Mother Tongue

An interesting LitHub post by Swedish American novelist Johannes Lichtman, on the challenges of working in a language you only use to speak to your mother:

The problem hadn’t been with the translation of the second part of my novel—it had been with me. In my novel, Jonas was speaking English like a twenty-eight-year-old American. He was sarcastic at times, as if he were frequently sharing an inside joke with an invisible spectator. He had command of his words, the selection of which he modulated to make someone laugh, listen, or back off. The translator had rendered his English into the Swedish of a twenty-eight-year-old Swede with the same characteristics. But in my head, I heard Jonas in my own Swedish—the language of a twenty-eight-year old who has spent most of his life speaking Swedish only with his mother. The language of a twenty-eight-year old who sounds like an enthusiastic aunt. It was too sweet a language for my novel.

Pakko paha?

"If there is no requirement to choose another language in place of Swedish, the fear is that a lot of people will no longer study a language," said Kari Jukarainen of the Finnish Language teachers association. "We would have a large group of pupils whose only foreign language is English."

http://yle.fi/uutiset/teachers_fear_for_language_skills_without_compulsory_swedish/7021451

Shadows of Recession

The latest issue of Hiidenkivi, the cultural magazine published in Helsinki by SKS, the Finnish Literature Society, is focused on the theme of "The Long Shadows of Recession", with a look in words and pictures at three periods of economic crisis in Finland: the early 1930s, the early 1990s and the late 2000s. Articles examine social attitudes to unemployment and poverty through the decades, and there's also a survey of Depression and wartime cookbooks, and a sobering photograph of a Helsinki leipäjono (literally "breadline") or soup kitchen in 2006. Jouni Jäppinen contributes an interesting study of the tiny Baltic-Karelian island of  Tytärsaari, whose Finnish inhabitants traded with local Estonians from the 14th century onwards until the Second  World War, when the island was lost to the USSR (it's still in Leningrad Oblast). And Taru Kolehmainen ponders the history of the Finnish Literature Society's language committee, which was founded in 1928 and modelled to some extent on Germany's Der Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein, which in the Nazi period attempted to rid the German language of foreign - particularly French - loanwords. It's somewhat eerie and even rather disturbing to note some details of the Sprachverein's experiments, such as its aspiration to replace the names of the months of the year with "Germanic" equivalents like Herbstmond (September) and Julmond (December) - for some of these creations seem to have been borrowed from equivalent formations in Finnish (syyskuu, joulukuu). In Finland, the struggle was against Swedish influence, however, and probably represented a natural historical development more or less untainted by ideology.

Terrier tactics

Hufvudstadsbladet is running a series of articles and features (the website includes only a selection from the paper edition) under the general headline "Swedish Under Attack", focusing on the current language debate in Finland. Yesterday the paper asked some leading Finland-Swedish personalities what they thought of SFP ([Finland-]Swedish People's Party) leader Stefan Wallin's proposal, voiced during an interview on Sunday, that the party should be a "terrier" for Finland-Swedish interests.

Respondents were asked:

1 What do you think of terrier tactics in the defence of Swedish questions?

2 What sort of tactics should they be?

Among literary respondents, Jörn Donner wrote:

If by terrier tactics what is meant is a more aggressive style that beats fists on the table, I can probably see a point in it. It's getting too easy for the Finland-Swedes to become too accommodating and seek consensus. But if terrier tactics are on the agenda, the SFP should probably have left the government a number ofl times during the past 20 years. So far I have seen no indication that they ever intended to do so, alas.

And in the course of his (longer) reply Kjell Westö said:

I have no easy counter-prescription. I'm surprised that so many Finland-Swedes seem to experience Finnish-speaking Finland as a scary, completely alien world. This autumn's debate has made me realize that I've underestimated that sense of alienation. I personally get along well with  Finnish-speakers and have always felt myself to be a Finn who happens to have Swedish as his mother tongue. For me language - any language - is a tool that makes it possible to build bridges, and I don't think I'm going to abandon that position.

See also: Land of one language?
Land of one language? - 2

Land of one language? - 2

The renewed and often bitter debate about the position of the Swedish language in Finland continues to cause waves in Finnish cultural and political life. Last week Anna-Maja Henriksson, chair of the Swedish Assembly (Folketinget) which promotes the interests of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority warned that if the anti-Swedish trend continues (the future of the country's Swedish-language television service is currently in doubt) the Åland Islands may seek separation. At present Åland (in Finnish, Ahvenanmaa) enjoys a special autonomous status within Finland, enabling the province to conduct its affairs entirely in Swedish, without the need for the people who live there to learn and speak Finnish at all.

This statement, which Ms. Henriksson subsequently modified, saying she had been misunderstood, caused outrage in the comments section of the Helsingin Sanomat article in which it appeared, and she began to receive threats and accusations of treason.

Polarization around the issue does appear to be gathering momentum, though the discussions I've read generate more heat than light. Today's issue of Hufvudstadsbladet leads with a story about Finland-Swedish hospital patients and their experiences, suggesting that Finland-Swedes demand more of the public health services than Finns do. On the other hand, most of Finland's medical personnel don't speak much or any Swedish, especially those doctors and specialists who have migrated to Finland from abroad.

Finland's current prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, is the first politician to hold the post who in meetings with his Nordic colleagues uses English, not Swedish, as a means of communication.

Svenskfinland in English has much more on all the related issues - seen from a Finland-Swedish viewpoint, of course. 

See also: Land of one language?

Land of one language?

In Finland the vexed and perennial question of the position of the Swedish language in the country's affairs continues to provoke discussion in Finnish and Finland-Swedish media. Last week Ulla-Maj Wideroos, chair of the Swedish People's Party group in the Finnish Parliament, gave an interview to the regional Finnish dailyTurun Sanomat in which she said that

the climate within the government had changed to the disadvantage of Swedish-speaking people over the past two legislative periods... "There has been a change of generation and today's politicians do not relate to the Swedish language in the way earlier ones did"...(Helsinki Times)

Last month the youth wing of the Perussuomalaiset (True Finns) party demanded (Turun Sanomat) that Finland should become a monolingual country, and that the special official status accorded to Swedish should be removed, "because the language legislation does not correspond to the real declaration of will in our country". In their statement, the campaigners said that too much of Finnish taxpayers' money was being spent on maintaining Swedish as the country's second language relative to the small area in which Swedish is actually spoken. Alluding to the growing numbers of Russian-speaking migrants to Finland, they asked if Russian. too, would be made an official language when the numbers of Russian-speakers reached the same proportions as those of Swedish-speaking Finns.

In the Swedish-language Hufvudstadsbladet it's possible to follow an ongoing discussion of the issue. Some of the contributions illustrate the intensity and bitterness of some of the debate. Excerpts:

• Our history with Sweden was horrible and vile. We don't want a Little Sweden here in Finland any more.
  

• It is simply that there is no need to learn Swedish. Everywhere in Scandinavia one can get by with Finnish and English.

• Swedish Finland (Svenskfinland) - that's not something one talks about in Finnish. What is it , exactly? 
  

• In the metropolitan area nearly all Finland-Swedes speak "proper" Finnish. But there must be something wong with  the Swedish teaching in Finnish schools, because Finns don't learn Swedish? The majority of Swedish teachers in Finnish schools don't know Swedish well enough and are also incapable of inspiring their students to learn it.

Note: to an outsider, it would seem that from a literary point of view Finland is quite clearly a land of two languages - the Finland-Swedish contribution is at least equal to the Finnish one. But seen in contemporary social and general cultural terms, the situation appears to be different. Is it a case of one Finland for the Finns, and another for the rest of the world?