Mayor suggests Helsinki declare itself an English-language city
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
When I was going through my migration process, someone at the tax office said in response to my statement that my Swedish was pretty bad (paraphrasing here): "I think you could live the rest of your life in Sweden pretty easily speaking only English."
I lived in way northern Sweden, so not like a cosmopolitan/metropolitan area like Stockholm/Gothenburg/Malmö. After a couple of years, my Swedish barely improved, and I think the tax office agent was probably correct.
My very young kids were in public school there. Probably almost all of the Swedish kids wanted to be friends with my kids, because my kids could speak English just like these kids' parents and older siblings. Almost all of the kids in my rural town were excited to learn English, and I met many fully Swedish kids whom at 7 or 8 years old were already gaining a good level of proficiency in English.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
(And if you want to get off on a technicality, see if one version is more favourable to you, as the “feeling” of words can’t always be a 1:1 match).
Ireland and Malta didn't need to nominate English (as the UK had done so) so they nominated Irish and Maltese. Now the UK is gone I'm not sure how well that works for them now. Perhaps the EU could adopt the Indian strategy of using a language that no national group claims, thus seemingly not favoring any one member group over another.
Source: French
Now, this is just for fun, but did you know that Queen Elizabeth's grandson is named "George Alexander Louis"? How fun would it be if he decided to call himself "King Louis I" when crowned?
That's a common stereotype I hear coming from english-speaking people, but it doesn't really translate to any meaningful behaviour in France. I'm afraid if such a rivalry actually persists, it is one-sided.
> The Britain and France have been adversaries for nearly a thousand years, after all.
Germany and France have been pretty cross too in the past, and bad feelings have died off in a generation. I wouldn't give too much credit to this kind of claims based on folk history.
I'm just hoping this whole Brexit shitshow will teach my country men some humility.
France has an institution: "The Immortals" (1) which looks after the French language. Seat 31 is currently this bloke: Michael Edwards (2). He is British.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Edwards_(literary_scho...
Esperanto.
Outside of work I haven't really met anyone native below the age of 50 who can't communicate in English. That said we are doing an awful job at making it easier to immigrants to learn Swedish, as soon as any Swedish diffuclty is detected a lot of us auto-switch to English.
I did learn a bit of Swedish via reading, watching TV, etc, but it was near to impossible to actually practice my Swedish with people. I would say something with an obvious foreign accent, and they would just switch to English immediately. In any setting, at the grocery store, in a bar, at work, at the freaking McDonald's.
In a way, they don't really have many other options, it's not like the Swedish language has any sort of "soft power" in the world. But still, it would have been nice to be able to practice a bit more :)
I was surprised how closely related Swedish and English are. In my opinion, I think Swedish is closer to English than German even. I still think Dutch is closest to English, and data tends to agree, but Swedish's similarities, minus being a declarative language and a few other aspects, really caught me off guard.
The French Voyageur program looked super fun, they stopped by our camp for some soccer, dinner, and sauna once, had a great time with them.
Frisian is very similar to English
"Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Friese," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages
(Frisian: "Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.")
Interestingly, English has become a world language, while Frisian must fear extinction. 10 centuries ago, neither development would be predictable.
Languages of massive empires rarely die out; they might be transformed (such as when Latin gave birth to an entire family or related languages), but outright disappearance is typically not their fate.
The curious thing about English is that it gained a massive role after spending almost a thousand years of its previous existence as a niche language spoken on a small island on the edge of Europe.
The language we speak here in the US is pretty close to English...
I'd be curious to see the data. I can understand a bit of german based on my very limited knowledge of dutch, but I struggle in dutch despite speaking english and actively seeking to learn the language.
I find that knowing french is more helpful than english when it comes to dutch. (e.g. "vind je" is "trouves-tu" but it's "do you find" rather than "find you" in english. "ik heb dorst" is "j'ai soif" but it's "I'm thirsty" rather than "I have thirst" in english)
On another note, my daughter spent 9 months in Sweden as an au pair. I asked her, when she came home, if she learned any Swedish. She said she learned a few words, but everyone spoke really good English so there was not really an opportunity to learn Swedish.
Surprisingly, the same Icelandic youth that spoke to my siblings and I in fluent English couldn’t spell. I was floored when after an hour chatting with one of them they couldn’t spell “frog”. Not because they should be able to spell in English, but because I couldn’t understand how someone could be so fluent in a language without being literate. Clearly it’s very possible.
