It is again the time of the year to show how much we all love Swedish. Flags are flying on the flagpoles. The media are relaying the politicians' rhetorically rather predictable statements on the crucial importance of the language for every man, woman and child.

The representatives of the Swedish-speakers' own one-issue, always in government party, the SFP (Svenska Folkpartiet), sharpen their pencils and write opinion pieces about how much work there still is to be done to truly achieve language equality. They warn that our civilization faces the danger of imminent collapse and Finland's international isolation that would make North Korea look cosmopolitan, should we stray from the one true path of Nordic co-operation and unity.

If we are lucky, the Swedish Embassy will affirm the latter point with motherly, yet ominous chidings that our relations indeed do run the risk of worsening in that case. They would be happy to provide us with a political commissar of their own to make sure things go smoothly and amicably in the future by helping us improve our understanding of Sweden, Swedish and its culture.

According to the common wisdom of Swedish day, it is "attitude problems towards Swedish" that most threaten the harmonious co-existence of our language groups. These attitude problems are most prevalent among the uneducated and uncivilized, the intolerant, the financially less well-off, the rebellion-age teenage schoolboys and otherwise disturbed and undesirable individuals. Over an individual's lifetime, they lead to dropping out of schools and careers, destitution and inability to function in an increasingly international world and Finnish society, whose laws have been wisely written demanding more and more knowledge of Swedish - nobody in their right mind would want to have attitude problems!

Naturally, they must be corrected by society in order to help the individual. The way to do this, of course, is to expand the reach of Swedish in all ways to ensure no-one is left out -- in its most efficient form, preferably encouraging language-bathing children in Swedish before they reach school age, so they would not get the chance to find the situation bothersome in the first place. Only a member of the lunatic fringe would refuse such a wonderful gift from the government!

Unfortunately, I was born too early and in too Finnish-speaking an area of the country, to parents who are too Finnish-speaking, to have any part in this, so I missed out. As I am now damaged for life, I may just as well live with my attitude problems and attempt to gain people's understanding through elucidating on why I feel the way I do. I believe that many Finnish-speakers in this country share my feelings, but are averse to making themselves heard, as opposing the official policy carries a stigma.

The Swedish day slogans are catchy and subtle as well, and require some active countering, which most people are not capable of doing or are not willing to expend the energy on in the ensuing confrontation of views. A normal, peace-loving citizen does not wish to openly take positions which seemingly "are against the minority", "deny the Fenno-Swedes the right to use their own language" or "oppose personal enrichment through knowing languages".

Yet, throughout the last decade a solid two-thirds of the population has consistently polled against the mandatory Swedish education, and Swedish teachers are worried about the bad results and the perception of the language as a forced burden. In spite of this, the parliament near unanimously just passed the new language law, which contains interesting provisions which we will return to shortly. An interesting argument for the passing of the law was that it mostly requires that the content of the old language law must be followed -- in other words, the old law was already dead, which people found unreasonable enough not to respect and follow!

The pro-Swedish argumentation can be broadly divided into two categories: arguments from need, necessity or benefit, and those from identity, history and culture. Let us tackle the need and benefit aspects first, as they are easier to evaluate objectively.

Finland's 5.5% Swedish-speaking minority is, according to my knowledge, the smallest language minority in the world who have had their language blessed as an official language of the country. They are not only the smallest such minority, but certainly also the one with the most extensive rights enshrined in their country's laws.

The most important law of these, the language law, divides municipalities on Finland's mainland (excluding Ahvenanmaa, or Åland) into unilingually Finnish or Swedish and bilingual ones. In bilingual ones, one is entitled to service from the government in one's mother tongue. This sounds rather reasonable at first glance. However, the devil is in the details and implementation. The bilinguality criterion kicks in swiftly: Currently, a municipality becomes bilingual if 8% or 3,000 people of its population are of the minority language. The criterion has been tightened repeatedly throughout history, as the number of Swedish-speakers has dwindled, to maintain the status quo. At the moment, this means that in particular in the large municipalities in Southern Finland, most notably Vantaa, the 3,000 person limit remains broken, while the percentage of Swedish-speakers remains remarkably low.

