Finland-Swedish
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Areas where Finland-Swedish populations are found shown in yellow |
Finland-Swedish is a general term for the closely related cluster of
dialects of
Swedish spoken in
Finland by
Finland-Swedes as a first language. For the most part, these dialects are mutually intelligible with dialects spoken in Sweden and are considered
varieties of
Standard Swedish. A common mistake made by many
Swedes is to mistake Finland-Swedish for Swedish with a
Finnish accent, something that can be a considerable source of frustration to most Finland-Swedes, since "standard Finland-Swedish" is in fact supposed to sound different from standard Swedish.
An often repeated "fact" is that the municipality with the highest proportion of Swedish-speakers in the world,
Hammarland (96%
as of 2004), is located in Finland. However, as there are no official statistics on citizens' mother tongue in Sweden, this is hard or impossible to verify, and should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
In spoken language, especially among young people in Finnish-dominated areas, Finnish
loanwords, as well as
calques from Finnish, are frequently incorporated. There are also some words in the Finland-Swedish that in Sweden would be considered slightly archaic. Some words from the field of government and public service that have been created in recent centuries do also differ, like also other new words, notably loanwords from
English. Some
specific dialects from
Ostrobothnia are practically unintelligible to Swedish-speaking people in southern Finland.
Swedish as spoken in Finland is regulated by the "Swedish department" of the "
Research Institute for the Languages of Finland". There is an officially stated aim that Finland-Swedish should remain close to the Swedish spoken in Sweden, thus the Swedish department strongly advises against
loanwords and
calques from
Finnish, which are often incomprehensible to Swedes. The standard form of Finland-Swedish, (used for instance in national mass media), is called
högsvenska ('High Swedish'). Although loan words and calques from Finnish are avoided, högsvenska still has a finnicized
prosody.
From the 16th century Swedish, rather than
Finnish, was the main language of jurisdiction, administration and higher education in
Finland. In
1892 Finnish and Swedish became
official languages with equal status, and by the time of
Finland's independence in
1917 Finnish clearly dominated in government and society.
Finland has since then been a
bilingual country with a Swedish-speaking
minority (5.08% of
Mainland Finland's population in 2003), speaking
Finland-Swedish and living mostly in the coastal areas of southern, south-western, and western Finland. During the 20th century, the
urbanization following the
Industrial Revolution has led to large majorities of Finnish speakers in all major cities. The capital
Helsingfors became the predominantly Finnish-speaking city
Helsinki as early as around
1900. A large and important part of the Finland-Swedes nevertheless live in the capital.
The autonomous island-province of
Åland 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 Finland-Swedish or not. Most Swedish-speaking Finns consider them to be closer to some of the dialects spoken in nearby parts of Sweden.
With the exception of the dialects spoken in
Ostrobothnia along the west coast, closer to the
Gulf of Bothnia, Finland-Swedish are not particularly deviant from Central Swedish. The phonology is identical, but with slightly different vowel qualities. The phoneme is more centralized and pronounced like , quite similar to the
American English pronunciation of /u/ (as in
moon). This should be compared to the Central Swedish , which is very close to the short vowel and is more
rounded.
The realization of the highly variable
phoneme , is more frontal on the mainland and can vary between and while the realizations on Åland are more similar to the velar (and often distinctly
labialized) in Sweden. is
affricated into in all dialects and in standard Finland-Swedish.
The
tonal word accent, which distinguishes some minimal pairs in most dialects of Swedish and Norwegian is not present in Finland-Swedish. The so-called accent 2, used mainly in words with a two-syllable root is not used at all, and instead the normal accent 1 is used in all words. Hence Sweden-Swedish minimal pairs like ("the duck"), with stress on only the first syllable, and ("the spirit") with both syllables stressed, are both pronounced in Finland.
*
SweDia - a collection of dialect samples of Finland-Swedish
