NNL Pod 12: How do biligualism and minority languages function in Finland and Sweden?

Listen to a discussion on the diversity of the languages in the Nordic countries, focusing on how bi- and multulingualism functions in practice, and the history, framework and importance of minority and heritage languages and their status in Sweden and Finland.

In the twelfth podcast for the New Nordic Lexicon, students from Aarhus and Helsinki Universities, Gaëtan Gamba and Sóley Eliasdottir, speak to Nina Carlsson from the University of Uppsala, and Tuire Liimatainen from the Migration Institute of Finland. This podcast was made possible by funding from the A.P. Moller Foundation.

Sound credits: Summer by tictac9 from freesound.org.

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Transcript

00:00:05 Nicola
Welcome to this podcast for the New Nordic Lexicon. We're in Helsinki with students and researchers from Aarhus University, Uppsala University and Helsinki University. This is one of two podcasts on bilingualism, minority languages and English in the Nordics. This is the 12th New Nordic Lexicon podcast on 'how do bilingualism and minority languages function in Finland and Sweden?'. The New Nordic Lexicon is a collection of articles, podcasts and films based on research about the Nordic region and the world. The subject of the next few podcasts will be language, and we have a few researchers who'll be helping us with this who we'll introduce along the way. Normally, podcasts and information about the Nordic languages focus on the mutual intelligibility of the three Scandinavian languages: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and we will be discussing this a little bit, but our focus will start elsewhere, namely bilingualism. And we'll be talking about language, but in a societal context. My name is Nicola. And I am editor and project manager of nordics.info, which is a research dissemination website at Aarhus University.

00:01:37 Gaëtan
My name is Gaëtan and I'm a master's student in European and Nordic studies here at the University of Helsinki. I'm originally from Switzerland, from Fribourg, a little bilingual town.

00:01:49 Sóley
My name is Sóley. I am from the Faroe Islands. I currently live in Denmark where I'm studying at Aarhus University. I'm very interested in languages as a whole. I've been interested in it since I was a kid, but since I started studying philosophy, I've really come into understanding how it's helping us shape our identities, and I find that really interesting.

00:02:17 Nina
And I'm Nina. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in political science at Uppsala University. I just started a position at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, and I've spent probably half my life in Finland and half my life in Sweden. Going a bit back and forth and yeah, I grew up bilingual too.

00:02:40 Tuire
My name is Tuire. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, and my background is involved in Scandinavian languages and area and cultural studies, and I did my PhD on Sweden- Finns. So, Finns in Sweden and their ethno-political mobilisation in social media.

00:03:00 Gaëtan
So, to start with, Tuire, you're from Finland and you speak Finnish and Swedish as well as other languages. How do you call the Swedish speaker from Finland or Finnish speaker from Sweden?

00:03:15 Tuire
Yes. So, when we talk about Finnish and Swedish in the context of Finland and Sweden, we are basically talking about, let's say two main groups, who at least I have called in my own research Sweden-Finns and Finland-Swedes, and these are the English terms. And simply put, the term Sweden-Finns refers to the Finnish speaking population or the population of Finnish descent in Sweden and then Finland-Swedes refer to the Swedish taking population in Finland but in practise, however, this terminology that we used to talk about these two groups is not always self-evident and I think it's also important to remember that individuals do not always necessarily use these terms to talk about themselves or their sort of subjective experiences or identities. And then I also think it's important to note that although it might be sometimes tempting to talk about these two groups as sort of two sides of the same coin, they still have very different kind of history. So, the current Finnish speaking population in Sweden has been largely formed as a result of large-scale labour migration from Finland to Sweden. And then Finland-Swedes are native to Finland and Finland is of course constitutionally a bilingual country. At the same time, it also should not be forgotten that, of course, Finns and the Finnish language have a long historical presence in Sweden, as well as Swedish has in Finland. But this is something that has only started to be recognised in the last few decades and this was also largely the basis on which Sweden recognised Sweden-Finns as a national minority in 2000.

00:05:03 Gaëtan
OK. And if we talk a bit more about the language more specifically, is the Swedish spoken in Finland very different than the Swedish spoken in Sweden for example? What are these kind of differences?

