Pia Ingström:
From majority to minority

Extracts from Muukalainen Muumilaaksossa
('A stranger in Moominvalley', WSOY, 2005)

Because I'm a Ugro-Finn* who has been uprooted by the forces of social change, I've had a questionable freedom to choose the place I call my home. If I hadn't come to the village of Dalsbruk (Taalintehdas in Finnish), I might easily have ended up living abroad. For compared to that of the Ugro-Finnish interior, the way of life in the coastal region initially seemed to me as exotic as life in a foreign country.
     I was born a Ugrian Finn in Oulu, northern Finland; as far as I know, there have never been any Swedish-speakers in my family. I'm a Finnish-language writer and mainly follow Finland's Finnish-language culture when I can be bothered to follow it. In the mornings, it's true, I listen to the Finland-Swedish Radio Vega, because the tunes it plays are more cheerful than the lugubrious flow of minor keys on the Finnish-language stations. My children go to a Swedish-language school here, and outside the home our family generally speaks Swedish. I consider it polite to speak Swedish, as the coastal Swedes were here before I was. Swedish is spoken by more than three-quarters of the people in our home borough of Dragsfjärd.
     I could perhaps start to consider myself bilingual — after all, many Finland-Swedes boast of being bilingual. I don't see why they should have an exclusive right to that. Also, there seems little point in leaving the discussion about Finland-Swedishness to them alone, with only five per cent of the nation discussing the matter.
     I'm a Finn who has been really mixed up by the movement from the country to the towns. Perhaps it's for that very reason that I've always had a great longing for a place to call home, a home environment of my own, one that is filled with familiar people, a place I know well and where I can always ask my neighbours for help. I have also wanted to find a place where my children would be able to grow up in safe surroundings, in the company of lasting friendships and familiar adults.
     I only found such a place after I moved to Finland's south-west coast, among a tribe of people of whom I knew nothing. That place was Dalsbruk, which was situated on the shore of the sea of my childhood, but fortunately in a much more favourable climate than Oulu, 600 kilometres further south where even the oak tree thrives.

When I moved to Dalsbruk I immediately suffered a form of culture shock. Living in Tampere I had almost completely forgotten that there are almost 300,000 Swedish-speaking people in Finland.
     The first thing I noticed was that the etiquette was different from what prevails in the deep inner regions of Finland. People always greeted one another when they met, whereas in Finnish Finland one doesn't have to greet acquaintances if one's in a bad mood (as is frequently the case), one can always look away. Here it's easy to find eye contact and a greeting, because one apparently doesn't feel in a bad mood so often, and one isn't afraid of other people. During a trip to the market one sometimes has to greet the same person as many as four times, but one gets used to it.
     In Ugro-Finnish car-repair shops or plumbing stores I have grown accustomed to somewhat rude snarling and growling. I have also adjusted to the fact that the representatives of these thoroughly male professions have never said a word, even by accident, to my wife, who is a woman. In Dalsbruk I could hardly believe my eyes and ears: the plumbers wore an air reminiscent of university professors, though their behaviour was far better. They always had a friendly word or explanation for the bewildered customer. The excavator driver did his job well, and he always had time to come and chat for a moment afterwards. Every self-employed workman always seemed to have ten minutes for a chat, and such use of time did not appear to interfere with the efficiency of their business.
     Here one encounters one of the differences between Finland-Swedes and Finnish Finns, namely the manner in which work is done. It has been my experience that in this part of the world work is less often performed with one's teeth gritted. Jobs are done perhaps a little more in the South European manner — and I'm not referring to any stupid stereotype about laziness. The time allotted to work is simply employed in a slightly more human way, in that it includes communication with other people. This communication decreases the boredom one may feel with one's own work.

