The Language Situation in Finland

Sirkku Latomaa · Pirkko Nuolijärvi

43 citations0/0 files storedCurrent Issues in Language Planning

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies Multilingual Education and Policy Minority Rights and Languages

Abstract

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Finland, an officially bilingual country in northern Europe. The national languages, Finnish and Swedish, have equal status, guaranteed in language legislation since 1922. During the 19th century, however, Swedish was still the language of the élite, while Finnish was the language of the common people. Therefore, the main accomplishment during the 19th century was the rapid development of the Finnish language into a language of education and administration, after Finnish was accorded official status in 1863. The beginning of independence (1917–) witnessed a number of language conflicts that gradually subsided and led to a long stable period between the languages. In the 1980s, the linguistic situation changed again in many ways. The former emigrant country became an immigrant country. Even though immigrant minorities in Finland are still small compared with, for example, other Nordic countries, immigration has created a situation where there are several established linguistic minorities. In the 1990s, the status of linguistic minorities was improved through a number of legislative and educational reforms, and in 2001, proposals for the new Language Act and the Saami Language Act were written. Simultaneously, the status of Finnish has changed somewhat. In 1995, Finland joined the European Union. Internationalisation and globalisation have become a part of Finnish society, and the role of English in business, education, media and science has become more accentuated than ever before. In this new situation, the future of Finnish as well as the other national language, Swedish, is discussed from the viewpoint of less widely used languages in a globalising world.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

References

1997Immersion education: A category within bilingual education

Cited by

2018The Impact of Language Experience on Language and Reading 2009Motives and outcomes of New Zealand sign language legislation: a comparative study between New Zealand and Finland 2011Children with Specific Language Impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections 2014Teachers' beliefs about learning and language as reflected in their views of teaching materials for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)2007Introduction: why a special issue on the Swedish-speaking Finns?2016Promotion in times of endangerment: the Sign Language Act in Finland 2012Different languages, one mission? Outcomes of language policies in a multilingual university context 2021Families in flux: at the nexus of fluid family configurations and language practices

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.