And English, with its extremely complex (frequently irregular, but even where not strictly so still not simple) mapping between phonetics and pronunciation probably has bigger gap between spoken and written proficiency as a first language than languages with a more simply phonetic script.
On my visit there seemed to be a pretty sharp division based on age where people over 60ish have a good chance of not speaking English. Maybe lower as you move away from Reykjavik. Virtually everyone under 40 speaking English, across the island.
Oddly, while I've always considered my brother and I to look a lot alike, everyone would speak English to him and then immediately switch to Icelandic for me (which I don't speak).
Decades ago my wife spent a semester abroad in The Netherlands. She said she never learned any Dutch because everyone wanted to practice their English with her.
Italian TV was the only way to see some good tv, and since Albania is next to Italy, pretty much all the kids of that generation know italian, this is especially since Italians dub/voice over the Hollywood movies shown.
After 2000s, English started becoming mainstream, and local TVs did start becoming much better, and they do show movies in English (with subtitles), and don't generally dub them.
So, know English is slowly overtaking Italian as a foreign language, with German becoming a popular third foreign language.
Relevant: "Friends is the most popular way to learn English. 26% of those who watched television to improve language skills cited the 1994-2004 series in a survey, compared to 7% for The Simpsons and 6% for How I Met Your Mother, and were more likely to want to study in the US."(<https://np.reddit.com/r/television/comments/5vqtsa/friends_i...>)
There’s a few times I feel completely powerless, telephone systems, random slips of paper through the door, written notices (in bad handwriting) in the elevator- but everyone speaks English and every company manages to accommodate me.
I still want to learn Swedish, but it always seems to take a back seat to my stressful worklife.
I managed to get a citizenship without any Swedish either.
If I was to take a job in say, The Netherlands, I feel that at 39 yo, I have no chance of learning a fourth language (I already speak ES, EN, DE) with the needed proficiency to integrate by purely speaking Dutch.
Therefore, I hope that language barriers are lowered in favour of a real European integration.
Not only does Sweden not have a language requirement for citizenship, the country has [no income, employment, or skills requirement](http://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/B...) either.
In completely unrelated news, [Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden](https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...).
It’s all fun and games until the ESL people start correcting your English too because they actually learned the rules of it instead of just knowing it by being born in an anglophone environment.
Also, I have to say, the best French language reference I found was on a Hong Kong university site. It was written in English (or I couldn't use it!) and would often explain things in reference to English, but also provide a formalized definition of the behavior in English, often that I never had seen formalized.
Of course, I spent a few hours trying to learn French, didn't use it much and it evaporated. Oh well, maybe next time.
Like Latin in medieval times (at least for the educated), and Greek in the Roman Empire.
Who. No m.
Given the content of GP's comment, I thought they (and everyone else) would appreciate the correction... That is, appreciate the humour of being corrected by a Swede.
I wrote myself as the subject (who) of the sentence and the children the object (whom).
Let me rewrite it like this:
I met children. I met Swedish children. I met Swedish children, many of whom were becoming proficient in English by the age of 7 or 8.
> I met many fully Swedish kids whom at 7 or 8 years old were already gaining a good level of proficiency in English.
I think whom is correct, given that the children are the objects of the sentence. The real error was more that my original construction was a bit awkward.
I think that's because it's not just her, but her and her attributes (here: height) that is the subject of the sentence: The whole clause "a woman who is tall" is the object of he sentence "I am married to ...". In Swedish I think it's called inskjuten relativbisats; dunno the grammatical term in English, but a direct translation would be something like inserted related-secondary-clause. Within that secondary clause, the wife is the subject, so "who", not "whom". The fact that the whole clause is the subject of "I am married to..." apparently just doesn't get a grammatical marker of its own.
Then, for the difference between
> I met Swedish children, many of whom were becoming proficient in English by the age of 7 or 8.
and
> I met many fully Swedish kids whom at 7 or 8 years old were already gaining a good level of proficiency in English.
I absolutely agree that the first is correct, but still contend that the second is not. The structure of the second is perfectly analogous to "I am married to a woman whom is tall"; the first differs... Somehow. I think it's the "many of", which makes it not a grammatically complete clause so it can't have a subject, or something. Or perhaps more specifically, the "of", which moves the following pronoun from object to subject. Like: "As a polygamist, I am married to several women, some of whom are tall"; "As a bigamist, I am married to two women who are tall".
