Hello
I’m starting to get seriously annoyed and concerned with the lack of Swedish language in Finland. Finland officially has two languages, Finnish and Swedish, both have the same legal status, and both Finns and Swedes have the right to get service on their native language, however the last years there has been a strong opinion among the Finnish talking people to get rid of the Swedish language minority. It’s quite threatening for us who don’t talk Finnish since it feels like the whole country is turning against us, just a few years ago you could get service in both Finnish and Swedish in most situations, unless you were in the middle of the darkest finn-forests…
There are even political parties with racist-like ideas like Pro-Finland for example that actively working to get Finland monolingually Finnish. One argument that I’ve heard oh so many times are that there’s so few Swedes in Finland, and then they show some numbers on how large the percent of Swedes are compared to the whole population. Well this doesn’t really make much sense since much Finland-Swedes are living with a Finland-Finn and thereby have two languages, these are measured as Finns in the statistics… there are also quite much Saami, Romani and Russian people in Finland, these are not Finnish but still used as Finns in the propaganda. Why can’t we have more then one language, more then one culture and more then one people… It’s a diversity that are making the culture rich, not something that should be exterminated.
Historically, the first official language in Finland were Swedish, so if anyone has the right language… ok I drop that thought, I don’t want to provoke…
Today my mother got a new SIM card for her mobile phone, it was from Tele Finland it contained a few papers ad forms and not a single word in Swedish. A few days ago a woman from that company called her and (in Swedish) asked if she’d be interested in changing to their company. Mother change and soon the Finnish forms came… Mom sent a message back to them that if she don’t get it in Swedish she wont take the service… That is the way to do it, but most people don’t seem to mind. And just because of all these people that don’t mind Finland will loose it’s Swedish culture… I’m also in the process of getting a phone, my old phone is mostly dead, and I’ve noticed that there aren’t a single mobile telephone company in the country that have their website translated to Swedish, one of them has some basic information but not enough to actually use it… I don’t think it’s in the law that companies must have information in Swedish but I think it would be in their own best interest to sell, but maybe it sells more to show that they are a Finnish only company… I don’t know… Another company that I noticed made less of a service in Swedish lately is the post office… they use to have two different URL’s, one that said posti.fi (means the post in Finnish) and was Finnish and one that said posten.fi (which means the post in Swedish) and was in Swedish… they changed it a few months ago to both point to the Finnish site, with a small text in the corner to make the site Swedish, it’s actually more work to do this than to leave it as it was… Maybe I’m picky and in an irritated mood but I think that this is racist and oh so unnecessary…
Also, we do have one political party that are working for the Swedish rights, it’s called svenska folkpartiet or SFP (the Swedish peoples party) but there is a fundamentally wrong idea with having a political party that has to be voted in to the government, if you are Swedish talking you almost have to vote on them to defend your rights to service in Swedish, those rights that are a part of the Finnish law, however I would rather vote on the Green party or someone with more liberal ideas if it wasn’t for this issue that overshadows everything else… and in the end there are so much more Pro-Finland’ers that will just vote down anything good for the Swedish culture anyway… Gaah!…
I feel like moving to some more intelligent country… I use to think Iceland would be a good idea but I’m not sure anymore after they crashed their economy… They said in the radio the other day that the Finns in Sweden (Finnish is not an official language in Sweden) has more rights then the Swedes in Finland… Maybe moving to Sweden would be a good idea…
Or why not just remove Åland and the Swedish coast of Finland to make a new country… A country that would speak a language that you could understand, a country that would have a culture that are interesting and fresh… I mean why not, isn’t breaking out in the fashion these days… We already have an internet domain (.ax)… we already have a flag… =)
I guess the way to hack this problem is to learn and start talking Finnish, but I think that is loosing, I think that since we have the right to our language, in the law, we should never give it up… What will be next, when we no longer talk Swedish we no longer need our own media channels (TV and Radio). We do have a different culture then the Finnish people and that culture will also suffer and die if the language dies, and that would be so sad…
Ha en bra dag… typ
