Finland-Swedish

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Image:Finland-swedish.jpg 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 the citizen's mother tongue in Sweden, this is hard or impossible to verify, and should probably be taken with a grain 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.

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History

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.

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Sounds

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 Template:IPA is more centralized and pronounced like Template:IPA, quite similar to the American English pronunciation of /u/ (as in moon). This should be compared to the Central Swedish Template:IPA, which is very close to the short vowel Template:IPA and is more rounded.

The realization of the highly variable phoneme Template:IPA, is more frontal on the mainland and can vary between Template:IPA and Template:IPA while the realizations on Åland are more similar to the velar (and often distinctly labialized) Template:IPA in Sweden. Template:IPA is affricated into Template:IPA 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 Template:IPA ("the duck"), with stress on only the first syllable, and Template:IPA ("the spirit") with both syllables stressed, are both pronounced Template:IPA in Finland.

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