This means that Finland's large public sector needs to prepare to serve Swedish-speakers in Swedish, even in areas where this occurrence is rare, and even then, probably because of the individual's insistence on Swedish; instead of his actual inability to speak Finnish. Interestingly, according to a common misconception, the language law does not say that everyone must speak Swedish in government jobs in bilingual municipalities -- the amount of speakers of each language must be "sufficient" -- but, in practice, it seems to me the language law is being interpreted as if it did require Swedish of everyone.

At least for the SFP, the language law seems to serve as grounds for pushing for increased Swedish education, so that the entire population would be able to fulfil the law's requirements. If the law genuinely states that services in both languages must be according to real need, I do not understand why Swedish-speakers can't work themselves in government organs in areas where they are living in sufficient numbers. Are crimes, social issues and bad health really so much more common among Swedish-speakers that their own numbers are insufficient to man the necessary services? The logic seems to go that you might find yourself in the situation where the government body you work for does not have sufficient numbers of Swedish-speakers, so you will be then able to stand up and fill in the gap, regardless of your own background.

Probably the most misguided idea that was often argued for on the basis that it is "good to be able to serve Swedish-speakers in their own language" was instituting the requirement of the government officials' language test in the second domestic language as a mandatory part of all higher education in universities. The idea is to go for a blanket coverage, just in case someone among the students will become a government official whose job requires a university degree.

Could someone please then explain to me what sort of a government public service job I might expect to be doing, considering that my education is in Computer Science and I have mostly been studying algorithmics? Sure, Swedish is an easy language and the requirements of this course are rather basic, but this is not the issue. Swedish is simply irrelevant here, and it's bad enough for me, as it places demands on the prior education of everyone in the entire country who might ever want to enter university!

There is no more efficient way to confirm the loyalty of the nation's best and brightest to your policies than forcing them to make a personal investment from early on, and then filtering out the refuseniks, not only from government jobs, but from their entire futures as people with university degrees.

An interesting, possible time bomb results from the combination of the new language law and a few other developments in Finnish society. Finland desperately needs to either reduce the number of its municipalities or increase the co-operation of the existing ones to increase the efficiency of most notably healthcare and social services, which are experiencing lean times as funding goes. Otherwise, the municipalities will have trouble meeting their legal obligations.

Should municipalities merge, the old idea of the language law maintaining the number of Finnish- or Swedish-speaking and bilingual municipalities constant will have to give. We will be increasingly living in bilingual municipalities in a big part of the more densely populated Finland because of the 3000 people limit. Of course, the small Swedish-speaking coastal towns are facing the inverse problem of this prospect -- they are very unwilling to give in to the idea that Finnish would spread, even in principle, to their region.

A similar effect can be observed when municipalities co-operate -- bigger units will have to make accommodations, even simply because the law says so, and language requirements therefore spread further and further, over an area where Swedish-speakers are spread ever more thinly. Language issues have already complicated co-operation around Vaasa, where SFP is "gerrymandering" as much as it can to ensure Swedish-speakers do not lose majority in co-operative organs, and refusing co-operation when it would mean losing power or influence somewhere. This kind of one-party-state politics can only be disastrous to the overall efficiency of the solution, and simply expecting the Finnish-speakers to roll over out of "tolerance" each and every time is unrealistic.

It can also be foreseen that in the future, an increasing number of society's services will be outsourced to private providers. The language law stipulates that those who sell services to the government are subject to the same language requirements as the government's employees themselves. Therefore, this connection nicely spreads the requirements from the public sphere to that of the private. What company wants to exclude itself from government deals? The prospect looms large that a law that was initially supposed to safeguard a minority's dealings with the government will actually end up meaning that in your entire working life, there will be no escape!

