Finland's language strife
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.)
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[edit] The 19th century resurgence of Finnish nationalism
In the centuries following the present-day Finland's gradual incorporation into the Swedish Realm (also known as Sweden-Finland) — from the 13th century on — Swedish gradually became dominant over Latin, French and Finnish as the most-used language of administration and education among the Finns.
Besides having to acquire the right language skills for good education and work opportunities, many Finns found it useful, and even fashionable, to acquire a foreign - or foreign sounding - name for themselves. From early on, the Latin sounding versions/translations became popular: Alopaeus, Chydenius, Hackzelius ... Cadolin, etc. (even Sibelius, much later). Later on, also Swedish names gained popularity. Thus - for instance -, the Swedish sounding family name of the popular Finnish TV personality, Arvi Lind, was not originally "Lind".
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. Now, 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 Åland 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 against the Soviet Union (1939-1940), the Swedish-speaking minority feared that new Finnish-speaking settlers would change the linguistic balance of their neighborhoods. 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.
[edit] Contentious history views
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 speculate and specify the birth of the nation of Sweden, the process of the Swedish expansion in today's Finland and the formation of Sweden-Finland, pointing out that "Finland" was in no way conquered and incorporated, but that the extreme southwestern corner of the current-day Finland was part of birth of the nation of Sweden, as there was no country of Sweden prior to this assimilation.
Furthermore, the Swedish-Finnish assimilation did not happen trough any wars or battles fought between the Finns and the Swedes, but rather the Finns themselves, some sympathizing with the Catholic Swedes (mainly in the west) and others with the Orthodox Russians (mainly in the east). This was a gradual process, lasting over several centuries, including many tendencies towards - and attempts for - 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 Småland, 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 wilderness - a process with clear parallels 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 in their historically acclaimed areas 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.
Besides the extreme southwestern corner of the modern-day Finland, the rest of Finland stayed - for long time to come - outside Sweden-Finland. For instance the Karelians, the Samis and the people of Kainuu ("Kainulaiset") became effected by the union at a very late point; the "Kainulaiset from the 17th century on:
- Once King Karl IX had strengthened his hold on the crown of Sweden he appended to it the title "King of the Kainulaiset", apparently using it for the first time on 16.3.1607.
- This title was later dropped, but Kainuu, or Ostrobothnia, occupied a separate position from the rest of Finland for a long time to come. Thus when Queen Christina appointed Count Pehr Brahe as Governor-General, he became officially Governor-General of Finland, Åland and Ostrobothnia.
- This can only be interpreted, of course, as implying that the incorporation of Ostrobothnia into rest of the country by international agreement was still a recent event and remained fresh in people's memories."
- Kainu(u) - as seen by most historians - means Kvenland in Finnish language, and kainulaiset means Kvens. In historic texts Kvenland has also been referred to as Ostrobothnia, which term thrives from the Swedish language (Professor Emeritus Kyosti Julku - KVENLAND / KAINUUNMAA, 1986).
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 the 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.
Thus, it ought to 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 could be that this situation was no different from the situation in most parts 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 before the nation of Sweden was born, by known historians and others (including the Romans, the Pope - in Papal letters -, the Scandinavians), 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/Åbo to study at the theological college Collège de Sorbonne of the University of Paris participated with the other students and teachers in signing a petition to the Holy See, demanding 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 university of choice for the Turku bishopric, where a Paris degree was seen as essential for advancement.
Consequently, by 1420, the Turku students were one of the largest foreign groups at Collège de Sorbonne (seven times the size of the group from Uppsala), 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 Åbo (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 (including the Great Fire of Turku) 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 the national symbol for Sweden and "Swedishness".
[edit] External links
- Paper about Finnish studies abroad before the foundantion of the Åbo University in 1640 - linked 10 February 2006
