Hey, what does fennoswede mean? Not trying to offend you.
Hello! No worries whatsoever! It’s very much not common knowledge, and I don’t mind explaining. A Fennoswede is a person who’s a native Swedish-speaker born in Finland. We also call ourselves Swedish-speaking Finns but that’s kind of a mouthful.And here comes the infodump!Finland is a bilingual country, our two official languages being Finnish and Swedish (think Canada and English/French). This means that I’ve gone to Swedish-speaking schools and though we had Finnish classes, I’ve managed to not learn it. Many Finnish speaking students have similar experiences with their Swedish classes so I guess that’s fair. It also means our national broadcasting network also runs their services in Swedish, and we’re generally entitled to service in our native language, whether that’s at the dentist or the bank or whatever, and so on. This doesn’t always work out that well, seeing as how we’re vastly outnumbered by the actual Finns. I mean I’ve had to use an interpreter at the hospital before, but still, we’re very privileged compared to other linguistic minorities since we’re still at least officially recognised by the law. The Swedish-speaking population in Finland is mostly concentrated along the coast and mainly in the rural Ostrobothnian area–that’s where yours truly is from. We’ve been living here for uhhh I think closer to a thousand years?? but there are only about 300 000 of us on this bitch of an earth currently. Anyway, this means there are individual dialects for every little village where language has remained isolated for ages, and that makes it sound incredibly not like the Swedish spoken in Sweden by the Swedes. I tried it. They were mostly incredibly confused and didn’t understand much. Because the dialects are more like ancient Swedish on account of having been isolated by the vastly different Finnish language on one side, and the sea to the other, and as such they haven’t evolved like modern Swedish. We still have Standard Swedish here and it’s generally considered uhhh rude to speak your local dialect around people who might not understand it (read: anyone who’s not Ostrobothnian or hasn’t had any contact with one. If you’re Norwegian you might understand it though!). For obvious reasons. Also if you speak your dialect around southern Fennoswedes they’ll consider you a bit of a hick. And you know, they’re not completely wrong.So there u have it. It’s a linguistic minority thing, and though I think there are sliiiight ethnic differences as well between Fennoswedes and Finns, we’re very mixed at this point and though I run into so many personal problems for not speaking Finnish in fucking Finland, we’re not actually oppressed or anything. Sure, there’s tension between the Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking populations at times, and there are noisy politicians who want to boot us out of the country, but really I think the majority honestly don’t give a fuck–though they might be a bit disgruntled at having to learn Swedish in school. Also the fact that we’re mainly white means we’re generally treated well. Whole different story for immigrants and refugees though lmao lmao
