Ethnic groups in Finland

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A variety of ethnic groups have long existed in Finland. Prominent examples include the Swedish speaking minority within the country and the Sami peoples in the north. With modern international migration to Finland, different ethnolinguistics groups populate the country, most prominently in Helsinki.

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Finland-Swedes

The largest minority group in Finland is the Swedish-speaking Finns, who in 2018 numbered about 282,300, with all Swedish speakers in the country making a total of 288,400 which is 5.2% of the total population. [1] Municipalities are classified as either monolingual or bilingual with a majority language. Most Swedish-speakers live in unilingual Swedish-speaking municipalities. These municipalities are found in coastal areas, from Ostrobothnia to the southern coast, and in the archipelago of Åland. [2]

Russians

Russians in Finland had come from two major waves. About 5,000 originate from a population that immigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Finland was a grand duchy of Imperial Russia. Another consisted of those who immigrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A significant catalyst was the right of return, based on President Koivisto's initiative that people of Ingrian ancestry would be allowed to immigrate to Finland. [3]

About 30,000 people have citizenship of the Russian Federation (2015) [4] and Russian is the mother language of about 70,000 people in Finland, which represents about 1.3% of the population. [5] [6]

Karelians

In 2011 there were about 30,000 people who identified as Karelian in Finland. About 5,000 of them are fluent or native in the Karelian language but about 25,000 of them can speak Karelian. The Karelians are a closely related ethnic group to Finns. Karelians in Finland mostly live in a diaspora around the country and in North Karelia. All dialects of Karelian are spoken in Finland. [7] Before 2009 Karelian was taught as a dialect of Finnish, but in 2009 it was given official status as a language in Finland. [8]

Sami

The Sami are related to the Finns, and each people speaks a non-Indo-European language belonging to the Uralic family of languages. Once present throughout the country, the Sami gradually moved northward under the pressure of the advancing Finns. As they were a nomadic people in a sparsely settled land, the Sami were always able to find new and open territory in which to follow their traditional activities of hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture. By the 16th century, most Sami lived in the northern half of the country, and it was during this period that they converted to Christianity. By the 19th century, most of them lived in the parts of Lapland that were still their home in the 1980s. The last major shift in Sami settlement was the migration westward of 600 Skolt Sami from the Petsamo region after it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. A reminder of their eastern origin was their Orthodox faith; the remaining 85 percent of Finland's Sami were Lutheran. [2]

In 1988, about 90 percent of Finland's 4,400 Sami-speaking citizens lived in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the reindeer-herding area of Sodankylä. According to Finnish regulations, anyone who spoke one of the Sami languages, or who had a relative who was a Sami, was registered as a Sami in census records. Finnish Sami spoke three distinct Sami languages, but by the late 1980s perhaps only a minority actually had Sami as their first language. Sami children had the right to instruction in Sami, but there were few qualified instructors or textbooks available. One reason for the scarcity of written material in Sami is that the three Sami languages spoken in Finland made agreement on a common orthography difficult. Perhaps these shortcomings explained why a 1979 study found the educational level of Sami to be considerably lower than that of other Finns. [2]

Few Finnish Sami actually led the traditional nomadic life pictured in school geography texts and in travel brochures. Although many Sami living in rural regions of Lapland earned some of their livelihood from reindeer herding, it was estimated that Sami owned no more than one-third of Finland's 200,000 reindeer. Only 5 percent of Finnish Sami had the herds of 250 to 300 reindeer needed to live entirely from this kind of work. Most Sami worked at more routine activities, including farming, construction, and service industries such as tourism. Often a variety of jobs and sources of income supported Sami families, which were, on the average, twice the size of a typical Finnish family. Sami also were aided by old-age pensions and by government welfare, which provided a greater share of their income than it did for Finns as a whole. [2]

