Fennoman movement

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The Fennomans were the most important political movement in the 19th century Grand Duchy of Finland. They succeeded the fennophile interests of the 18th and early 19th century. After the Crimean War, they founded the Finnish Party and intensified the language strife yearning to raise the Finnish language and Finnic culture from peasant-status to the position of a national language and a national culture. The evoked opposition, the Svecomans, tried to defend the status of Swedish and the ties to the Germanic world. Although the notion of Fennomans has not been as common after the generation of Paasikivi (born 1870) than it was before, their ideas have, partly in synthesis with the legacy of the Svecomans, since dominated the Finns' understanding of their bilingual nation.

Many of the first generation of Fennomans were originally Swedish-speaking by mother tongue, but not all. Some of the originally Swedish-speaking Fennomans learned Finnish, and made a point of using it both in the society and at home, giving their children what they missed themselves: the Finnish mother tongue.

Several Fennomans were from Finnish or bilingual homes. Some had originally Swedish surnames, as it was very common in Finland at that time.

Most of the Fennomans also Finnicized their family names, particularly beginning from the end of the 19th century.

In the last years of the 19th century, and in the first years of the 20th, the Fennoman movement split into two political parties: the Old Finnish Party and the Young Finnish Party.

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[edit] Motto

The fennoman motto was coined by Adolf Ivar Arwidsson (originally in Swedish):

"Swedes we are no longer,
Russians we can never become,
so let us be Finns!"

It is said though that these words were put into Arwidsson's mouth by Johan Vilhelm Snellman.

[edit] Some prominent Fennomans

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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