What about the effect on Finland's education system and therefore, its future citizens on an individual level? Surely, there are benefits to knowing Swedish, too?

Finnish is, as is Swedish, a small, on a global scale, exotic language. Finnish people certainly need to know foreign languages in order to communicate globally. The key here is understanding that Finnish people, as a group, need to speak as many languages as possible, but it is not reasonable to expect any one single individual to master them all, let alone in some predefined order. This means we need to maximize the variation among individuals' language skills. The narrowness of the scope of the languages Finns know has been major point of concern for a long time, in particular by the people who are actively moving the economy around.

English dominates international discussions today -- it is the generally accepted, rather neutrally perceived new lingua franca. It simply has been adopted as a tool, and the fact that his has come without any substantial feelings of "cultural imperialism" from the USA or the UK is a huge boon to nationalism-torn Europe. English is therefore the one language that has an undisputed place in any curriculum.

The "second domestic language" occupies a very difficult spot in particular for Finnish-speakers, as it is in reality a foreign language for them. It comes right after English, and has more priority than other languages, which typically are German and French. In the economically troubled Eastern part of the country one of these languages should most certainly be Russian these days, as it is direly needed.

In particular in lukio, the more academic level of secondary education, the fact that two languages are already fixed beforehand, forces a person to either become a full-time linguist in order to reach the languages he finds personally interesting, or be satisfied with English and Swedish, which is the case for most non-linguistically talented people who concentrate on the sciences. Catering for a need for both languages and sciences still leaves out the humanities, of which I find particularly History and Philosophy truly important for a well-rounded education.

The typical argument that Swedish just happens to be particularly "generally civilizing" is rather self-serving. An infamous quote from Elisabeth Rehn boldly states that Swedish is mandatory because Mathematics is mandatory too. The more languages one knows, the more it becomes clear that all of them are simply means of communication. Subjective appreciation of one's mother tongue is fine, but to extrapolate that to claiming that it is, from an outsider's perspective, comparable to the universal language of formalized thought, is a sign of an over-inflated ego and not of any capacity to objectively and rationally evaluate the significance of languages.

Regarding our relationship with Sweden, I have no doubt in my mind that even voluntary education of Swedish would produce enough people to maintain those links. Binding the entire population to Scandinavia through forced language choice is questionable foreign policy, as this limits the options of our own population, while the people of Sweden are free to pursue whichever direction they choose. This hurts our competitiveness and gives Sweden leverage in regional issues -- they should need to earn our respect as any other country, and not take it for granted that our school kids are taught in school to "maintain good links to Sweden".

It is instructive to note that Sweden sees it as potentially hurtful for our countries' relationship if our people had the choice, but this special historic and cultural relationship still only goes one way. Sweden's 400,000-strong Finnish-speaking minority is nowhere near the rights they theoretically should have, if the EU directive on the equal treatment of mutual language minorities between neighbouring countries were actually implemented. The EU is full of new partners for Finland, and we should seek to engage them not only on the governmental level, but each individual citizen should be equipped to form personal relationships to people in at least one or two of the countries. Sweden will get their fair share of these people according to how strong our connection truly is.

It is understood that companies that operate in Sweden, Finland and around the Baltic Sea are English-speaking by working language. All of my Nordic friends and I communicate in English, and I would consider it extremely petty behaviour, should one of them all of a sudden start to outright demand that I speak Swedish. Even the traditional bastions of Swedish-speaking Finnish foreign policy, the Nordic political organisations that used to be very important for Finland for image reasons during the Cold War, would switch to using English at the admittance of Baltic members, if not for the resistance of ... Finland.

SFP's bourgeois political alignment seems somewhat questionable in light of all this. Essentially, Finland's official bilinguality can be seen as a form of Socialism: People's time and efforts in language education are bound to fulfil political goals for the sake of "equality" where they would be better spent elsewhere from the point of view of the individual. No wonder SFP's policies have historically found greater resonance among the political left than the right. SFP's relationship and attitude to other social-political programs should also come under scrutiny: recently they voted down, with the government, a motion from the opposition that called for improved personal assistance services for the disabled.

