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Originally Posted by Seekers
More background and information, in English and French, on Finlandswedes and Swedish in Finland, in handy PDF format.
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Just as a note: The Swedish Assembly of Finland is not a neutral party but an interest group, like they state by theirselves in the document. Most of the information seems correct, however.
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The Swedish-speaking population in Finland is
mainly descended from peasants and fishermen
who settled on the western and southern coasts
and islands some time between 1000 and 1250 A.D.
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There's very little preserved written documents concerning Finland from those ages, and so far as I know there's not any indication of Swedish immigration before Finland was annexed by Sweden starting from 1249. Being associated with an armed conquest is bad PR?
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Under Swedish rule, many ethnic Finns changed
their language and started speaking Swedish, but
most of them reverted to Finnish in the late 1800s.
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I don't know to which extent this has been researched, but so far as I know the Fennoman movement was not somehow exclusive to only those Swedish speakers who were aware that their ancestry (or part of it) had been Finnish speaking.
This sounds like an attempt to give the reader a picture of a straight-forward ethnogenesis that resulted in a distinct, uniform population. Genetics tells a different story: all estimations of Finnish ancestry in modern Swedish speakers that I have seen have given results ranging from a little more than 50% to 75-80%. These kind of studies are however quite dependent on the Finnish speaking reference population. The more recent population developments in Sweden may also have some influence.