Should we go check if Lieberman & Co have any eggcorn of enlightenment to shred on this? :-)
However to me as a native English speaker (from England) the second sounds wrong. It feels like the Swedish kids are the subject of the sentence, and using "whom" jars slightly. My guess is this may be down to the active way their increasing proficiency was described: "were becoming proficient" in the first sentence sounds passive; whereas "already gaining a good level" sounds active, shifting the emphasis and thereby making them the subject of the sentence.
This is the citation the whole story is built upon. The meat of the idea being that for city employees (i.e primarily public servants) Finnish and Swedish language skill wouldn't be a job requirement anymore. So the "declaration" probably would have way smaller impact than one would expect from such grand statement. Basically only means that you would not be guaranteed to get finnish/swedish service from citys public services.
So what this would cause is disenfranchise the lower education people who do not have fluent English skills and are also probably in greater need of the public services. All that just in a vain hope to attract more talent.
It’s the same(ish) as Russian minority speakers having more rights in Estonia and Ukraine than Ukrainian or Estonian in Russia.
I think each of those countries hates the “invading” language though. It’s a memory of oppression. Finns certainly mentioned that they hated Swedish when I was there and I’m also aware of Estonians hating Russian.
Ditto for Ukraine where Russian language in some respects threated as third class citizen, i.e., the only language that you can't use in education or in official contexts. They still pretty much continue to speak it, though.
You’re very wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_under_Swedish_rule?wpr...
That should have been a clue.
> You’re very wrong.
No, I'm not. The very first sentence in the WP article you cite:
"In Finnish history, Finland under Swedish rule refers to the historical period when the bulk of the area that later came to constitute Finland *was an integral part of Sweden."*
Are you saying it would be correct in a future where they are independent countries to retroactively say Ostrobothnia-now and Päijät-Häme-now were "colonies of Finland" back in the twentieth century? If not, then Finland wasn't a "colony of Sweden" either.
The rest of the article is liberally sprinkled with
A) Tendentious phrasing like "Finland was annexed as part of the Western Christian domain" ("annexed" to a religion?), and
B) Grammatical mistakes typical of Finnish-speakers with a bad grounding in Germanic languages like Swedish and English.
So... No. If you think the bigoted view on history some parts of that WP article espouses are to be taken seriously, it is you who are wrong.
If in a few centuries some part of Finland (say, Päijät-Häme or something) is an independent nation, do you think it would be natural for them to talk about the old days — our present — as "back when we were part of Finland", or should they say "our dark age of oppression under the bootheel of the Finnish colonial project"?
Which is actually pretty bad because the city and administration is literally the one place where a Finnish citizen should be guaranteed to communicate in the official language.
I don't mind as much what language requirements private companies have if it works for them, but it would be pretty comical to go to my municipal office and have someone work my case who doesn't speak his own country's language.
This is pandering to the potential of foreign investment --which could benefit already rich people and who potentially price out the locals. Yay, globalization.
Seems like a token gesture then, especially considering:
> Many companies require Finnish and public sector employees must master both.
So "declaring the city English-speaking" is pointless unless the city actually implements English as an official language, providing legal and civic support for English on all official matters.
Seems like streamlining bureaucracy and reviewing the tax code would do more good, but of course it's much more involved than adjusting branding.
(I am utterly uninformed in all matters Finland, for all I know Helsinki could already have such support and I do not know it, in that case, good for them and this is effectively a good move!)
It's massively easier to get by with english here than almost anywhere else in Europe (besides UK and Ireland).
In reality, international companies have decoupled sales and development. Sales will be in customer countries. Sales will communicate with customer in customer's mother tongue. Sales will communicate with development in English. Software development will be done in English, with a diverse group of people, whether centralized or distributed.
However, Finland also is the poorest of the nordic countries, with the lowest salaries comparatively—and yet similarly high cost of living and extremely high taxes.
With free movement of talent in the EU, brain drain is a problem.
And it’s basically impossible to import talent if your value proposition is: “come for the low salaries, stay for the high taxes”
English isn’t the issue. If Helsinki companies paid like those in Zurich and had similarly low taxes, there would be no problem retaining or importing talent.