No one knows where we Finns came from. Nowadays it's thought that the direction of arrival was from the south. We are not Mongols, and we do not need to look for our forefathers among the Cheremissians. Our shores caught Swedish when migrants returned to the Gulf of Finland some time after the Viking era. For example, before the Middle Ages many of the place names in our south-western archipelago were Finnish or Estonian.
     The impenetrable obscurity of the past and the archaeological shadow-pictures that quietly move around within it provide an excellent opportunity for all kinds of conceptualisings and theorisings. For how can we know what kind of states we formed with the Estonians during the Viking era?
     Who is at home anywhere now? Over a thousand years ago almost every people seems to have been on the move from one place to another. The German suddenly decided to push himself to southern Spain, and even north Africa, while in the tenth century the Viking stayed in France but from there, during the very next generation, went on to Sicily. If we go even further back, we find a bunch of people that moved from the western shores of France to northern Norway. It is probable that at times there was also movement to Europe from Africa. Everyone has always been on the move, so the babbling about the sacrosant nature of 150-year-old nation-states should really stop. People's colour and language changes constantly: just look at who is living in California nowadays.
     Nation-states were created, however, and in many ways they are the root and origin of war and trouble. Rising industrial capitalism liked the economic unity of the 19th-century nation-state; in Finland it developed in secret beneath the ogling double eagle of tsarist rule. The job was done in low profile even then: the tsar was praised because He (though He kept changing) had guaranteed us all kinds of rights and freedoms in the Act of Union and Security. Finns have always placed more faith in the highest legislative authority and the power of the tribunal than the shepherd in Lord God Sabaoth.
     So for Finns, too, a nation-state was created, and the educated Finland-Swedish bourgeoisie which resided in Turku during the 1820s served in many ways as its originator. The study of the Finnish language became a fashion, a bit like that of Gaelic in Ireland. Swedish dandies began to speak broken Finnish at high-flown punchbowl parties. The gathering of folk poetry began, and the development of a glorious past for the nation was initiated. This artificial concept of greatness did not disperse until the wartime chaos when Finns fought beside Nazi Germany in 1941-44.
     It was possible to invent a glorious past by arranging the ancient poems in a certain order. Fortunately Elias Lönnrot was a sensible man and made the Kalevala a fairly peaceful national epic. Many of the sacred books of national states drip with blood on every page: just think of the Edda, the Nibelungenlied, the Chanson de Roland or El Cid.
A nation-state was created for us, and within the space of a few decades the process of turning it into a Finnish-speaking one had been completed rather well.

Finland-Swedes are broad-minded if any finne (Swedish for 'Finn') is eccentric enough to want to try to speak their language. Of course my own study of the language has been made easier by the fact that here Swedish clearly has the upper hand.
     The strongest Finland-Swedish linguistic identity is appararently to be found in older Swedish-speakers living far from Helsinki. When I moved to the borough of Dragsfjärd, it was really bewildering to observe that on the archipelago there were still people who knew no more than a few words of Finnish. On the other hand, miracles do happen. I once heard with my own ears an inveterate archipelago bachelor who spoke only Swedish demonstrate a virtuosic proficiency in Finnish on meeting a Finnish woman with whom he wished to be on closer terms.
     Fortunately my own children have become not semi-lingual but bilingual: their nursery school teacher did not know a word of Finnish. She is proof that the language laws work and that it's possible to live in Finland using Swedish alone. It's true, however, that there are certain preconditions for this: staying in a confined area and doing your daily business in the town of Ekenäs (Tammisaari), where 85 per cent of the residents are Swedish-speaking.
     Among the Finland-Swedes there it is normal to switch the language of the conversation to contrived Finnish. If two Finland-Swedes are standing on a street corner and one finne breaks in on them, then the Swedish-speakers at once begin to chat in Finnish, even to each other. This politeness is not without ambiguity: the constant switch to Finnish contains within it an element of the secret society, perhaps a desire to keep Finland-Swedish as the coded language of one's own small group, into which there is no reason to initiate Finnish-speakers.
     It is understandable that a linguistic minority should want to handle the linguistic majority with kid gloves. And according to research, Finnish-speakers may, it is said, grow irritated if Swedish-speakers are not prepared to speak Finnish. This irritation (but why do Finnish-speakers always get so easily irritated?) derives of course from the fact that the Finnish-speakers don't really know Swedish. For this reason the linguistic essence of Finland-Swedish bears this characteristic feature: that one must avoid irritating the Finnish Finn, as he is easily insulted and his anger is slow to cool....
     It's my opinion that in recent years there has been a slight easing in matters of language. Finland-Swedes have begun to use their mother tongue a little more freely and actively, and Swedish no longer always comes to a halt when a Ugro appears round the corner. This is a good thing, because otherwise the language will not survive. In Dalsbruk I have noticed the curious phenomenon of the Finnish-language tourists experimenting with broken Swedish in the corner shop. This is a nice touch of politeness; Finland-Swedes have to do something similar from the cradle to the grave.

