A very small piece of news
NOTES AND QUERIES
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By Antti Blåfield
When the new Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt paid a short courtesy visit to Finland last weekend, Finland stepped across a small but potentially significant cultural threshold. The Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen elected to speak English with his Swedish colleague.
Thus far, Finland's political leaders, including Vanhanen himself, have used the blingual nation's second language - Swedish - in such encounters. When Reinfeldt, then recently appointed to lead the Moderate Party at home, paid a visit here at the invitation of the opposition National Coalition Party, the Finnish conservatives' leader Jyrki Katainen made the same choice as Vanhanen: he, too, chose English as the language of their discussions.
So what, you ask. When Swedish is very definitely a distant second language in many Finnish mouths, why would anyone wish to humiliate themselves by struggling along with bad Swedish?
And why should a Finnish-speaking Finn always speak a foreign language when the Swedes can engage in these talks in their own mother-tongue, and often also using a local dialect that makes understanding the message a strenuous affair?
If both parties use a foreign language, the playing-field is levelled, and neither can take advantage of the intellectual superiority that comes with "playing at home".
It is also important that the message in these discussions gets across as precisely as possible. If both are competent in English and if one is rather less so in Swedish, why would they complicate an important meeting with comprehension difficulties?
Swedish is Finland's second national language, but one encounters it increasingly seldom, and the majority of Finns these days do not run up against situations where speaking Swedish would be absolutely essential: only in the outer islands of the archipelagos and in some of the more remote coastal communities of Southern Ostrobothnia is one likely to encounter a totally Swedish-speaking world.
Hitherto, the use of Swedish has enjoyed a kind of absolute value.
The language has been seen as a means of emphasising Finland's "Nordicness". By speaking Swedish in our dealings with the other Scandinavian countries, we have demonstrated that we belong to the Nordic family.
In this family community we have admittedly often been handed the mantle of a poor relative or country cousin, since the Danes and the Norwegians have taken it for granted that they can speak their own languages - and as is well known, Danish in particular is not a tongue that opens up to untrained Finnish ears.
It requires a decent measure of self-confidence and what Americans would call "moxie" to ask the Danes and the Norwegians (and those from the Skåne region at the southernmost tip of Sweden) to speak more clearly and more slowly.
Fortunately such politicians have been found in Finland in the past and even to this day.
In addition to the wider Nordic picture, Finland and Sweden have been understood to have a very special relationship in which the Swedish language has had an important symbolic value.
Finnish history is the history of Sweden, and vice versa. Sweden has been the mother-conutry, and after that role was brought to an end in 1809, it has been the neighbouring big brother - often an infuriating one, but a brother nonetheless.
The Swedish language has been a special indicator of this special relationship. It has been such an important lynch-pin that previously it was not possible for a person to rise to the very top of the Finnish political heap without being able to hold discussions in Swedish.
This state of affairs no longer holds.
The ties are being loosened on both sides. We had a topical demonstration of this in a recent discussion that touched on the private life of Matti Vanhanen.
During the Swedish election campaign, a Finnish journalist asked Fredrik Reinfeldt how he believed he would be able to cope as a husband and father with the pressures that come with the prime minister's job.
The reporter was making a reference to the breakdown of Vanhanen's marriage and to the media furore that accompanied this - but Reinfeldt had heard nothing of Vanhanen's marital travails.
If one has even kept an occasional eye on Finnish politics of late, this item of news was quite impossible to miss.
The common language is going, and the mutual interest in the life of the other is slipping away. These are not totally insignificant matters.
At the same time, the economic ties between Sweden and Finland are closer than at any time since Finland ceased to be Sweden's eastern province in the early 19th century, and Swedish skills in business life are important.
Will once more the knowledge of Swedish become a litmus-indicator of belonging to "bättre folk" - the better sort of people?
I was wondering about just this subject until I heard that Jouko Karvinen - the new CEO of StoraEnso appointed a few days ago - had stipulated in his first press conference that he would answer questions only in Finnish and English.
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Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.10.2006
The writer is a Helsingin Sanomat editorial columnist
Note: The reference to StoraEnso is significant in the sense that the pulp and paper manufacturer is the product of a 1998 merger between the Swedish mining and forestry concern Stora and Finland's Enso-Gutzeit. The Chairman of the StoraEnso Board is Claes Dahlbäck, a Swede, the former Stora Chairman.
ANTTI BLÅFIELD / Helsingin Sanomat
antti.blafield@hs.fi
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| 24.10.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 A very small piece of news |
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