Finland Swedish or Fenno-Swedish (; ) is a

variety Variety may refer to: Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats * Variety (radio) * Variety show, in theater and television Films * ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont * ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...

of the

Swedish language Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic languages, North Germanic language from the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the G ...

and a closely related group of

Swedish dialects Swedish dialects are the various forms of the Swedish language, particularly those that differ considerably from Standard Swedish. Traditional dialects The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called ...

spoken in

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

by the Swedish-speaking population, commonly also referred to as

Finland Swedes Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

, as their

first language A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period hypothesis, critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' ...

. For the most part, these dialects and the dialects spoken in Sweden are

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

, although some archaic dialects in Ostrobothnia are practically unintelligible to Swedish-speaking people in southern Finland (and in Sweden). Most Swedish-speaking Finns emphasize that Finland Swedish is not a separate language from the Swedish of Sweden. The Swedish dialects in Finland are considered varieties of Swedish, and the norm for written

Standard Swedish Standard Swedish () denotes Swedish as a spoken and written standard language. While Swedish as a written language is uniform and standardized, the spoken standard may vary considerably from region to region. Several prestige dialects have deve ...

is completely applicable also for Finland Swedish. Today, Swedish dialects are spoken in four different regions in Finland: Ostrobothnia,

Åland Åland ( , ; ) is an Federacy, autonomous and Demilitarized zone, demilitarised region of Finland. Receiving its autonomy by a 1920 decision of the League of Nations, it is the smallest region of Finland by both area () and population (30,54 ...

Southwest Finland Southwest Finland (, ; ) is a Regions of Finland, region ('','' ) of Finland. It borders the regions of Satakunta, Pirkanmaa, Tavastia Proper, Tavastia Proper (Kanta-Häme), Uusimaa, and Åland. The regional capital and most populous city is Tu ...

and

Uusimaa Uusimaa (; , ; both lit. 'new land') is a region of Finland. It borders the regions of Southwest Finland, Tavastia Proper (Kanta-Häme), Päijänne Tavastia (Päijät-Häme), and Kymenlaakso. Finland's capital and largest city, Helsinki, alo ...

. Swedish as spoken in Finland is regulated by the Swedish Department of the

Institute for the Languages of Finland The Institute for the Languages of Finland, better known as Kotus, is a governmental linguistic research institute of Finland geared to studies of Finnish, Swedish (cf. Finland Swedish), the Sami languages, Romani language, as well as Finnish ...

. This regulation includes the officially stated aim of keeping Finland Swedish close to the Swedish as spoken in Sweden and strongly phrased advice against

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s and

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language ...

s from

Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

, which are usually incomprehensible to Swedes. In the spoken vernacular, especially among young people in Finnish-dominated areas, Finnish

s as well as

s from Finnish are frequently incorporated into Finland Swedish. There are also some words in Finland Swedish that would be considered slightly archaic in Sweden. Some government and public service terms that have been created in recent centuries also differ. The same is true of other new words, notably loanwords from

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Culture, language and peoples * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England * ''English'', an Amish ter ...

. A common misconception among many

Swedes Swedes (), or Swedish people, are an ethnic group native to Sweden, who share a common ancestry, Culture of Sweden, culture, History of Sweden, history, and Swedish language, language. They mostly inhabit Sweden and the other Nordic countries, ...

is that Finland Swedish is simply Swedish spoken with a

accent, something that can be a considerable source of frustration to most native Swedish-speakers in Finland. Any language adopts features, especially pronunciation habits, from dominant languages it comes in touch with, but many of the traits of Finland Swedish exist also in monolingual areas and some are in fact preserved features of Old Swedish, as with Scots in comparison with

Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...

in comparison with

Dutch Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands ** Dutch people as an ethnic group () ** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship () ** Dutch language () * In specific terms, i ...

History

Finland Swedish was a result of

Swedish colonisation of Finland The Swedish colonisation of Finland took place during the Northern Crusades from the 12th century until the 1350s. Sweden's colonisation efforts focused on the Finnish archipelago and some of its coastal regions and brought Swedish-speaking popula ...

during the

Northern Crusades The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were Christianization campaigns undertaken by Catholic Church, Catholic Christian Military order (society), military orders and kingdoms, primarily against the paganism, pagan Balts, Baltic, Baltic Finns, ...

in the 12th to 14th centuries. Colonisation focused on the

Finnish archipelago The Archipelago Sea (, ) is a part of the Baltic Sea between the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland and the Sea of Åland, within Finnish territorial waters. By some definitions it contains the largest archipelago in the world by the number o ...

and some of its coastal regions. This colonisation led to the beginning of the

Swedish-speaking population of Finland The Swedish-speaking population of Finland (whose members are called by many names—see below; ; ) is a linguistic minority in Finland. They maintain a strong identity and are seen either as a separate cultural, ethnic or linguistic group or ...