Health is not a simple matter. Western medicine has long viewed man's physical aspect as something strangely different from his spirit. On the other hand, according to the medical doctor Markku Hyyppä's research**, the support of trusted friends has a positive connection with the experience of good health. If one does not trust one's fellow human beings, one experiences one's health as being worse.
     So it seems that a sense of trust has an influence on the degree to which people feel themselves to be healthy. Almost twice as many Finnish-speakers as Swedish-speakers believe that their fellow human beings will take advantage of them if they are given a chance. This in my view reinforces the basic problem of Finns: they don't trust themselves, and so it is hard for them to trust others.
     Trust between people is important for the development of society. In northern Italy mutual trust and sociability have led to economic prosperity and democracy. Some northern Italian towns are even famous for their social nature and gentle virtues, and shortage of money does not seem to be a problem there. In southern Italy, on the other hand, people have never trusted the state, local government or one another, but only their own clans and mafia families. In other words, everything there is founded on lack of trust, which is directed at people outside their extended family.
     If a society has plenty of social capital, people trust one another. Old-fashioned moral values are respected, promises are kept, the truth stands and mutual solidarity is shown. In Dalsbruk this can be seen among other things from the fact that our family has never had problems when requesting small services. Not even from people who are relative strangers. If the plants need watering, the cats need feeding or the children need to be suddenly fetched from somewhere, everything is taken care of. The catchphrase in the neighbourhood is det ordnar sig: 'It will be OK.' Problems exist in order to be solved, not to be moaned about. If you ask for a service, you are also prepared to do the same for the other person later on. In this way social capital accumulates as in a bank. The starting point here is not that each person looks after their own affairs. The starting point is that one helps others to look after their affairs, and can then oneself receive help when it is needed.
     The conclusions at this stage are approximately these: there is a conspicuously greater amount of social capital in Finland-Swedish society than there is in Finnish society within the same area. Social capital is linked to people's health. Swedish-speakers keep their working ability for noticeably longer and live to be older than Finnish-speakers. And it really has little to do with language: people with many interests live longer than those with few.

Back to Moominvalley. What is the future of Finland-Swedishness, and what will happen to the Swedish-speaking coastal boroughs? The Finland-Swedes themselves have tried to handle this hot potato in many different ways. They think it will die away. They think it will survive just fine, as long as they don't have to hang around with the Ugros in vain.
     In my view Finland-Swedish will certainly survive as a language. According to the constitution Finland is a bilingual country, and so the Swedish language will not easily disappear. On the other hand, Finland-Swedish culture is a threatened species, especially in the cities. In the cities the parallel pressure of the Finnish-speaking majority has turned Finland-Swedishness into a secret society. The Finland-Swedes gather like Freemasons behind the closed doors of apartment buildings to sing drinking songs in muted tones. As soon as they go out to the street, as if by magic they speak almost perfect Finnish.
     Whatever the faults of such a hidden fraternity may be, the main thing is that people have fun. Finnish urban culture and economic life are, however, changing at a breakneck pace. To the young it is no longer so desperately important which culture someone represents or what their mother tongue is. Migration to Finland is increasing all the time, and that is our great good fortune. After all, someone will have to do the heavy work, since we ourselves can no longer be bothered to, and someone will also have to take care of the task of reproduction — the hedonistic New Finn will no longer find the time to be pregnant, let alone to take care of the kids. Will we need to wait a hundred years for the language of our largest minority language to be Russian?
     The future development of Finnish urban culture is hard to predict. But the old Finland-Swedishness will be there somewhere, perhaps in the future taking second place in an intermediate landscape of greater Finnish and immigrant Russian culture. The tradition is strong: from balconies in wealthy seaside suburbs gnarled hands holding aquavit glasses will always be raised... and into an August night from a wicker chair will echo a cheerful