For people who didn’t grow up in the country and benefit from the social welfare system at all, why would they want to come from outside and suddenly start paying for it?
From what I understand, Finland has the best education system on Earth, bar none. While migrants themselves might not benefit from this themselves, their children certainly will.
However, if you’re a highly paid white collar worker, you can afford to put your kids in good schools no matter where you’re living.
I went to a private school from years 7-10 and could never put anyone I loved our cared about in that position.
I don't think there's a single university in Finland in even the top 100 is there?
I dug into these rankings years ago, and found them very, very unconvincing.
The OECD rankings (where Finland does really well) tend to be much more robust.
Doesn't seem to be a problem for the Chinese or Singaporeans?
Like, it would be surprising if China (1.1bn people) wasn't doing reasonably well (though most of their growth has occurred since they started publishing in English language journals).
Singapore has one university, right? That, along with the 8mn driven people they have along with former english colonialism would seem to be germane to my points above.
Really difficult to argue 'best bar none' I think.
Their methodology is briefly described here: https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings...
So, the proportion of international students and faculty (which account for 20% of the rankings) will massively bias the rankings towards English speaking universities, because more people study abroad in English.
Additionally, the academic & employer surveys are biased by the fact that name recognition is much, much higher for older universities, so it's likely that they will be perceived as being better in the absence of any real differences.
Nonetheless, when people say that Finland has the best education system in the world, they are referring to the OECD data. You're the one trying to use university rankings as a proxy for this, when it should be clear that primary & secondary education are much more important from a population perspective.
Additionally, students in Finnish universities are paid to be there, and may also be provided with housing. That's a much better deal than one would get at Oxford/Cambridge/MIT.
They might be lower-ish, but not low. And it attracts talent.
(though the weather is a push factor more likely)
In almost all cases the top three reasons for somebody moving to Finland were:
1. To study. So they expect to leave after "a while".
2. Because they had a Finnish spouse/lover.
3. Refuges of various nations.
I know that some people do move here for jobs, but I can't recall actually having met anybody who has done so.
Working in English, in IT, is very easy. Paying taxes, and using banks online, etc, in English is also pretty good. I've managed to buy a couple of properties, get my brain scanned, and done other things almost entirely in English.
But that said when you're picking your child up from daycare, and all the other parents are speaking Finnish, and your child is too? Well you'll have an easier time if you can learn some too..
So you moved here somewhat recently, i.e. in the last decade? Some fifteen years ago lots of people moved here to work at Nokia.
Isn't Switzerland famously difficult to immigrate to?
(I am a Foreign Resident living in Zurich for more than 10 years)
That's more progressive than Switzerland (but it varies by canton). No Swiss passport? No vote for you.
This is not "just in paper". Some weeks ago I got a job offer widrawn from a company in Zürich because of this reason; me being a PhD in Applied Mathematics (granted by the ETH Zürich) but with a non-EU nationality.
Alternatively, have you considered just getting an O-1?
My main weak point of entry is that I was applying to a consulting job in Data Science, and as such, it is not really possible to argue that there is no-one else left in the EU to take the job. Having a degree from the ETH indeed helps, but it wasn't enough.
They have enforced quotas per canton, which means that once filled, no-one else is getting in. Furthermore, Swiss bureacracy is the most strict one I have seen in my life, so there is no much wiggle room to bend the rules.
From what I have heard, the usual complaints are about immigration bureaucracy, language, difficulty of making friends, climate, and darkness. The real challenge in retaining immigrants comes in the first year without a proper winter, when you have to face six months of November.
> with the lowest salaries comparatively—and yet similarly high cost of living and extremely high taxes.
i.e. why would you pick it over the others, you don't make your choice of economic migration to be fairest to the potential destinations, 'the other Nordic countries set the bar very high' just means 'the other Nordic countries are better choices'.
Of course other factors may narrow it down - 'I like Nordic countries', or particularly 'somewhere in the EU', but not typically 'Finland or bust'.
For Helsinki I think the closest peer is Stockholm. Here are comparisons of CoL and PPP GDP between Helsinki/stockholm and finland/sweden (spoiler: helsinki wins on CoL, sweden as a whole has higher average ppp gdp, probably accounted by higher urbanization on the country level). Both differences are small.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
An important aside is that I don't really associate with the FAANG crowd, because I don't agree with them on ideological grounds and because I don't work for such a company. Perhaps among those people taxes seem more evil, especially given the fact that they are okay with working for companies that are not exactly doing good for society.