. From the 16th century, Swedish was the main language of jurisdiction, administration and higher education in

(which was then a part of

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

), but the majority of the population in the Finnish inland spoke

outside of these sectors of society, i.e. in normal, daily life. In 1809, when Finland was conquered by the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

and became an autonomous

Grand Duchy A grand duchy is a country or territory whose official head of state or ruler is a monarch bearing the title of grand duke or grand duchess. Prior to the early 1800s, the only Grand duchy in Europe was located in what is now Italy: Tuscany ( ...

, Swedish remained the only official language. In 1863, both Finnish and Swedish became

official language An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...

s with equal status, and by the time of

Finland's independence The Finnish Declaration of Independence (; ) was adopted by the Parliament of Finland on . It declared Finland to be independent from Russia, with reference to a bill simultaneously delivered to the Parliament to make Finland an independent ...

in 1917, after a

Finnicization Finnicization (also finnicisation, fennicization, fennicisation) is the changing of one's personal names from other languages (usually Swedish) into Finnish. During the era of National Romanticism in Finland, many people, especially Fennomans, ...

campaign by the

Fennoman movement The Fennoman movement or Fennomania was a Finnish nationalist movement in the 19th-century Grand Duchy of Finland, built on the work of the ''fennophile'' interests of the 18th and early-19th centuries. History After the Crimean War, Fennoman ...

, Finnish clearly dominated in government and society. See further:

Finland's language strife Finland's language strife (; ) was a major conflict in mid-19th century Finland. Both the Swedish and Finnish languages were commonly used in Finland at the time, associated with descendants of Swedish colonisation and leading to class tensions ...

. Finland has since then been a

bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

country with a Swedish-speaking

minority Minority may refer to: Politics * Minority government, formed when a political party does not have a majority of overall seats in parliament * Minority leader, in American politics, the floor leader of the second largest caucus in a legislative b ...

(5.2% of

mainland Finland Mainland Finland (, ) is a term used in statistics and in other contexts to describe the continental parts of Finland, an area which excludes Åland. In legal contexts, the relation between the mainland and Åland is depicted by the word pair ''the ...

's population in December 2019) living mostly in the coastal areas of southern, south-western, and western Finland. During the 20th century, the

urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation in British English) is the population shift from Rural area, rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. ...

following the

Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a transitional period of the global economy toward more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes, succee ...

has led to large majorities of Finnish speakers in all major cities. The capital

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

(in Swedish Helsingfors) became predominantly Finnish-speaking as recently as around 1900. A large and important part of the Swedish-speaking population nevertheless lives in the capital. The autonomous island province of

is an exception, being monolingually Swedish-speaking according to international treaties. It is a matter of definition whether the Swedish dialects spoken on Åland are to be considered a kind of Finland Swedish or not. Most Swedish-speaking Finns and linguists consider them to be closer to some of the dialects spoken in nearby parts of Sweden.

Official status

Swedish is one of the two official and national languages of the Republic of Finland, the other being Finnish. These two languages have formally equal status in nearly all legislation, though the status of Swedish in Finland has long been a subject of sociopolitical debate. The other minority languages (such as

Sami Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ne ...

) are regulated separately. Finland Swedish is regulated by the

. Official Swedish is not supposed to be very different from Swedish as found in Sweden. There are however e.g. words regarded as archaic in Sweden, but commonly used in Finland, and terms that differ from their counterparts in Sweden, often because of slight differences in the related legislation. Bilingualism of municipalities is regulated by the Language Act of 2003. If the minority has increased into at least 3,000 persons or 8% of inhabitants, then the municipality must become bilingual. If the minority has fallen below 3,000 persons and 6% of inhabitants, then the municipality becomes monolingual, unless it decides to keep its bilingual status. At present, only one such municipality has done so, namely

Lohja Lohja (; ) is a town in Finland, located in the southern interior of the country. Lohja is situated in the western part of the Uusimaa region. The population of Lohja is approximately . It is the most populous Municipalities of Finland, munici ...

