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| The "<b>finlandssvensk</b>" (the finnish-swedish) people are a ] minority consisting of 292,400 people (]), or 5,7% of the ] population. | The "<b>finlandssvensk</b>" (the finnish-swedish) people are a ] minority consisting of 292,400 people (]), or 5,7% of the ] population. | ||
Revision as of 13:09, 6 December 2002
The "finlandssvensk" (the finnish-swedish) people are a Finnish minority consisting of 292,400 people (1999), or 5,7% of the Finnish population.
The Finlandssvensks speaks Swedish as their native tongue. The pronunciation differs, however, from "rikssvenska", the Swedish spoken in Sweden. A large portion of the officially Swedish-speaking people are bilingual with their other language being Finnish.
It should be noted that Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. The Finnish-speaking Finns sometimes confuse the Finnish-Swedish with Swedish people, and therefore many Finnish-Swedish like to emphasise that they are in fact Finns and not Swedish.
To add further to the confusion, many ethnic Finns speak Swedish as a second language (with the same distinct accent of the finlandssvensk), with English being their third. These are not considered Finlandssvensk.
Famous Finlandssvensks include Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel, as well as the composer Jean Sibelius, authors Tove Jansson, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Elias Lönnrot and statesman Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim.