In most parts of the world, language is usually a fiery and divisive issue, one that pits the powerless against the powerful, the small against the big.
The Basques battle the Spanish.
The Flemish tussle with the Walloons. The Quebecois scuffle with the rest of Canada. But Finland, a country with an unshakable sense of fair play, offers a coounterbalance to that sort of acrimony.
In fact, no sooner did Finland win its independence from Russia in 1917 than it ensured in its Constitution that Swedish speakers, who still controlled much of Finland, would be granted equal rights culturally, educationally and socially. It was a gesture of comity and pragmatism that overlooked the fact that for five centuries Sweden had controlled Finland and scorned the Finnish language, which the Swedes deemed mysterious and second-class.
The result of that constitutional mandate is that Finland is home to the world's most pampered minority group, the endangered Swedish-speaking Finn. Even as their numbers and influence dwindle -- from a high of 14 percent of the population in 1880 to 5 percent today --their rights, for the most part, continue to flourish.
"We have it very good here," concedes Henrik Creutz, a Swedish-speaking Finn and a board member of the Swedish People's Party, who is quick to note that almost all Swedish speakers also speak Finnish, most of them very well.
Finland has two official languages, Swedish and Finnish. One takes precedence over the other, depending on how many of the people living in a given community speak Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue. Mostly, the country is made up of Finnish-language communities; only about 4 percent of the country's 432 communities are considered Swedish only. Another 10 percent are bilingual, 21 of them with a Finnish-language majority and 23 of them with a Swedish-language majority.
Finland even has a kind of reverse system of quotas and affirmative action for Swedish speakers at the university level; reverse because Swedish speakers tend to be wealthier (in fact, Swedish speakers control many of the major industries) and healthier than Finnish speaker.
On this point, some Finnish speakers begin to grumble, saying that Swedish speakers have an easier time getting into competitive schools because of the quotas.
Most upsetting to Finns is the fact that they are required to take Swedish in school. (Finns notoriously speak poor Swedish, even though they are forced to learn it from a young age.)
Last spring, irate Finnish-speaking students struck a first blow at the Swedish-language requirment, when the government, despite aggressive lobbying from powerful Swedish speakers, agreed to drop Swedish from the difficult matriculation exam that leads to university admissions.
Riita Uosukainen, the former speaker of the Finnish parliament, argues that some of today's laws simply go overboard.
"People in Finland don't want to take rights away from Swedish speakers," she said. "It's in our Constitution. We are proud of it. But Finnish speakers don't want to be told that they must learn Swedish. Finnish people also have rights."
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