          ... Och den som inte helan tar
          Han ej heller halvan får!
          Heelan gååår!
          Sjung hoppfaderallanlej!

          '... And he who doesn't down it all
          Will be drinking nowt at all!
          Here's to it aaall!
          Sing tralalal-tralalal-lalay!'***

The population centres adjoining the large cities are often dormitory suburbs and transit points. Compared to them, Dalsbruk is a Shangri-la. It is situated at the end of a state highway; beyond it there is only the sea. In order to function properly, a good residential community requires a sufficient number of people who have decided to spend their whole lives and bring up their children there, as far as external conditions permit. In addition, my own personal criterion for a good community is that it should have a tolerance for difference, an ability to accept things and people that are different. I have found such an ability in the Finland-Swedish industrial and port district.
     On the other hand, tolerance is built into every Finland-Swede: in their own lives they have to constantly tolerate the Finnish-speaking majority, which sets the pace of the tango. Living as a minority also means that they are more ready to approve of the other minorities living in Finland.

I haven't felt like a stranger in Moominvalley for many years now. I knew that my final immersion here had occurred when a taxi driver explained to me that he'd seen a lot of 'foreign folk' here recently. My skin no longer itches strangely, and instead I have crawled into a hammock like some Moomin Valley muskrat, an odd creature that is nonetheless kept as a member of the community, even though it doesn't fit the same pattern as others.
     In spite of the darkness and the fierce gale raging outside, I know that the days are growing longer all the time. Now it's an ordinary mild, dark archipelago winter, the kind that two out of three winters are. It probably won't be possible to ski for many weeks. In February we may get some kind of ice, but I will hardly dare walk on it. The sea will probably be free of ice by April. Indeed, April is one of the best months here: there's enough light and warmth for one to be able to work on one's boat.
     One of the nice things about living here in the south is not having to wait until June for summer to arrive. April and May are my busiest and most active months here. In midsummer it's more pleasant to sail and laze about.
     The sky outside the window of my study looks clearer. I've noticed that living in the country I keep a closer eye on the weather. The rain has stopped. Today is Wednesday, and market day. Because it's only half past ten in the morning I want to go to the market and see if Holmberg the fisherman has any smoked whitefish.
     With a little good luck one can also get sea trout at the market.

* Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language; among other members of this family of languages are Hungarian and Estonian. Perhaps it should be added that the Finnish substantive 'ugri' sounds comical to a Finn, and that J.R.'s term 'Ugro-Finn' that he uses with tongue in cheek here, is not fit for use in scientific contexts; for example Ostyaks, Samoyeds and Hungarians are Ugrians, Finns are Finns. The Editors

** Markku T. Hyyppä and Erkki Kronholm: 'Kansalaisyhteisön sosiaalinen pääoma heijastuu vireyteen' ('The social capital of a civil society is reflected in mental agility', Lääkärilehti ('Medical journal') 41/2002

*** The only song of the merry and social Swedish-language drinking culture that even the Finnish-speaking population recognises — and will even sing (after a couple of schnapps). The Editors

Translated by David McDuff