According to the math, each Swedish-speaker apparently needs almost 20 assistants distributed around the country so that "they can be served in their mother tongue", but a disabled person who may not even be able to leave home without assistance, deserves none. On the other hand, if one demands that all groups must be treated with this same level of "assistance" in overcoming obstacles put forth by their incompatible surroundings -- that is, it is pretty much enough that you feel you must be given the right to be treated as you please, despite you being capable of accommodating the situation if you merely wanted to -- all bets are off as to where this slippery slope ends.

These purely pragmatic arguments are, however, the more uninteresting part of the picture, as they are so easily refuted. People aren't stupid, and they will study or have their children study the languages that will benefit them most in the future, or the ones they themselves subjectively value, so you might just as well stop worrying and start loving choice in language education and the resulting linguistic pluralism that meets needs but also provides for variety.

What truly has always inflamed passions in the language discussion in Finland over the years is the question of national identity: what it is, and what are the obligations it places on the individual citizen? What should the role of the officially bilingual state be in arranging matters so, that a certain identity becomes realized in the dealings of not only of citizens with the government, but perhaps even among and within private citizens themselves? When the arguments from national identity and history are brought in, it is easier to understand the willingness to overlook the gaps in the pragmatic arguments, which are, fundamentally, simple excuses.

I do not deny that Swedish has been spoken in Finland for a long, long time. How long exactly is a moot point that is for some reason debated fiercely by fringes on both sides -- let us agree that it is long enough that the exact truth is obscured by ancient history, which should be long enough by any measure. However, so has Finnish: It is one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in Europe, and has actually seen relatively little change over the ages compared to the big languages of Central Europe, that have been perturbed by each other far more. The big issue in the discussion is how much each language group has seen the other's language as part of their own identity: The SFP's case rests on the axiom that Swedish is, on a personal level, a language that is and has been a part of identity for everyone in Finland. Should someone disagree, the SFP simply knows better and that is the end of discussion.

Looking at it realistically, this is a wildly ambitious, yet weak, claim. Should Swedish have been, say, a thousand year ago, a language that was widely spoken by Finnish-speakers throughout the country, Finnish would resemble Swedish more than through than a number of loanwords. It is also likely that we would have a much more distinct Finnish-Swedish, as these Finnish-speakers would have bent the language to suit their own, grammatically very different mother tongue during a time when linguistic "correctness" was not enforced by some central authority, as it is today. Finally, bilinguality in general has been uncommon until the past few centuries throughout the world, as people have had more pressing affairs on their mind -- such as basic survival. We would also have had viable Swedish-speaking populations throughout the country, not just along the coastlines. They are nowhere to be seen.

Insisting that speaking, loving and living Swedish be considered a defining characteristic of every Finnish individual produces results that should be considered as fatal contradictions in any reasonable discussion that seeks to produce a generally agreeable definition of national identity. Consider, for example, my grandfathers and some other more distant male relatives that did not speak a word of Swedish in their lives, and half of which lived in the East, which are not traditional Swedish-speaking areas. The men I have in mind are WW2 veterans, who all fought an uncompromising fight against the Soviet Union, some of them even literally for their very homes. Some of the more fanatical Fenno-Swedes I have debated have actually considered them close to Russians. Was something really so much wrong with them for being who they are and not fitting into some ideal that they probably didn't even actively resist, because it was just irrelevant to their lives?

It is a small miracle that Finnish remains a tongue that it is spoken so strongly in our country despite our history. We have always, until independence, lived under a government that has tended to be indifferent towards Finnish at best. During the time when Sweden was a Nordic superpower, Finnish was officially pretty much nonexistent, so our language had to get by simply through the efforts of private citizens passing the language on to their children. Russia, while for political reasons initially benevolent towards Finnish, turned to active Russification during the waning years of Russian rule. Under these circumstances, one needs to admire the Finns' unwillingness to give up and adapt. Even today, one simply needs to consider that legislation is required to maintain the Swedish identity we're supposed to have, and even SFP politicians freely admit this. Why not take the hint instead?