00:05:19 Tuire
Yeah. The Swedish spoken in Finland is a bit different than the Swedish that is spoken in Sweden and here in Finland we often call the Sweden-Swedish "rigssvensk". So basically, these different forms of Swedish have different kind of intonation and the Swedish that's spoken here reminds a bit of the Finnish intonation and then also there are some vocabulary differences between Swedish spoken here and Swedish spoken in Sweden. And most often you find these words that are sort of direct translations from Finnish to Swedish, and I think my favourite example is the Sweden-Swedish word "övergångsställe", so the pedestrian crossing, which in Finland-Swedish is "skyddsväg". So, you see these sort of small nuances and differences?

00:06:20 Gaëtan
Yeah. Remember the example of the Moomin characters, people from Sweden would say that the Finnish speaks Swedish like the Moomins.

00:06:30 Tuire
Yeah, I also encountered it when I was doing my PhD, so a lot of people told that they had been told that they speak Moomin Swedish.

00:06:38 Nina
Yeah.

00:06:41 Gaëtan
We often say that language is very tied up with identity. The Swedish speaking Finns were recognised as a minority in 2000. Could you explain a bit more about these processes?

00:06:54 Tuire
Yes. So here we're talking about Sweden-Finns, so the Finnish population in Sweden and for them this road towards the recognition has been this kind of constant negotiation between their immigrant background and also the long history of Finns and Finnish language in Sweden, a language, has definitely been a key element and the political mobilisation of things in Sweden has often been motivated by the aim to ensure that the language is preserved and passed on to the future generations and we can trace the 1st wave of ethno-political mobilisation back to the 1980s already. But then in the 1990s there was an international framework that came into play when the protection of minorities and minority languages came on the agenda in Europe. And with this process Sweden-Finns then finally gained this recognition as a national minority in in 2000.

00:07:57 Gaëtan
And what does it implicate in practise to be recognised as a minority?

00:08:03 Tuire
Yeah, basically it means that their sort of historical presence is recognised of course. They have a minority status, but then at the same time there are also certain rights that the groups who are recognised as national minorities then receive or are entitled to. And there's also, of course, funding and resources that are available for these groups.

00:08:28 Gaëtan
And what are the other minorities recognised independent or in Sweden?

00:08:33 Tuire
Well, if I start with Sweden, there are five national minorities. They were all recognised in 2000. So in addition to Sweden-Finns, these minorities are the Jews, the Roma, the indigenous Sámi, and then the Tornedalians. And then, apart from Finnish, the recognised national minority languages are Yiddish, Romani chib, Sámi, or variations of Sámi and Meänkieli. And then here in Finland, what we usually regard as traditional minorities are also the Sámi, the Roma, the Jews and then also the Tatars, the Karelians and then a group called Old Russians, so a historical group of Russian speakers.

00:09:23 Gaëtan
OK. And Nina, would you like to react to what we have been saying so far? In your research you talk about language justice. Could you tell us more about what that means exactly?

00:09:39 Nina
Yeah. So linguistic justice or language justice can mean a lot of things. And justice is a big research field. But in my work, it's referred to as this normative question of 'how should we in a just way govern linguistic diversity?' So, we have a place where a lot of languages are spoken. Which ones should be recognised in the public space, which ones should be left to the private space so you can speak them at home, but you can't expect to have public signs, for example, in the streets. And should it matter how widely spoken these languages are, so is there a million speakers or 20 speakers? Should it matter how much public resources are put into these languages? And also, does it matter how long these languages have been spoken? So Tuire for example, mentioned these national minority languages that have been recognised in Sweden and Finland, and you have this distinction between Old and New Russians, for example. So the Old Russians have been here long enough to be awarded some kind of rights, but the new Russians are left out of this because they are viewed as migrants. Another question is, should these languages have only regional recognition, or should they be nationwide, these forms of recognition? Should the right to language be individual or group based? So, I looked into this question with regard to different "old", so to say, minority languages, but also migrant languages that are often left out of this kind of recognition.

00:11:23 Gaëtan
So, would you say that in the Finnish context or in the Swedish context, language justice has been achieved?