For example, no successful business owner on earth who isn’t already there, would ever choose to re-locate to the nordics. That’s not great.
Also, by creating a low risk environment, instead of freeing people to take more career risks, it ironically trains people to take even less risk. This results in reduced variance in outcomes. A generally homogenous, no growth country.
No matter if you think FAANG is evil, they’re going to continue dominating European lives unless you have talent and capital taking risk to innovate alternatives, and build your vision of a better world.
Unfortunately, in shrinking the possible variance in outcomes, the nordics become the best place on earth to be below-average, with exceptional success due to risk taking being penalized. It’s like begging your best talent to leave. Not everybody will, but some do.
So you have no top talent immigrating, and some top talent leaving every year. Over time you can see how that’s a dangerous trend.
The safety-net gives you the ability to take risks, without risking your healthcare or your children's future.
There is very little poverty and crime here, compared to SF. Public services work. If you go to a shop or restaurant, it feels good knowing that the people working there are making a living wage with 5 weeks vacation, etc.
Norway has more $-millionaires per capita than the US: https://youtu.be/A9UmdY0E8hU
I wouldn't worry too much by that. Is not uncommon to spot some really talented people among immigrants, and people can learn fast in the correct environment. On the other hand sometimes there are fakers among top talented people or some experts lose a lot of shine when moved to a strange/distracting/hostile environment where they didn't grow
Just give tax breaks to desirable professions.
Living in southern Norway or Sweden, it's still doable to go on a car trip, visiting Germany, Alsace, Netherlands or even Austria or Czech republic; not to mention their own fjords and mountain ranges. From Finland, one always has to fly to go just about anywhere interesting
I understand the desire to make political points about the status of native/first nations populations in Canada, but frankly, English and French are Canada's official languages.
That aside, there are bigger problems in Helsinki such as geography and daylight. There’s too much light in the summer and too little in the winter. Not everyone can adjust to that. There isn’t really a policy solution to that.
There is also population and mobility - Helsinki isn’t easily accessible from other population centres and exists in relative isolation. Two of the closest population centres are St Petersburg - in Russia - and Stockholm in Sweden. It’s much the same problem in Stockholm in that it is a population centre without other ones nearby although you can drive from Copenhagen or Oslo to Stockholm.
Finally, is the challenge of having a society built around strong ethic ties. Even if Helsinki were to switch to English, there will be always be outsiders i.e. those who are not ethnic Finns. Again, this is not something that policy can solve and is one of the reasons that silicon valley and North America in general do very well at.
Recently I read a book called Persian Fire by Tom Holland. One detail which struck me as very interesting was how the first democratic ruler of Athens, Cleisthenes, solved the tribalism problem. Here tribalism is the perfect word as the average Athentian citizen of that time associated with one of the 10 tribes based on surnames. His solution was to invent 150 demesnes and have people arbitrarily assigned to them. He also invented new surnames.
Something similar is happening in contemporary Singapore. Every neighbourhood must not have more than X% of any ethnic group.
My point is that policy can solve this. Might make many people unhappy, like Finns who are forbidden to live in some zip codes because there are too many Finns, but policy is definitely a way to approach this problem (if it is a problem, nothing wrong with mono-cultural societies who do not want foreigners).
You can definitely get by with just English here and have been for a while. In fact, when I first lived in Helsinki in 2000 you had to speak Finnish in some restaurants since the staff didn't speak English, whereas now it's the other way around.
There are however problems with English language primary education: while there are enough English language daycares, there's a shortage of (free) places in English language schools. Hopefully that's something that will be addressed soon, though.
If you're considering Finland as a place to relocate to, check out these links from our startup's blog:
https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-de... https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/finnish-contract-developer-fa...
These links might also be interesting:
https://www.helsinkibusinesshub.fi/90-day-finn/ https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/do-business-with-finland/w...
- Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes?
- The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent?
- Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers?
- Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?
- Everyone would hire more seniors if possible. Juniors are sometimes seen as expensive and hiring only juniors does not scale.