The period of history that is brought up most regularly in language-policy discussions is the 19th century and the time of national romanticism. During a time when the initial waves of Nationalism swept Europe and all countries were looking into their history for ways to glorify themselves above their neighbours, Finland was freshly split from Sweden and was looking for a new identity as a state abstraction that would tell us apart from Russia, which we historically looked upon with suspicion, and for a reason: under Sweden we had experienced almost constant warfare against it. It is ironic to note that the final resolution of this regional rivalry in Russia's favour finally brought to Finland a period of peace, prosperity and actual development that actually enabled the dedication of resources to pondering the nature of the country we live in.

A recurring argument associated with this time is that we should be ever grateful for our body of national-romantic imagery to their admittedly Swedish-speaking creators. Apparently, according to this idea, Finnish-speakers would have simply been unable to produce art of such quality. If we gracefully ignore the interpretation that there are inherent differences between the ability of language groups, we must conclude that this state of affairs is a product of societal organization. In other words, if the small high-society circles of Finland at the time were completely monopolized by Swedish-speakers through lack of admittance of Finnish-speakers into even basic education, it is no wonder we see such results. Who knows where Finland would be today, if all the capabilities of the nation had been put to use? Fortunately, some enlightened souls -- in particular the originally Swedish-speaking fennomen -- saw this problem. I have the deepest respect for them. Still, it took an edict of the Czar in 1863 to grant Finnish its initial official recognition in society, and the Svecoman movement hindered Finnish-speakers' participation in society all the way to WW2, even battling our right to be educated in Finnish in the University of Helsinki.

Besides, it is not even necessary to appreciate all Finnish patriotic imagery within the framework of some singular, monolithic narrative that everyone must appreciate equally! For example, Runeberg shows a distinct belonging to his own context and language -- sometimes it is hard to decide whether he really wishes to live in a separate Finland, or whether he would prefer to re-join Sweden like so many of his peers. Many of his Finnish-speaking characters are nothing but crude yet idolized caricatures he obviously has no real grasp of on a personal level -- for reference, read "Paavo from Saarijärvi". Runeberg is a child of his times and surroundings, and saw things his own way. He cannot be seen as representative of the entire nation because he came from an isolated subculture that was hastily trying to explain, from their narrow point of view, what had just happened in history. It was a noble effort, but please, let us objectively appreciate him for who he was.

The Swedish-speaking identity, on the other hand, is a concept at least as interesting as the Finnish-speaking one. While actively ignored in discussions today, it is obvious that the Swedish-speakers have always felt something separates them from the rest of the population. During the height of the language strife at the later 19th and early 20th century this separatism even culminated in the racist theories of Svecoman and Nordist

Axel Olof Freudenthal, who became the founder of the modern SFP and their "spiritual father". It was only during the 80's, when the strategy of withdrawal to their own-language institutions obviously started to lead to their extinction, they had to start to push for national "Swedishness" -- the idea that the rest of the country must be made into their own image in order for them to preserve Swedish in Finland.

I can appreciate that Swedish-speakers themselves will have trouble defining themselves due to them living in a predominantly Finnish-speaking country where even most of their own speak Finnish at near native levels. The simplest way to approach this question is to at first realize that the Swedish-speaking minority, in order to be a minority at all, must define themselves as something the majority obviously is not. Whether this difference constitutes something more than just a language -- which would necessarily lead to a dangerous devaluation of their defining characteristic as being nothing but a set of words and a grammar -- is the interesting point.

