Finland's language strife
The
language strife was one of the major conflicts of
Finland's national history and domestic politics. (The others revolve around the relations to
Tsarist Russia, to
Socialism, and to the
Finnic peoples under Russian jurisdiction.)
In the centuries following present-day
Finland's incorporation into the
Swedish Realm (also known as
Sweden-Finland) in
1352,
Swedish gradually became dominant over
Latin,
French and
Finnish as the most-used language of administration and education of the Finns. However, Finnish eventually recovered its predominance after a 19th-century resurgence of
Fennomanic Finnish
nationalism (also working to assure
Imperial Russia of the loyalty of the then-Russian autonomous
Grand Duchy of Finland).
The publication in
1835 of the Finnish
national epic The Kalevala first stirred the nationalism that later led to
Finland's independence from Russia.
The
Finnish national awakening in the mid-
19th century was the result of members of the
Finland-Swedish upper classes deliberately choosing to promote Finnish culture and language. And they did not just
promote the language. They
fennicized their family names, learned the language, and made a point of using it both in the society and at home, giving their children what they themselves had missed: the Finnish mother tongue. However, another faction of the Swedish-speaking
elite did not wish to abandon Swedish, as they felt it was a guarantee that Finland would remain within the
cultural sphere of Western Europe.
Beginning in
1892 Finnish gained an
official language status comparable to that of Swedish, and within a generation Finnish clearly dominated in government and society in Finland. Inevitably, this situation made for conflict between the supporters of the two languages. In the beginning, the conflict only involved the upper social strata, but the population at large was drawn into it after
universal suffrage was implemented in
1906.
The last surge of Fennicization frenzy came in the
1920s. After Finland's independence in
1917, relations with Sweden unexpectedly became strained in connection with the
Finnish Civil War and the
Ă…land crisis, which further aggravated the language dispute, sharpening it to become a prominent feature of domestic politics during the
1920s and
1930s. This time, the Fennicization of surnames was chiefly a middle-class phenomenon.
In the newly independent
Finnish constitution of
1919, the minority language, Swedish, was given far-reaching privileges. The language strife thereafter centered on these privileges and on the role of Swedish in universities, particularly regarding the number of professors lecturing and examining in Swedish. Then, at the resettlement of over 420,000
Karelians after the
Winter War, the Swedish-speaking minority feared that new Finnish-speaking settlers would change the linguistic balance of their neighbourhoods. These issues were ultimately settled by the Fennoman
Prime Minister and later
President of Finland Juho Kusti Paasikivi, in a way that was too generous to attract criticism from Finland-Swedes.
An important process in the creation of a separate Finnish national identity was the perception of Finland's history as separate and different from Sweden's. As in other processes of conceptual changes, this led to rather contentious disputes between the protagonists of the new views and the defenders of traditional truth. Discordant history views between
Fennomans and
Svecomans are today reflected by differences between
Finnish and
Swedish understandings of the shared history, but also between academic historians and popular perceptions, the latter being more influenced by the views of prolific 19th century leaders.
From a Fennoman point of view, it may be important to problematize and specify the process of Swedish expansion in today's Finland and the formation of
Sweden-Finland, pointing out that "Finland" was in no way instantly conquered and incorporatedâ€"and not through any wars or battles fought between
Finns and
Swedes, but rather Finns themselves, some sympathizing with the Catholic Swedes and still others with the Orthodox Russiansâ€"but that this was a
gradual process over several centuries, including many tendencies toward and attempts at autonomy for the eastern half of
Sweden-Finland, that is, today's Finland.
Opponents may argue that the gradual process was no different from the gradual process of colonization and incorporation of other parts of the medieval
Swedish realm, notably of
SmĂĄland,
Värmland, and
Norrland, and emphasize that one important explanation for the gradual displacement of Finland's border in an eastward direction from
1323-
1721 was the gradual expansion of the
Finnish people colonizing the wildernessâ€"a process with clear parallells in Scandinavia, where many of the colonizers similarly were ethnic Finns. From a Finnish point of view, it may be counter-argued that the
Karelians actually existed long before Sweden's border extended to
Vyborg in southernmost Karelia, and that only few of them came under Swedish rule until the
Time of Troubles in
Muscovy. This made Finns somewhat invulnerable.
Disputes sometimes arise on the degree of dominance of Swedish. Debaters representing a Fennoman point of view sometimes stress that
Latin, and not Swedish, was the language of academia, and until the Protestant Reformation was also often the language of state administration; hence the notion of Swedish
dominance is misleading for the
14th-
15th centuries, and also to some degree for the
16th-
17th centuries. Hence it may be emphasized that, up to the 16th century,
French and Latin were the languages Finnish students most often used for their higher education, and to a large extent later as well. A Swedish point of view would be that this situation was no different from the situation in any other part of what was then Sweden.
A chief point of contention is when
Finns and
Finland started to become perceived as different from
Swedes and
Sweden. It may well be argued that the words
Finn and
Finland were used to describe the Finnish people and the land they lived on a millennium ago by known historians (including the Romans), and that the earliest documents of Finnish student life can be found from over seven centuries ago.
In
1313, monks sent from the recently founded bishopric of Turku/Ă…bo to study at the theological college
Collège de Sorbonne of
University of Paris participated with the other students and teachers in signing a petition to the
Holy See, that the college should be exempt from the debts of the University. Due to establishment of German universities in the 1380s, Paris' popularity dwindled quickly among the German and Swedish bishoprics, but remained the univerity of choice for the Turku bishopric, where a Paris degree was seen as a must if you wanted to advance. Consequently, by
1420, the Turku students were one of the largest foreign groups at
Collège de Sorbonne, and in
1435, Olaus Magni from Turku (not to be confused with the Swedish ecclesiastic
Olaus Magni, who lived a hundred years later) became the rector of the college. Historians may object that the
See of Ă…bo (
Turku) was no less a Swedish bishopric than that of Uppsala, although the latter was an
archbishopric; and that denoting
Swedes and
Finns as somehow opposite concepts is unhistorical.
Fire has destroyed most of the early literature that must have been produced by the churches and monasteries in Finland. The first known Finnish author was
Jöns Budde, a Franciscan monk who lived in the Brigittene monastery at
Naantali,
Finland, in the middle of the
15th century. He chiefly translated from Latin to Swedish, and became the first known author to translate the Bible into Swedish.
Martin Luther's first Finnish student,
Pietari Särkilahti (also known as
Petrus Särkilahti), was one of the earliest-known pioneers of teaching science in the
Finnish language. In
1538, the first known books in Finnish were published by his student,
Mikael Agricola. It is sometimes pointed out that the promotion of the popular languages, Swedish and Finnish, was a policy of
Gustav Vasa, the very Swedish king most often perceived as a
national symbol for Sweden and Swedishness.
*
Paper about Finnish studies abroad before the foundantion of the Ă…bo University in 1640 - linked 10 February 2006
*
Language policy*
Language revival
