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Revision as of 19:40, 21 September 2002 by Enchanter (talk | contribs) (Delinking repeated link to Swedish, Finnish)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)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.
The most famous Finlandssvensk is Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel. Another example is the composer Jean Sibelius.