Social contacts and career opportunities are the main reasons for studying Swedish for foreigners living in Finland.

According to a recent survey conducted by Helsinki Times, over 55 per cent of the foreign language community living in Finland would like to learn Swedish. 67 per cent say they would be prepared to learn Swedish if it helped them succeed in their career while in Finland. Swedish is one of two official languages in Finland. It is the mother tongue of 5.5 per cent of the population.

Martin-Éric Racine from Québec, Canada, currently a consultant on immigration issues, has lived in Finland for 11 years and says that he first became interested in the Swedish language when he heard that those who master both the official languages tend to get the top public sector jobs in the country. Later he tried requesting Swedish language classes at the Employment Office.

“They told me that the only language they can offer me is Finnish and, even then, I would not qualify because I had lived in Finland for more than three years,” Racine says.

Nearly 90 per cent of the respondents to the survey say that at the moment their level of Swedish is either poor or they do not know any Swedish. Meanwhile, 57.5 per cent of the respondents estimated their level of Finnish to be poor or they do not know any Finnish.

Racine has since become active in the matter and has recently made a proposal to the Ministry of Employment and Economy (TEM) that foreigners would be allowed to sign up for Swedish classes as labour training, provided that they already passed Finnish YKI level 4 or better.

According to Racine, “This proposal was extremely well received because it keeps the pragmatic needs of the Finnish majority in mind, while making it possible for both Finns and immigrants to learn Swedish to better their chances of employment and to secure the availability of public services in Swedish.

According to the survey the most eager to learn Swedish are under 30-year-olds, students or self-employed respondents who are intermediate in Finnish and who have stayed in Finland two to four years.

Swedish easier to learn

Racine asserts that learning Finnish was not difficult for him, and he is self-taught. However, according to the survey a total of 70 per cent of the respondents say that Swedish would be easier for them to learn than Finnish. Swedish is “definitely easier than Finnish,” wrote a female respondent from Russia.

The foreign language community have quite good knowledge of the Swedish language culture in Finland, and 77 per cent say that they have some familiarity with the Swedish speaking community through their studies, family and friends or general knowledge. However, 47 per cent still do not think that their knowledge is sufficient.

According to the survey, the main reasons to get involved with the Swedish language community and learn the language are for social contacts and career opportunities. The survey was conducted among the readers of Helsinki Times and SixDegrees between March and April 2009. Only those whose native language is neither Finnish nor Swedish were eligible to participate in the survey, which was filled out by 510 people.

Elisa Lautala - HT