( in Swedish). The status is reviewed once in a decade, and enacted by a government decree issued by the

Finnish Council of State The Finnish Government (; ; ) is the executive branch and cabinet of Finland, which directs the politics of Finland and is the main source of legislation proposed to the Parliament. The Government has collective ministerial responsibility and ...

. The country's public broadcaster,

Yle Yleisradio Oy (; ), abbreviated as Yle () (formerly styled in all uppercase until 2012), translated into English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a joint-stock comp ...

, provides two Swedish-language radio stations,

Yle Vega Yle Vega (prior to 1 September 2016 – Yle Radio Vega) is a Finnish radio channel broadcasting in the Swedish language. It is operated by Finland's national public service broadcaster Yle, and broadcast news, current affairs, culture and musi ...

and

Yle X3M Yle X3M (''Extrem'', ) is a Finnish Swedish-language radio station, owned and operated by Yle. Established in 1997, it is generally aimed at the youth audience broadcasting news, current affairs, entertainment and popular music. The station pri ...

. The Swedish-language TV channel

Yle Fem Yle Fem (''Yle Five'') was Yle's Finland-Swedish national television channel, providing television programmes in the Swedish language in Finland. It was a public-service channel principally intended for Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. Creat ...

was merged with

Yle Teema Yle Teema was a Finnish television channel owned and operated by Finnish public broadcasting company Yle. The channel was dedicated to culture, science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of ...

in 2017 to form

Yle Teema & Fem Yle Teema & Fem is a Finnish free-to-air television channel owned by Finnish state broadcaster Yle. It was launched on 24 April 2017, after Yle Teema and Yle Fem merged to form this channel. Teema & Fem is Yle's channel for culture, education, a ...

Phonology

With the exception of the dialects spoken in Ostrobothnia along the west coast, close to the

Gulf of Bothnia The Gulf of Bothnia (; ; ) is divided into the Bothnian Bay and the Bothnian Sea, and it is the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea, between Finland's west coast ( East Bothnia) and the northern part of Sweden's east coast ( West Bothnia an ...

(example: the dialect spoken in

Närpes Närpes (Finland Swedish: ; ) is a town in Finland, located on the west coast of the country. Närpes is situated in Ostrobothnia, along the Gulf of Bothnia. The population of Närpes is approximately , while the sub-region has a population of ...

), Finland Swedish is not particularly different from Central Swedish. The phoneme is more centralized and pronounced like , quite similar to how many speakers of English pronounce (as in ''moon''). That should be compared to the Central Swedish , which is very close to the short vowel and is more rounded. The highly variable ''sj'' sound varies between and on the Finnish mainland, often close to ''sh'' in English ''shoe''. In the Åland Islands, its realization is similar to the velar (and often

labialized Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels invol ...

) pronunciations of nearby parts of Sweden. The historic ''k'' sound before front vowels and the ''tj'' sound, in modern Central Swedish a

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

, is an

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

or in all Finland Swedish dialects, close to ''ch'' in English ''chin'', except for some

Åland dialects Åland dialects () are dialects of Swedish language, Swedish spoken in Åland, an autonomous province of Finland. The Åland dialects have similarities to both Finland Swedish and the historical dialects of Uppland, but are generally considered ...

, in which it is a simple fricative � The tonal word accent, which distinguishes some minimal pairs in most dialects of Swedish and Norwegian, is not present in Finland Swedish (except around the parish of Snappertuna, west of Helsinki). Hence, Central Swedish

minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...

s like ("the duck") and ("the spirit") are both pronounced in Finland. Finland Swedish lacks the aspirated stops present in Central Standard Swedish, making the contrast between "fortis" and "lenis" stops one of voicing only. The retroflexion that occurs in many dialects when precedes a coronal consonant does not occur in certain pairs in Finland Swedish (e.g. , which is realized as in Standard Swedish but in Finland Swedish).

Vocabulary

Finland Swedish mostly has the same vocabulary as Swedish in Sweden, and there is a conscious effort to adopt neologisms from Sweden, to maintain cohesion between the two varieties. Nevertheless, there are differences, which generally fall into two categories: words now considered archaic in Sweden, and

s and

s from Finnish or independently borrowed from other languages (nowadays mostly English). There are also some terms differing because of differing legislation.

References

External links

Ordbok över Finlands svenska folkmål
(in Swedish) – Official dictionary of Swedish dialects spoken in Finland.

SweDia
– a collection of dialect samples of Swedish including Finland Swedish {{Swedish language

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

Swedish language Swedish dialects