- Education systems do not produce senior people. Also there are other sectors than tech too. I don't know the current situation, but it used to be that places for IT education were never filled completely. There just isn't enough people.
- I don't remember this being reported as significant
- I believe there is difficulties with taxation etc. if you hire people living in different country.
It is pretty real. Hiring programmers is a challenge. The pay you can get is pretty good.
> The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent?
Only 5.5 million people in all of Finland.
> Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers?
No. Finns don't move abroad that often.
> Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?
More of that is happening, especially after the pandemic, but obviously the mayor of Helsinki would not want that.
- Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes?
Both, but mostly the first. A friend of mine chose to work for a local consulting company because it paid more than certain well-known Game Engine company in USA. Furthermore, the Finnish company was more "agile" in the recruitment process, meaning they probably weren't feeling picky, but rather slightly desperate. Caveats: it's just one case.
- The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent?
There seems to be a mismatch between how much Nordic people are in need of the money and job security that a tech profession brings, and the industry needs. In other words, with a social security net, more people pursues other careers, even if they risk finding themselves jobless at certain point.
- Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers?
Hard to answer that one, but it seems the opposite. Last time I checked, Finland had a downright friendly immigration system for qualified people.
- Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?
Companies do use remote labor, but I don't think that's a policy the major of Helsinki would go out of his way to promote publicly. Also, when it comes to tech talent, the EU has a peculiar situation: some countries have affordable tech talent slightly in excess, and some countries are searching for affordable tech talent. So there is market competition for the same talent. Hiring out-of-border is not an automatic guaranty of meeting needs.
There is another factor, and that's that Finland invests heavily in social security. A local engineer benefits from those investments just by living in Finland. For example, child-care and free, high quality healthcare. Add other benefits the employer already gives to the local workforce, like access to a gym, local cafeteria, and work facilities. An employer may believe they can extract higher-quality labor from somebody by relocating them to a place where they enjoy those investments, and that would come practically at no extra cost for that employer.
One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages).
Why is that an issue?
It seems reasonable to me if you want to have citizenship. But you can surely live a successful life in Finland as a foreign national, no?
Not all that outlandish either -- a cognate of Swedish köpa and German kaufen.
Compared to English, Finnish is still super-easy to learn in at least one respect I think is much more important for ease of learning: No exceptions. With most languages, you have to learn a bunch of regular patterns, and then all the exceptions from those. Finnish isn't like that -- just learn the rules, and you're good to go. No exceptions to learn.
And if I want to say "It was on sale in our store as well", I have to conjugate the same "kauppa" word multiple times: "Se oli alennuksessa meidän kaupassammekin" (kauppa [store] -> kaupassa [in a store] -> kaupassamme [in our store] -> kaupassammekin [in our store as well]).
Foreigners would probably also not be too appreciate of the "no exceptions" part when they discover that "teen", "teet", "tekee", "tekevät", "tehdään", "tein", "teki", "tehtiin" and "tehnyt" are all various inflections of the same "tehdä" (to do) verb.
We also have the good ol' word salads in the form of compound words. Germans may have the Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, but we have the Kaksoiskytkinvaihteisto.
Is English in Finland not so common?
Many people can speak English but would like not to. This is especially the case in groups where foreigners are much less in number than natives. They can all speak English but feel unhappy about having to do that to accommodate the foreigners.
Unless Helsinki citizens reach a state in which English is a native language for them and feel other English speakers as co-natives, this whole declaration will be essentially useless at the level of the people foreigners interact with every day. And these matter most. Shopkeeps, colleagues, etc.
In essence being able to speak English does not make one less tribal. Cultural integration of foreigners is very hard to do without learning and living with the native language. Due to this 'expats' flock to places where they pay least taxes and have largest amount of other foreigners to socialize with, e.g. Amsterdam.
'expat' - a word North Americans and Western Europeans like to use to avoid calling themselves immigrants. Usage: Josh is an expat. José is an immigrant.
(from urbandictionary.com)
What nonsense. North Americans and Western Europeans who call themselves expats are exactly that, expatriates, because they aren't planning to stay in the place they're living in forever. If an American or Briton ends up marrying a local, obtaining citizenship, and working in a "normal" (that is, one not typical for expats) job, such a person will readily call himself a immigrant, too. But most don't do that; they will finish their contract, or their educational program, or their series of casual jobs they get to pay their way while "finding themselves" in Prague or Florence or Buenos Aires, and return home.
