this happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I ordered lunch.
the Place is right next to my office and I go there every week. I always speak Finnish with the staff because I understand that they are Finnish-speaking.
But when one day I heard the chef talk English with another customer I realized that I talked Finnish with him completely unnecessarily.
Also, the chef admitted that he has long been a little unsure.
n in Helsinki is small, it is like a village: you can often recognize each other. Or so, you will listen to for a while, maybe put on their music radar and are trying to decide on the basis of other attributes. The accent, the hair, the clothes.
Or so, you will listen to for a while, maybe put on their music radar and are trying to decide on the basis of other attributes.
Exactly how to do it requires a life to understand. And sometimes the radar is demonstrably still a little felkalibrerad.
In Sweden, I often get the question: everyone is talking Swedish-speaking finns Finnish?
My grandmother’s sister up in the village of Lappväärtti in southern ostrobothnia was probably his entire life without uttering a single word in Finnish. She and her husband cultivated cucumbers, and according to a släktmyt they would a time to visit Helsinki, but turned around when it started raining. In some small towns in Ostrobothnia, the Swedish language is absolutely dominant. There may be more immigrants than the Finnish, which, in turn, allows the immigrants linguistically, in terms of the Swedish-speaking finns in Finland.
In Helsinki mix of young people freely when they talk – borrows Finnish words like ”lenkkare” for sneakers, throws in some English words, and form sentences like ”It is so satisfying when my lenkkare crackles against the snow”.
It is so satisfying when my lenkkare crackles against the snow.
Finnish via football. My son draws, however, to go alone on the town that his Finnish is so bumpy.
Fortunately, my Finnish partner had a particular influence on him. At the dinner table switches we often between the Finnish and Swedish without thinking on the matter, and it is a good picture of how life looks for many Swedish-speaking finns in Helsinki. It is bilingual rather than monolingual. And there arises a new challenge for me: to make sure that my children can express themselves in proper English when needed. In Sweden, called the ”lenkkare” namely, sneakers.
Read more: Campaign to get more people to talk Swedish in Finland