00:11:31 Nina
I don't think you can say in any case that justice has been achieved in society, but that would depend very much on who we ask. If we ask the majority Finnish person, most would probably say that they are content with the way that their language is treated in public space. Some far-right persons might feel that this is not the case because they might identify as a threatened minority. That's the discourse going around in far-right circles. A Swedish speaking Finn living in the Swedish speaking area might feel more content than someone who lives in Helsinki or Tampere, where there are fewer Swedish speakers. A Sámi person might not feel at all that the linguistic justice has been achieved for their language. A Romani person whose language is very weak and due to different societal structures, that are oppressive towards their many minority might feel that there is an ongoing linguistic injustice towards their group.

00:12:44 Gaëtan
I know that for example in Finland, there's laws regarding the fact that if there's a percentage of Swedish speaking in a municipality, then language signs will be written in Swedish and then maybe secondly in Finnish, or then first in Finnish and then secondly in Swedish. So, I don't know if you have any other examples or if you can comment on this idea.

00:13:13 Tuire
Yeah, it is true that you can very clearly see the bilingualism here in Finland in the public space and it's a very good example that the percentage of population in certain municipalities impacts how the signs are written out. I was just thinking, when you talk about bilingualism in Finland in general, I mean Finnish and Swedish are equal. They both have strong constitutional decision. So, this means that Finnish citizens can use both Finnish and Swedish when communicating with authorities. There are also of course, medical care, daycares, schools, elderly homes, cultural institutions, magazines, all kinds of stuff available in in Swedish as well, and also of course Finnish and Swedish are both mandatory subject in Finnish schools. But I think as Nina also said, it shouldn't be forgotten that also in Finland, despite this legal status and seeing these signs in the public space, it doesn't always mean that equal treatment would be provided and it has become increasingly difficult for Swedish speaking citizens to get equal treatment and they also face prejudices and stereotyping, and I think that also shouldn't be forgotten that although it looks equal on the outside that that's not always the case, and it is complex and it directly links to these questions of linguistic justice.

00:14:58 Nina
And then if I would say a few words about Sweden and the situation of Finnish speakers in Sweden, this recognition in 2000 was important because through that there were these new administrative areas that were established for regional minority languages. So, in these areas, individuals have the right to access elderly care and preschool in Finnish and other minority languages, and also use Finnish in public authorities and the courts. But then, children with Finnish background also have the right to I think it's three hours of weekly minority language instruction, but most pupils only get one hour per week, which is usually regarded insufficient to prevent language shift. And also, the Finnish language is not really visible in the public space in Sweden the same way as Finish is here in Finland, but Finish is generally being regarded as the language of the private sphere as well. So, when you look more deeply into these context, you notice that there are still a lot to do and a lot of these kind of tensions.

00:16:12 Gaëtan
Would you say that the political representation of this minority impacts on the policies that are adapted to these different minorities? Because if you look at the Roma people for example, that you know you mentioned earlier, they are not necessarily maybe organised as one group or something like that, so then they maybe struggle more to get their right to language, their language being taught at school or things like this recognised, even though they are a minority and they are a recognised minority in Finland.

00:16:52 Nina
I think it's important to consider what we mean when we speak about one voice or minorities, so not even majorities are organised in one voice, and so it's the same for minorities of course. There's diverging views. And when it comes to language rights, we also have to remember that if a group is oppressed, it happens on many different levels, of which one might be language. So, I think Roma is one example of that. And there's multiple issues going on at the same time, whereas for some other minorities, maybe language is the main issue of mobilisation. Also, religious minorities, for example the Jewish people in Sweden whose recognised minority language is Yiddish, many of them maybe don't feel like Yiddish is the most important marker of minority-ness in life, that might be Hebrew, religion, community, something else.

00:18:05 Tuire
And I would add maybe even symbols. And I think in Sweden especially, there's been studies that symbols are also very important for minorities as well, especially the Jewish minority.

00:18:17 Gaëtan
Could you give us an example of symbols?

00:18:22 Tuire
I think in the Jewish case, for instance, synagogues have been usually sort of presented as one of these important symbols.

00:18:32 Nina
Yeah. And also related to the finished speaking minority in Sweden, many are not learning Finnish as children or adults. Some are taking it back or revitalising the language and learning it as adults. But most people tend to have Swedish as the stronger language. They are born in Sweden, but here's symbolic issues such as sauna or some Finnish food. Some Finnish music might be more important than language, and you can still identify with the language even if you don't speak it.

