|
History From the 16th century, Swedish was the main language of jurisdiction, administration, and higher education in Finland, but the majority of the population spoke Finnish outside of these sectors of society, i.e. in normal, daily life. In 1892, Finnish and Swedish became official languages with equal status, and by the time of Finland's independence in 1917, Finnish clearly dominated in government and society. Finland has since then been a bilingual country with a Swedish-speaking minority (5.08% of mainland Finland's population in 2003) living mostly in the coastal areas of southern, south-western, and western Finland. During the 20th century, the urbanization following the Industrial Revolution has led to large majorities of Finnish speakers in all major cities. The capital Helsingfors (Helsinki) became predominantly Finnish speaking as early as around 1900. A large and important part of the Swedish-speaking population nevertheless lives in the capital. The autonomous island province of Åland is an exception, being monolingually Swedish speaking according to international treaties. It is a matter of definition whether the Swedish dialects spoken on Åland are to be considered a kind of Finland Swedish or not. Most Swedish-speaking Finns consider them to be closer to some of the dialects spoken in nearby parts of Sweden. Sounds With the exception of the dialects spoken in Ostrobothnia along the west coast, close to the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland Swedish is not particularly different from Central Swedish. The phonology is identical, but it has slightly different vowel qualities. The phoneme is more centralized and pronounced like , quite similar to the American English pronunciation of /u/ (as in moon). This should be compared to the Central Swedish , which is very close to the short vowel and is more rounded. The realization of the highly variable phoneme is more frontal on the mainland and can vary between and , while the realizations on Åland are more similar to the velar (and often distinctly labialized) in Sweden. is affricated into in all dialects and in standard Finland Swedish. The tonal word accent, which distinguishes some minimal pairs in most dialects of Swedish and Norwegian, is not present in Finland Swedish. The so-called accent 2, used mainly in words with a two-syllable root, is not used at all, and accent 1 is instead used in all words. Hence Sweden Swedish minimal pairs like ("the duck") - with stress on only the first syllable - and ("the spirit") - with both syllables stressed - are both pronounced in Finland. | ||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||
 |
|
| |