There have been many efforts over the years by Finnish authorities to safeguard the Sami' culture and way of life and to ease their entry into modern society. Officials created bodies that dealt with the Sami minority, or formed committees that studied their situation. An early body was the Society for the Promotion of Lapp Culture, formed in 1932. In 1960 the government created the Advisory Commission on Lapp Affairs. The Sami themselves formed the Saami-liitto in 1945 and the Johti Sabmelazzat, a more aggressive organization, in 1968. In 1973 the government arranged for elections every four years to a twenty-member Sami Parliaments that was to advise authorities. On the international level, there was the Nordic Sami Council of 1956, and there has been a regularly occurring regional conference since then that represented—in addition to Finland's Sami—Norway's 20,000 Sami, Sweden's 10,000 Sami, and the 1,000 to 2,000 Sami who remained in the Kola Peninsula in Russia. [2]

Sami languages have an official status in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the northern part of Sodankylä since 1992. [9] In 2023, over 60% of the 10,000 Sami [10] in Finland lived outside of this area.

Romani

Romani people, also called Kale and Roma, have been present in Finland since the second half of the 16th century. With their unusual dress, unique customs, and specialized trades for earning their livelihood, Roma have stood out, and their stay in the country has not been an easy one. They have suffered periodic harassment from the hands of both private citizens and public officials, and the last of the special laws directed against them was repealed only in 1883. Even in the second half of the 1980s, Finland's 5,000 to 6,000 Romani remained a distinct group, separated from the general population both by their own choice and by the fears and the prejudices many Finns felt toward them. [2] There are 13,000-14,000 Romani people in Finland. [11]

Finnish Roma, like Roma elsewhere, chose to live apart from the dominant societal groups. A Roma's loyalty was to his or her family and to their people in general. Marriages with non-Roma were uncommon, and the Roma's own language, spoken as a first language only by a few in the 1980s, was used to keep outsiders away. An individual's place within Roma society was largely determined by age and by sex, old males having authority. A highly developed system of values and a code of conduct governed a Roma's behavior, and when Roma sanctions, violent or not, were imposed, for example via "blood feuds," they had far more meaning than any legal or social sanctions of Finnish society. [2]

Unlike the Sami, who lived concentrated in a single region, the Romani lived throughout Finland. While most Sami wore ordinary clothing in their everyday life, Romani could be identified by their dress; the men generally wore high boots and the women almost always dressed in very full, long velvet skirts. Like most Sami, however, Roma also had largely abandoned a nomadic way of life and had permanent residences. Romani men had for centuries worked as horse traders, but they had adapted themselves to postwar Finland by being active as horse breeders and as dealers in cars and scrap metal. Women continued their traditional trades of fortune telling and handicrafts. [2]

Since the 1960s, Finnish authorities have undertaken measures to improve the Romani's standard of life. Generous state financial arrangements have improved their housing. Their low educational level (an estimated 20 percent of adult Romani could not read) was raised, in part, through more vocational training. A permanent Advisory Commission on Gypsy Affairs was set up in 1968, and in 1970 racial discrimination was outlawed through an addition to the penal code. The law punished blatant acts such as barring Romani from restaurants or shops or subjecting them to unusual surveillance by shopkeepers or the police. [2]

Jews

There are about 1,300 Jews in Finland, 800 of whom live in Helsinki and most of the remainder live in Turku. During the period of Swedish rule, Jews had been forbidden to live in Finland. Once the country became part of the Russian Empire, however, Jewish veterans of the Tsarist army had the right to settle anywhere they wished within the empire. Although constrained by law to follow certain occupations, mainly those connected with the sale of clothes, the Jewish community in Finland was able to prosper, and by 1890 it numbered around 1,000. Finnish independence brought complete civil rights, and during the interwar period there were some 2,000 Jews in Finland, most of them living in urban areas in the south. During World War II, Finnish authorities refused to deliver Jews to the Third Reich, and the country's Jewish community survived the war virtually intact. By the 1980s, assimilation and emigration had significantly reduced the size of the community, and it was only with some difficulty that it maintained synagogues, schools, libraries, and other pertinent institutions. [2]

