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Originally Posted by Seekers
I wonder what this figure implies, since according to the curriculum, all Finns have to learn Swedish. I want to hear from the Finns.
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This legislation has only existed from the seventies, so there's many older people who don't know the language virtually at all (most notably the generation born in the baby boom after the war). And you have no idea how large scale is the attitude problem the legislation has caused, especially in the areas that have virtually no Swedish-speakers. Many people feel Swedish as a burden and limit their studying efforts to minimum. This has caused the educational system to lower the threshold to a ridiculously low level to prevent people failing their primary studies because of Swedish.
Finland is one of the most linguistically homogenous countries in Europe, and I see no reason why the whole country should remain officially bilingual. There's traditional minorities in many countries that aren't officially bilingual. While I already support moving power increasingly to local levels, I would naturally prefer language issues to be decided locally. I don't have anything against preserving Swedish language in Finland, but there simply is no way to prevent Finnish being used as a common language of the country and trying this in the state level is extremely impractical.
Speculation of the originality of Swedish language in Finland is irrelevant in this discussion, because it is known that the group contains a majority of Finnish-speakers that at certain point of history were changing their language to improve their status. So the group is not anything 'foreign' or imported anyway (and personally I wouldn't care if they'd
all be immigrants from the 14th century). But the same can be said about the (traditional) Finnish minority in Sweden: in the 17th century the Swedish crown simply moved some of his subjects to a different area inside it's realm. The modern, economically based migrations are a whole different issue, of course.