00:19:11 Nicola
Nina, you talked about the sort of old and new languages, so those minorities that Tuire mentioned as recognised in Finland and Sweden, do they sort of come under the heading old languages and new ones and more sort of recent immigrants, like maybe Turkish and stuff like that. Or could you say a little bit about old and new minority languages?

00:19:42 Nina
Yeah, I would say that all minorities we've brushed upon so far have been part of these old minorities that are also usually politically recognised as groups that belong in the nation state. And because there is this common understanding that all languages that are spoken within the state cannot be recognised, that would mean hundreds of languages maybe, so in much of normative political theory, and often policy, and there are different degrees of recognition given to different groups, and usually time is used for doing this division. And here the idea is that groups that have a long presence within the territories of the nation state should have special rights that makes it possible to maintain their language and culture despite being part of another nation's state. So often these groups have lived in these territories before the state was founded already and they are subject to this, you could say, "foreign" nation building project. And it's of course, not just if you are forced to lose your language and culture because of this, and 'this' would refer them to these old minorities that include groups such as Sámi, Roma, and so on. And with new minorities, usually we refer to immigrant groups a couple of generations down. And of course, these definitions are contested and sometimes follow very different criteria than time. And that's why, as always, when we categorise groups or people for policy, they are crude and don't apply for every case and, for example, Sweden-Finns in Sweden are an example of a group to kind of balance between this new and old minority-ness. So, they were very clearly viewed as a new minority, immigrants that would never achieve recognition in some discourses a few decades ago, but today are self-evident part of this recognised old minority that have a long historical presence in Sweden.

00:22:01 Gaëtan
Interesting, and about the new immigration waves, we talk about it like that. What language would you say new immigrants should learn in order to properly integrate in Sweden or Finland or in countries or regions that are bilingual in the Nordics?

00:22:30 Nina
Yeah. So this is another issue that we talked about in this project on linguistic justice and migration. So which languages should immigrants learn? Should they learn any language? Should they be expected to learn a language? Should this be tested in some way? Who decides which language the people are to learn? And so here again in these expectations, we can kind of see the hegemony of the dominant nation, and someone who comes to Finland, for example, is expected and actually even required if they wish to become citizens, to learn Finnish or in some rare cases, Swedish. There's a very interesting case internationally, that you actually can naturalise become a citizen by demonstrating skills in the minority language and this of course because officially it's not a minority language, it's one of the national languages. So, in Sweden, it's very clearly Swedish people are to learn and they don't have a language test yet, but they are to introduce it for citizenship and even actually permanent residency, and this will be combined also with the culture knowledge test. So here we can see also that language and culture, this idea of where you are entering, how you should behave, what you should talk, what you should know, is regulated in order to achieve these rights of residence and citizenship. And I've in my research claimed that by looking at these requirements you can get a pretty good idea of how the state understands itself, because it's such a concentrated thing you communicate to a person who comes as a new person to a country. So, for example, how would you represent your own country to a friend who has never heard of it? Then you tend to bring up these stereotypes like 'we speak this language, we do these traditions' and that's maybe not representative to what's actually going on in the country, what languages are used and so on. So, there is a clash with this monolingualism promoted in these policies, and actual multilingualism encountered. So, you could actually claim that the society has a responsibility to make sure that people learn the languages, they are needed in order to work or live in Finland and that could be Finnish and Swedish, but the models are so monolingual that it's hard to cover both languages and maybe you also need to learn English in order to be employed. And actually, what I heard from people is that often employers demand that you know Swedish or Finnish or Swedish in Sweden, even though you can get by in English. So, this language requirement is also used as a gatekeeping method to maybe keep some people out of certain types of employment, but it's not viewed as discrimination because it's part of the nation building that we take for self-evident; of course you should speak this language in this country.

00:25:53 Sóley
In the Faroe Islands, where I come from, this is very much present, like when people come to the Faroe Islands, they expect people to learn the language, which is very hard because you can only learn it in the Faroe Islands. You don't know anything beforehand, and people want to work when they come there, you know, make their money. So if there are workers from other countries who speak English, for example in the store or in the restaurant, wherever, some Faroese people get very annoyed and will not try to communicate with that person in any other language than Faroese and this person then feels out of place, but the Faroese people see this as self-evident because of course they have to learn the language if they're here. If they have to work, they have to know Faroese, and the Faroese people do not see this as discriminatory in any way, or the young people do, but it's more like the elder generations, so it's a learning process, but it's very much present also where I'm from so I can relate to what you're saying.