Tatars

The community of Finnish Tatars numbers only about 800. The Tatars first came to Finland from the Russian Volga region near Nizni Novgorod's Tatar villages in the mid-19th century; a Tatar presence has continued in Finland in the century and a half since, with Tatars chiefly active in commerce. The Tatars in Finland have significantly integrated into the Finnish society but continue to maintain their different religion, mother tongue, and ethnic culture. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Finland</span> Country in Northern Europe

Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, opposite Estonia. Finland covers an area of 338,145 square kilometres (130,559 sq mi) and has a population of 5.6 million. Helsinki is the capital and largest city. The vast majority of the population are ethnic Finns. Finnish and Swedish are the official languages, with Swedish being the native language of 5.2% of the population. Finland's climate varies from humid continental in the south to boreal in the north. The land cover is predominantly boreal forest biome, with more than 180,000 recorded lakes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Demographics of Finland</span>

The demographics of Finland is monitored by the Statistics Finland. Finland has a population of over 5.6 million people, ranking it 19th out of 27 within the European Union. The average population density in Finland is 19 inhabitants per square kilometre (49/sq mi), making it the third most sparsely populated country in Europe, after Iceland and Norway. Population distribution is extremely uneven, with the majority of the population concentrated in the southern and western regions of the country. The majority of the Finnish population - approximately 73% - lives in urban areas. Approximately 1.6 million, or almost 30%, reside solely in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Conversely, the Arctic Lapland region contains only two inhabitants per square kilometre (5.2/sq mi).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sámi peoples</span> Finno-Ugric peoples

The Sámi are the traditionally Sámi-speaking peoples inhabiting the region of Sápmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The region of Sápmi was formerly known as Lapland, and the Sámi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by the Sámi, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e.g. Northern Sámi Sápmi. Their traditional languages are the Sámi languages, which are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sápmi</span> Cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sami people

Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people. Sápmi is in Northern Europe and includes the northern parts of Fennoscandia, also known as the "Cap of the North".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sweden Finns</span> Finnish-speaking national minority in Sweden

Sweden Finns are a Finnish-speaking national minority in Sweden.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lapland (Finland)</span> Region of Finland

Lapland is the largest and northernmost region of Finland. The 21 municipalities in the region cooperate in a Regional Council. Lapland borders the region of North Ostrobothnia in the south. It also borders the Gulf of Bothnia, Norrbotten County in Sweden, Finnmark County and Troms County in Norway, and Murmansk Oblast and the Republic of Karelia in Russia. Topography varies from vast mires and forests of the South to fells in the North. The Arctic Circle crosses Lapland, so polar phenomena such as the midnight sun and polar night can be viewed in Lapland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enontekiö</span> Municipality in Lapland, Finland

Enontekiö is a municipality in the Finnish part of Lapland with approx. 1,800 inhabitants. It is situated in the outermost northwest of the country and occupies a large and very sparsely populated area of about 8,400 square kilometres (3,200 sq mi) between the Swedish and Norwegian border. Finland's highest point, the Halti fell, with a height of 1,324 metres (4,344 ft) above the mean sea level, is situated in the north of Enontekiö. The municipality shares borders with regions of Sweden and Norway that encompass the Scandinavian Mountains. The administrative centre of Enontekiö is the village of Hetta. About one fifth of the community's population are Sami people. Enontekiö's main industries are tourism and reindeer husbandry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karelians</span> Ethnic group

Karelians are a Finnic ethnic group who are indigenous to the historical region of Karelia, which is today split between Finland and Russia. Karelians living in Russian Karelia are considered a distinct ethnic group closely related to Finnish Karelians, who are considered a subset of Finns. This distinction historically arose from Karelia having been fought over and eventually split between Sweden and Novgorod, resulting in Karelians being under different cultural spheres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karelia</span> Area of northern Europe

