnish mainland at least since the 12th century. For 650 years Finland constituted part of the Kingdom of Sweden, with the same rights as the provinces in Sweden proper. The status – if not the existence – of the Swedish language in Finland is very much a consequence of the Swedish rule.

In independent Finland Finnish- and Swedish-speakers have equal rights by law. The Swedish-speakers (usually referred to as ‘finlandssvenskar’, ‘Finland-Swedes’), are loyal to the Finnish state and economically and politically well integrated into Finnish society, but at the same time the liberal Finnish minority policy allows the existence of a separate Swedish-language institutional infrastructure at both national and local levels: in administration, in education (from kindergarten to university level) in the Church, in the media – and even in the Finnish Army.

Swedish is also important in Finland as a language used in contacts between Finns and their Scandinavian neighbors. All Finnish-speakers study Swedish as a foreign language at school for at least 3 years – just as Finnish is taught as a school subject in Swedish-language schools. Today there is relatively little friction between the language groups.

Whereas Swedish has become a minority language in e.g. urban, bilingual Turku/Åbo and Helsinki/Helsingfors, Swedish constitutes a majority language in the traditionally Swedish-speaking rural areas. The Åland Islands are a unilingual Swedish-speaking region.

The way Finland has solved the question of the Swedish-speaking minority is often set as an example for dealing with minority rights internationally.

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