Nowadays you can even get around with English in most of France. Spain is trickier though.
For that, one needs to have a culture to be worried for... Somewhat less flippantly: How do you know they aren't? I'd guess most people don't worry about that, but some probably do. Personally, I don't; I'm fairly certain Finnish will survive... And I have enough to worry about for the country's minority language, Swedish, which I fear won't survive here for many more generations.
> Some comments mention that you can find restaurants where no one speaks Finnish. Is that not a red flag that at some point the country might flip entirely?
No. I think you misread that; at least the comment I saw on the subject read not like "nobody" but "not everybody" to me. Your waitress might speak only English, so if you don't, you'd have to ask for another one -- most, or at least some, of the rest of them probably do speak Finnish.
As for the latter: Why do you think localist-populist parties are on the rise all across Europe? A lot of people very much worry about drowning in the tide of homogenizing globalism.
Learning a new language is hard. The hardest thing most adults attempt in their lifetime and most fail. (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that). I have no delusions that we will ever settle on a common language, but I still wish it could happen.
> (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that)
I'm not sure if quantum physics really is harder. Learning a new language requires tremendous amount of work over many years (and a lot of that work happens naturally, as people are making use of the new language skills) - I feel very few people ever expended a comparable amount of effort into learning quantum physics, so we don't have a good baseline to compare.
When I go to Finland, I want to hear Finnish, read Finnish, and eat Finnish. I don't want to go to a place where kids speak, write, and think exactly like the kids from the school down the road here in North America. I don't want to travel 8000km to hear and see the same things as I have for my whole life.
There's nothing more depressing to me than a world where everything is the same and where there is no friction between anything.
If I want to read I'll go to my local library and request a book. Unless you mean streets signs - but there again not enough time.
Navajo is maybe the best example of a language that's been kept up for cultural reasons, and it tends not to assimilate loanwords, but thousands more languages are dying or extinct.
Same thing with language purity. Loanwords etc are a natural part of language evolution. It's up to the community speaking the language to incorporate more loanwords - or not - as they speak it.
The Irish language is in danger even in the Gaeltacht areas where native Irish speakers live, because English is everywhere. Tech is almost exclusively English, most jobs are English-only, most media is in English (not to mention ads on YouTube), most news and politics happens in English (the primary sources at least), all the packaging on everything you buy is in English, it's much easier to find a solicitor who speaks English-legalese than Irish-dlítheanga, your kids pick up English from TV and life.
Before you know it, you and many of your acquaintances are a bit rusty, and conversations happen in English more and more. The language declines, and it's not what you wanted.
This equation is different when the dominant language is spoken by the minority, but that minority can overpower the majority for historical reasons (e.g. historical concentration of economic or political power in their hands) - a good example of that would be Quebec. But the proper solution to that is to prevent or fix the concentration of power, not to force anyone to speak or not speak what they want.
Even native english speakers from the US can't pronounce most English placenames. Heck, not even English people can pronounce their placenames. (and yes I know, those placenames have french/nordic/germanic/roman origins, but placenames do become part of the language over time).
Other words change pronunciation without changing meaning (this one really annoys me). think of "to perspire" and "anti-perspirant". Why is the "perspire" pronounced so differently in those two words, despite referring to the same thing? Same with "vital" and "vitamins" (in UK english). The english pronounce it vit-a-minns, despite the origin of the word being "vital amines". Americans mostly do it the right way ("white-a-minns").
C or K or S? V or W or U? They're the same, but also different letters, except sometimes you pronounce them different? Forget it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
You can also basically pronounce vowels however you want. My favourite example (although a bit exaggerated) is that south african speakers only have one wovel sounds, which is "iiih". "I'm Sid Ifrikin" is how they pronounce "I'm South African" :) Difference in vowel pronounciation is the primary differentiator of different accents, but since we need to understand all these different accents and they all convey the same information, that means vowels carry essentially no information in them. "Do you like dags?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQSnua3M2lo&t=56s
My point is; the written word does not convey how to pronounce the word.
I've been learning Hungarian, which has 14 vowels, all pronounced differently. To my American ears, the differences are very subtle and I often mix them up. To my surprise, even though I think the mix up is subtle, people often have a hard time understanding which words I meant to say. It's interesting to me that this works in some languages and not others.
