Former president Martti Ahtisaari claims that Finns don’t speak good enough Swedish. You might not realise it but there is an active Swedish-speaking minority in Oulu. 65DN went to their main stronghold.
Sampo Backman
The bastion of Finland-Swede culture in Oulu in some ways resembles the city’s Swedish-speakers. The Svenska Privatskolan is old (established in 1850), small, tucked away and doesn’t get into the news very much. In fact, if you walked round the school during the lunch-break you’d find that most of the pupils spoke to each other in Finnish.
More Swedish than Sweden
‘Finland has some of the most Swedish areas anywhere in the world,’ explains the headmaster, Sampo Backman. ‘We have towns in Ostrobothnia that are maybe 99 percent Swedish-speaking. Even in Sweden you don’t have that.’
Born and brought-up in Sweden, thirty-seven year-old Backman’s parents were ‘Finland-Swedes’ and considers himself to be one as well.
His school has 200 students. They range in age from six to eighteen (pre-school to Lukio) and there are roughly fifteen children to a class.
Swedish Immersion
‘All the lessons are in Swedish,’ he says, ‘apart from languages such as French but then it’s still taught through Swedish.
‘Sometimes, if they forget a word, they might go into Finnish and you have to remind them to speak Swedish,’ adds history teacher Eva-Lisa Storbacka. ‘But that’s not often.’ Storbacka also emphasised that Swedish immersion is so total at the school that even if she argues with kids it’s still usually in Swedish.
‘And breaking the school rules, by swearing or graffiti-ing a text-book, is not considered any worse because it’s been done in Finnish rather than Swedish!’ she laughs.
For the schools ‘rector,’ it’s quite natural that many of kids should speak to each other in Finnish outside the classroom. ‘In Oulu, it comes naturally to speak in Finnish to each other if you are both native speakers of Finnish and you have friends that don’t speak as good Swedish.’
Backman estimates that about 90 percent of his students are ‘bilingual.’ Some speak slightly better Finnish than Swedish, others slightly better Swedish than Finnish while others are mainly Swedish-speaking.
Rami Klements
As he explains this, we run into 13 year-old Rami Klemets who is keen to practice his rather good English. ‘I speak Swedish, Finnish and now English,’ he responds, in American-sounding English, to the rector’s Swedish question. ‘I speak Swedish better than Finnish.’
At the Lukio level, many students come to Oulu from other parts of Ostrobothnia or even Sweden (if they have Finnish parents wanting them to learn Finnish). Sometimes they arrive speaking almost no Finnish. ‘They want to go to Lukio in Oulu so that they can learn Finnish.’
Tuition Fees of Zero
There are certain stereotypes about his school which Backman would like to correct. It is, as far as he’s concerned, inaccurate that Swedish-speakers are somehow of a ‘higher class’ than Finns and it’s certainly untrue that you need to be wealthy to send your child to the school. The meaning of ‘Privatskolan’ is not what you might think.
‘There are no tuition fees!’ he laughs. ‘It just means that there’s a different kind of administration.’ Most Finnish schools are funded by the government and you must go to your nearest school. Backman’s school is partially government-funded but also partially-funded by a private foundation. The school is not in any way oversubscribed but if it were it would have a duty to give priority to Swedish-speaking pupils because it has a duty to them. It actually has some pupils with no Swedish background.
And it’s discussing this which takes Sampo into what it’s like to be a Swedish-speaker in Oulu.
‘Dangerous to Forget Your History’
‘We are a bilingual society,’ he emphasises. ‘It comes from our history. So I think it’s natural to put a child in a Swedish school because it’s one of the official languages, even if it’s the smaller one.’
‘And I think everyone should learn Finnish. Finland used to be part of Sweden. We were part of a Nordic country and it is very dangerous to forget your history. Also, everybody has moved to Finland – the original people are the Saami – and Ostrobothnia, especially, was first of all mainly Swedish. It wasn’t Finland.’
He wouldn’t claim that Oulu is ‘indigenously Swedish.’ However, he feels this is true of Åbo (Turku) and is unsure with regard to Helsinki because it is ‘a very new city.’ But, certainly, Oulu was ‘about 20 percent Swedish-speaking’ a couple of hundred of years ago.
Though, according to the Maistraatti, there are only 395 registered Swedish-speakers in Oulu, Backman is unconcerned about the language’s future in the city. ‘The figures don’t tell you about the numbers who are bilingual!’ he insists.
‘Positively Surprised’
Some ‘Finland-Swede’ activists claim that ‘Swedish-speakers’ suffer discrimination for using their language. ‘Finland-Swedes have been harassed and insulted because of their ethnic background’ insists Ida Asplund of the Finnish-Swedish Association.
Backman, however, has never had any ‘problems’ due to speaking in Swedish in public in Oulu. ‘Maybe I would have in the 1920s or in towns where there is a kind of border but not here.’
Storbacka has never experienced any problems either. ‘I was very positively surprised! In the 1980s in Tampere people might say "We speak Finnish in Finland!" but not here and I’ve been here 12 years.’
She’s also unworried about the future of Swedish. ‘I feel I’m a Finn who speaks Swedish,’ she explains. Originally from Kokkola, she’s aware that the Swedish percentage there (sixteen percent) is dropping but puts this down to Finnophone migration into the city.
‘If I was flying a flag on a national day then I would fly the Finnish national flag,’ she asserts. ‘But if it was just the flag on my house then it would be the red and yellow . . . the Swedish-speaking flag.’
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