II

During the centuries of Swedish rule in Finland, the Swedish language clearly won ascendancy over Finnish as the instrument of culture and commerce; it was the major language of the towns and was spoken, as well, in the country regions which had received a Swedish population either before or after the establishment of Swedish hegemony. These regions were substantially the same as the ones   [p. xi]   which contain the Swedish-speaking population of Finland today: the coast of Ostrobothnia, north and south of the town of Vasa (Finnish: Vaasa); the Åland Islands; the academic city and, until 1827, the Finnish capital, Åbo (Turku), with its skerries; and the southern coast from Hangö (Hanko) and Ekenäs (Tammisaari) to Helsingfors (Helsinki), and then east past Borgå (Porvoo) to Lovisa (Loviisa). There also existed colonies of "inland Swedes"; of these, the most important was at Viborg (Viipuri) in Carelia. Isolated Swedish-speaking families were to be found everywhere in the Finnish regions; the large landowners were members, although hardly typical ones, of this group which comprised chiefly professional people, clergymen, and officials.

Not long after Finland had been incorporated into Russia, in 1809, the country's linguistic complexion began to change; nationalism, making its appearance here as it would, for example, in the Austrian Empire, encouraged the educated classes to adopt Finnish as their language. A movement was begun to make Finland monolingual; it is ironic that its leader, Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806-81), composed the majority of his works in Swedish. Some of Snellman's contemporaries, such as Finland's national poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-77) and the esthetician, Carl Gustav Estlander (1834-1910), felt that Snellman's demand for "one language, one people" was a kind of tilting at windmills; they argued that all Finns were Finns, regardless of what language they spoke. Nevertheless, the zeal of Snellman and his followers compelled some Finland-Swedes (for this is what they now began to call themselves, instead of "Finns" or "Finlanders," the latter a word which meant an inhabitant of Finland, no matter what his language was) to take up a position as extreme as Snellman's; the leader of these believers in a separate Swedish nationality in Finland was the philologist Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836-1911).

The teachings of Freudenthal acquired a special appeal for the Finland-Swede of the early twentieth century, who saw how the "true Finnish" element in Finland's national life was increasing its power and importance by leaps and bounds. Feeling steadily more homeless in his own homeland, the Finland-Swede retreated into the protective shell of "Freudenthalism," of what we might call a minority mentality. The establishment of the Republic did not bring with it an alleviation of the minority's fears; indeed, the Finland-Swedish position became even more precarious because of the understandable desire of a nation, suddenly independent after centuries of foreign rule, to become itself, like no other land on earth. The wars of 1939-40 and 1941-44, for all the suffering they caused, did benefit Finland in one way; the Finland-Swedes contributed so generously to the nation's defense that they found themselves more readily tolerated than before. The new tolerance may have also found encouragement in the likelihood of the language problem's resolving itself. The Swedish-speaking population is steadily decreasing, not least because of a smaller birth rate (in proportion to the Finnish-speaking Finns) and migration to Sweden in search of a better life, the very motive which led the ancestors of the Finland-Swedes eastward, ages before. According to the last census, there are 330,530 Swedish speakers in Finland, or 7.4 per cent of the nation's total inhabitants. The figure should be compared with that of 1880, the first year for which we have language statistics (295,000 or 14.3 per cent), of 1910 (339,000 or 11.6 per cent), and of 1950-51 (348,286 or 8.6 per cent).