You've given some examples in English. And in Spanish, there's a game called "hablando con los i's" (speaking with i's), where you replace every vowel with an i, and things are still very much understandable. For example: "Yi istiy hiblindi cin lis i's".
Do words like "cin" change the "c" sound to match the new "spelling", or does it retain the "c" sound from "con"?
Nuance! :o)
You might appreciate this poem. There are a few variations online, but this one has audio: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
(There are a couple of words I don't know the meaning of.)
No no, you've got it all wrong.
That's the Niw Zilindirs.
All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public. There's already a bit of a "our language is dying!" talk going on from things like a lot of universities offering some programs only in English.
I don't worry so much about the interactions, but I think that top-down communication is difficult if you don't speak Dutch or German. Especially letters, as you can't easily use an online translator. Just basic stuff, like enrolling your kid to school. You get a ton of letters, but none of them in English.
Also, you say Dutch is easy to learn, but what about people who stay only for a week or a few months? Or, even if they stay longer, the first few months when people don't speak the local language at all, but have to do a lot of paperwork?
> All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public.
Certainly, especially in Germany. But my argument is that German is already on the path to obsolescence, and if you don't want the same for German culture, it needs to transition to English.
If wages were higher, that would make a big dent.
Removing requirements for any kind of language fluency would help as well.
QED.
I think it helps that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all very similar to English in grammar – but with less flexibility, e.g. a sloppy but understandable word order in English might make no sense at all if spoken in Danish.
But how easy/hard is it to immigrate to Finland, or Helsinki in general? You also have to attract people to your city who use the language, etc.
Amerika ist wunderbar
We are living in America
Amerika, Amerika
People also watch British films and TV shows (Harry Potter, James Bond, Dr Who, Peppa Pig), listen to British music (Ed Sheeran, Adele, Little Mix), and play British video games (GTA, Tomb Raider).
I think it's probably under 50% of the market in non-English-speaking countries on average, but could be the majority in some countries with closer past or present associations to the UK.
Peppa Pig also is probably the worst example of people learning English from the British since you are not watching Peppa Pig in English unless you already live in an English-speaking country. It's a children's show, it's dubbed absolutely everywhere since children can't read subtitles.
And even though the GTA games are technically British games, they all take place in the United States, they are written to have (satirical) American dialogue and are pretty much fully acted out by Americans. Even European characters named Niko and Roman are voiced by American dudes named Michael and Jason.
Also, all of the new Tomb Raider games are actually American/Canadian productions.
There is no question about it, english is eating the world.
Bonus: English is the official working language of the EU, even if English is spoken officially only in Malta.
English, French and German have a higher status as general EU working languages.
Anecdata: Among my wife's family, I think everyone speaks/understands English and most have at least one additional language if not more (one of her cousins is fluent in and speaks accentless English, Spanish, French and Arabic and has a working ability in German as well). English speakers, in contrast, tend to be stubbornly monolingual.
I would argue that (some) Turkish soap operas/telenovelas are even better produced than spanish language ones.
Pre-pandemic, part of my job included face-to-face time with poor Latin American immigrants in the southern part of the United States (Mostly Mexican, plus a lot of Colombian, Guatemalans, and the occasional Venezuelan).
90% of the first generation people I'd work with would only speak Spanish. But their kids would flip back and forth just as you describe it: fluidly, and without apparently noticing. Those kids are now in their 20's and 30's, so I'm not surprised that the TV stations are going after that prime demographic. But even if their parents didn't speak English, they very often understood what was said. They just didn't have the confidence to speak aloud. So, another market for programs that use both languages.
There is no question about it, english is eating the world
My father was one of those international businessmen stereotypes in the 1970's, doing deals from London to Chicago to Sydney. (His two teletype machines in the den were what got me interested in computers.)
He always said that English is the international language of business.
He told me that if I wanted to be a businessman, it was important to master the English language more thoroughly than my competitors. He said if I wanted to be a diplomat, learn French. If I wanted to be an engineer, learn German. If I wanted to be a scientist, learn Greek.
I took Latin.
This last one isn't a serious suggestion – in the 1970s or 1980s, reasonable advice would have been to learn German. Plenty of research papers were being published in German back then.
(I was advised to learn German by a postgraduate student, who said he had examinations in German at an English university.)