Treffer: ECMI Minorities Blog. The Diverse Ways of Managing the Language Question in Finnish-Swedish Sport

Swedish is one of Finland’s two official languages, but it is spoken as a mother tongue only by a minority. Finland’s language policy has traditionally been founded on separate language-specific institutions. This principle is also evident in sports, where Finnish-Swedes generally established their own clubs separate from the language majority. This blog post investigates how Finland’s language policy and linguistic relations have been manifested historically and contemporarily in Finnish-Swedish sports. On one hand, Finnish-Swedish sports have national structures and organisations, giving Svenskfinland a tangible presence in the sporting world. On the other hand, Finnish-Swedish clubs each have to negotiate local linguistic contexts in their own way. In bilingual areas with relatively equally sized language communities, cooperation has recently prevailed over animosity – language difference has been something to overcome rather than stubbornly uphold.