Finland: Marginal Case of Bicommunalism?

Abstract

Finland is officially bilingual but is deficient in some of the structural, attitudinal, and institutional factors conducive to the maintenance of a stable bicommunal political system. The system is in no sense a federal one. At the level of social structure, the Swedish-speaking minority is relatively small, proportionally decreasing, territorially divided, and increasingly bilingual as urbanization continues. In terms of attitudes, the existence of a distinctive Finlandssvensk cultural inheritance is much debated, one view holding that the Swedish cultural tradition is an inheritance of the country as a whole and not just of the linguistic minority. Many in both groups emphasize the extent of common values across the linguistic division, and since 1939 external crises have strongly reinforced internal cohesion. In public institutions, Finnish and Swedish have virtually equal legal status but at the practical level Swedish is less fully utilized. One factor for instability is that Finland's language legislation, unlike that of Belgium or Switzerland, is based on flexible rather than fixed linguistic territoriality, except in the Aland islands, where Swedish enjoys a permanently protected special status.