Here we face a rather frustrating and illogical asymmetry in the way the issue is framed for different audiences and situations. When the bilinguality policy is being sold to Finnish-speakers, the Fenno-Swedes of course are not differentiated by anything else than speaking a different language. In all other respects, they are just as we are -- it's not a big issue, surely!

On the other hand, when the Fenno-Swedish minority needs to be presented as a coherent entity with their own culture that needs protection from being swamped by the majority, especially when making the point to people who are from abroad, we get Ida Asplund being interviewed by Ovi Magazine (30.10.2006). Ida half lives in Sweden and wears a regional dress (something nobody else in this country would actually do in their right mind for a mere interview), and then tells everyone how threatened the special Swedish-speaking culture is.

The definition of whether they constitute an ethnic minority thus shifts conveniently. Most importantly, the EU directive that specifies treatment of ethnic minorities does not officially apply as they are legally not an ethnic minority. If the directive held, our policies would be considered as unfair towards the majority!

A similar asymmetry arises while considering the language issue on the scale of the Nordic countries. This frame of reference is large enough to be useful for the pro-Swedish argument, but still narrow enough to exclude the global, or at least European, picture. Here, the special nature of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland and the areas they live in is still something to be protected and cherished at any cost, but the

Finnish-speaking minority of the Nordic countries must adapt to the fact that they are in the minority, no matter where they live. They would always do better to strive for the Nordic ideal. In the Nordic context, language-political thought analogous to what Finnish-speakers are supposed to accept without blinking in Finnish-speaking areas of Finland would be considered nonsense in Sweden (despite our supposedly common history) and raise howls of outrage and accusations of ethnic cleansing in Ahvenanmaa.

Through the apparently relative idea of the worthiness of preservation and special nature of different language groups, we may now fully appreciate the difficulties in specifying the interactions of the two languages through government action. Personally, I strongly believe that they should be respected as they are, and that there should not be overt attempts to create something that has never existed before, not even during the times of

Sweden-Finland -- a kind of monolithic homo nordicus that fulfils the criteria of worthiness of the modern Nordist ideologues.

The final straw my opposition typically grasps after all other arguments have failed usually concerns invoking the concept of tolerance. I am a big fan of tolerance, as long as it amounts to "live and let live". That the semantics of "tolerance" have been successfully reframed as meaning being unquestioningly accommodating of SFP's politics and, conversely, seeing criticism of them as being a sign of intolerant nationalism, is a remarkable propaganda coup.

However, it would be a great mistake to assume that the Swedish side of the discussion is being neutrally internationalist and world-embracing while the other side wants to live a life of ignorance alone in the woods. Clearly, it is of utmost importance for the Nordists that everyone in Finland speaks Swedish, regardless of any arguments to the contrary. This is a very ideological position. Their identity seems to outright require that other people do not contradict the reality they want to live in. The other side merely questions whether they really must play along. Who is the one being intolerant? Where is the SFP's famous liberalism?

History serves as a warning to us that if Finland allows our society to exclude those who do not (agree to) speak Swedish, only those who do conform actually get ahead in society, giving rise to the modern-day arguments along the lines of "if you want to be someone here, you must speak Swedish, and therefore, we must help you to do so". We have once broken free of this situation through a great deal of strife, and I do not wish us to return to accepting such a self-fulfilling prophecy voluntarily. I value the right of

Finnish to be an autonomous mother tongue of a civilized people that can take themselves, in their language, as far as they can, without artificially imposed conditions.

As Finnish is a small and obscure language in a small country, this right is even more important, as no-one else will uphold our niche of the world for us. Everyone is entitled to subjectively value their mother tongue -- including Swedish-speakers -- so there should not be a problem with such feelings. It is when one's subjective values begin to extend outside of one's self, things quickly turn into ugly nationalism. Everyone would do well to bear this in mind. There is too much religion in this world already.

The biggest tragedy in Finnish language policy is that the harder the sell, the more people like me feel that they are having their intelligence underestimated. Living together in a state of mutual recognition and respect is preferable, and I, for one, am willing to start at any time.