This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Gabbe (talk | contribs) at 12:47, 6 December 2002 (added Finns speaking Swedish and more famous Finlandssvensks). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 12:47, 6 December 2002 by Gabbe (talk | contribs) (added Finns speaking Swedish and more famous Finlandssvensks)(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.
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.