00:27:01 Nicola
It's also in the Faroe Islands, isn't Faroese a kind of almost minority language in the Danish, can we call it the Danish Kingdom these days? I don't know what the proper name for it is. So, I wonder if they are almost more justified in kind of wanting to hold on to their language than maybe, I don't know, the majority populations in Finland and Sweden. I guess I can understand it maybe more in that context.

00:27:29 Nina
That's a very interesting point that you're both bringing up, and this is one of the difficult normative questions. So, when does the wish to protect a language, when is it justified from kind of this minority protective purposes and when is it more xenophobia or racism? So someone who comes to France and talks English or Arabic and a majority person reacts, 'we actually need to speak French here because we need to protect our culture and our heritage and our language', that has a very different tone, I would say, than if someone comes to a place where a vulnerable minority language is spoken and speaks English, has maybe a background from the United States, and there is a lot of that kind of migration to that place, which makes the minority language even more vulnerable. These are very difficult questions, especially in these times, but yeah, there is always a discriminatory aspect, of course.

00:28:46 Sóley
OK, so earlier you were talking about Finnish Swedes or Swedish Finns, so I was thinking about Åland, for example, how would you define the people who live in Åland since they're a Swedish speaking region in Finland, right? -Yeah.- So how would that fit into...?

00:29:12 Tuire
Well, I have to say I'm not that familiar with Åland, but usually it is included within the sort of Swedish speaking community in Finland. And I mean in general, the bilingual municipalities that we have here in Finland are along the Southern and Western coast. And then you have the Åland Islands there in between Finland and Sweden, but as far as I've understood, Åland is the only monolingual Swedish municipality in Finland. They are also the demilitarised. They have autonomous positions, so they are a very special case. But yeah, I'm not sure if there's like a specific Ålandic identity or something, but I haven't studied it. Are you familiar with it?

00:30:07 Nina
What I've understood, of course everyone identifies in a different way, but there is a strong regional identity, and monolingualism is part of that. So, the Swedish language is strong there and to a certain extent bilingualism has maybe been viewed as a threat to that. So, the Finnish language has not so strong recognition there. And I think as many Ålanders, when they start their university studies, they might choose to go to Sweden because of the language.

00:30:49 Nicola
We've raised lots of sort of issues which are a little bit sort of delicate and potentially full of conflict. But Nina, I know you've looked at other sort of minority language situations in other parts of the world and we've got examples from Switzerland and elsewhere. I mean generally, from a comparative perspective, all of these minorities rub along quite well together in the North externally compared to elsewhere.

00:31:20 Nina
I would say that depends very much on who we are asking. And if we ask a Greenlandic person who lives in Copenhagen, they might maybe not have that perception. We ask the Sámi person again, or someone who up here speaking Kurdish. So, it's a matter of whom we are listening to, who gets their voice through and what level of conflict do we need to get the majority population to listen. And so sometimes the majority might perceive society as conflict free, but someone in a minorities position experiences the very, very opposite.

00:32:08 Gaëtan
So many thanks to all of you. It was a pleasure to share this moment with you. So, thank you, Nina. Thank you, Tuire. Thank you, Sóley. Thank you, Nicola.

00:32:20 Nicola
Thank you.

00:32:21 Gaëtan
Thank you very much.

00:32:22 All
Bye bye bye.

00:32:28 Nicola
The students you listened to in this podcast were Gaëtan Gamba from the University of Helsinki and Sóley Eliasdottir from the University of Aarhus. The researchers you listened to were Nina Carlsson from Uppsala University and Tuire Liimatainen from the Migration Institute of Finland. Emma Healey and Essi Turva, also from the University of Helsinki, helped out with this podcast. My name is Nicola Whitcombe and I'm the project manager of the New Nordic Lexicon and the editor of nordics.info. The New Nordic Lexicon is brought to you by the team behind nordics.info at Aarhus University in Denmark, with students and colleagues from across the Nordics and beyond. The New Nordic Lexicon is supported by the A. P. Møller Foundation and grew out of the university hub, Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World which was supported by NordForsk.