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Yeah, being bilingual may actually be an educational advantage.. I think of it like learning one language is understanding syntax, learning multiple languages is understanding the underlying concepts.

I don't know if the Finnish people I have known are exactly representative of the whole, but they were all bilingual (ie. parents spoke finnish and english or swedish at home).

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A recent study on bilingualim "advantage": Bilingualism changes children’s beliefs about the world around them http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2015/01/13/how-b...

If most Finns group up bilingual then maybe that's their advantage (or an additional advantage). Studies link growing up bilingual to improved cognitive abilities[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingu...

In most parts of Finland, people only speak Finnish at home. It's mainly just Western Finland (and Helsinki to a lesser degree) where there are lots of finnish-swedish people that are bilingual. Elsewhere everyone tends to know English pretty well, but Swedish isn't nearly that common.

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