Finland Swedish is a general term for the closely related cluster of dialects of Swedish spoken in Finland by Swedish-speaking Finns as their mother tongue. For the most part, these dialects and the dialects spoken in Sweden are mutually intelligible, although some dialects from Ostrobothnia are practically unintelligible to Swedish-speaking people in southern Finland (and in Sweden). However, most Swedish-speaking Finns emphasize that Finland Swedish is not a language separate from the Swedish of Sweden. The Swedish dialects in Finland are considered varieties of Swedish, and the norm for written Standard Swedish is completely applicable also for Finland Swedish.

Swedish as spoken in Finland is regulated by the Swedish Department of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland. This regulation includes the officially stated aim of keeping Finland Swedish close to the Swedish as spoken in Sweden and strongly phrased advice against loanwords and calques from Finnish, which are usually incomprehensible to Swedes. The standardized form of spoken Finland Swedish, as used for instance in national radio and television, has a prosody that like in northern parts of Sweden is related to Finnish prosody, similarly to how the high status varieties of Swedish as spoken in southern and western Sweden are related to the prosody of Danish and Norwegian. Phonological patterns may be considered distributed similarly, although to much lesser degree. Such spoken high status Finland-Swedish is sometimes called "High Swedish" (Högsvenska), although this term is increasingly shunned since it by many is considered a carrier of the capital's elite's expectations of dominance. As a term, "standard Finland Swedish" may be preferred.

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. Korsnäs has also held this title and is often cited as such. However, as there are no official statistics on the mother tongue of inhabitants of Sweden, this is hard or impossible to verify and should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.

In the spoken language, especially among young people in Finnish-dominated areas, Finnish loanwords as well as calques 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.

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 Swedish-speaking Finns. Any language adopts features, especially pronunciation habits, from dominant languages it comes in touch with, but the pronunciation of Finland Swedish by a Swedish-speaking Finn is clearly different from that of monolingual Finnish speakers pronouncing Swedish as a foreign language.

History

From the 16th century, Swedish was the main language of jurisdiction, administration, and higher education in Finland, but the majority of the population spoke Finnish outside of these sectors of society, i.e. in normal, daily life. 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) 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 Helsinki (in Swedish Helsingfors) became predominantly Finnish speaking as early as around 1900. A large and important part of the Swedish-speaking population nevertheless lives 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 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.

Sounds

With the exception of the dialects spoken in Ostrobothnia along the west coast, close to the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland Swedish is not particularly different from Central Swedish. The phonology is identical, but it has slightly different vowel qualities. The phoneme /ʉ/ is more centralized and pronounced like [ʉ], quite similar to the American English pronunciation of /u/ (as in moon). This should be compared to the Central Swedish [ʉ̟], which is very close to the short vowel [ʏ] and is more rounded.

The realization of the highly variable phoneme /ɧ/ is more frontal on the mainland and can vary between [ʂ] and [ɕ ~ ʃ], while the realizations on Åland are more similar to the velar (and often distinctly labialized) [ɧ] in the neighboring parts of Sweden. /ɕ/ is affricated into [ʨ] in all dialects including 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, instead accent 1 is used in all words. Hence Sweden Swedish minimal pairs like /ˈandɛn/ ("the duck") - with stress on only the first syllable - and /ˈandˌɛn/ ("the spirit") - with both syllables stressed - are both pronounced [ˈandɛn] in Finland.

References

External links

• SweDia - a collection of dialect samples of Swedish including Finland Swedish