Karelia is an area in Northern Europe of historical significance for Russia, Finland, and Sweden. It is currently divided between northwestern Russia and Finland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Culture of Finland</span> Overview of the culture of Finland

The culture of Finland combines indigenous heritage, as represented for example by the country's national languages Finnish and Swedish, and the sauna, with common Nordic and European cultural aspects. Because of its history and geographic location, Finland has been influenced by the adjacent areas, various Finnic and Baltic peoples as well as the former dominant powers of Sweden and Russia. Finnish culture is built upon the relatively ascetic environmental realities, traditional livelihoods, and heritage of egalitarianism and the traditionally widespread ideal of self-sufficiency.

Finns or Finnish people are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group native to Finland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrian Finns</span> Ethnicity in Finland and Russia

The Ingrians, sometimes called Ingrian Finns, are the Finnish population of Ingria, descending from Lutheran Finnish immigrants introduced into the area in the 17th century, when Finland and Ingria were both parts of the Swedish Empire. In the forced deportations before and after World War II, and during the genocide of Ingrian Finns, most of them were relocated to other parts of the Soviet Union, or killed. Today the Ingrian Finns constitute the largest part of the Finnish population of the Russian Federation. According to some records, some 25,000 Ingrian Finns have returned or still reside in the region of Saint Petersburg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sámi history</span> History pertaining to the Indigenous Sámi people of Fennoscandia

The Sámi people are a Native people of northern Europe inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. The traditional Sámi lifestyle, dominated by hunting, fishing and trading, was preserved until the Late Middle Ages, when the modern structures of the Nordic countries were established.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kuusamo</span> Town and municipality in North Ostrobothnia, Finland

Kuusamo is a town and municipality in Finland. It is located in Koillismaa, the northeastern part of the Northern Ostrobothnia region. The municipality has a population of 15,017 and covers an area of 5,808.92 square kilometres (2,242.84 sq mi) of which 830.81 km2 (320.78 sq mi) is water. The population density is 3.02 inhabitants per square kilometre (7.8/sq mi).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Finland</span>

The two main official languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. There are also several official minority languages: three variants of Sami, as well as Romani, Finnish Sign Language and Karelian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Sweden</span> Overview of the languages commonly spoken in Sweden

Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10.23 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forms a dialect continuum. A number of regional Swedish dialects are spoken across the country. In total, more than 200 languages are estimated to be spoken across the country, including regional languages, indigenous Sámi languages, and immigrant languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sámi homeland (Finland)</span> Autonomous area in Lapland region, Finland

The Sámi homeland of Finland is the northernmost part of the Lappi (Lapland) administrative region in Finland, home of approximately half of Finland's Sámi population. The area is defined in and protected by the Finnish constitution to be autonomous on issues relating to the Sámi culture and language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romani diaspora</span> Dispersion of the Roma people

The Romani people have several distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Calé, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans in the early 12th century, from a migration out of the Indian subcontinent beginning about 1st century – 2nd century AD. They settled in the areas of present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Roma population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.

The various regional and minority languages in Europe encompass four categories:

Finland has a Romani population of approximately 10,000 to 12,000. Most Romani people in the country belong to the Finnish Kale subgroup and had settled in Finland at the end of the sixteenth century. Finnish Roma mostly live in Finland's urban areas. Although some of Finland’s Romani community still speak Kalo Romani, most Finnish Roma just speak only Finnish. In 1995, an amendment to the 1919 Constitution had granted the Romani people, Sámi people and other Finnish minorities, the right to retain and develop their own language and culture in Finland. The Finnish Kalo language has the status of a non-territorial minority language in Finland. Finland’s Romani community are also recognized as a national minority under the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

References

  1. ↑ Tilastokeskus. "Population". www.stat.fi. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Text from PD source: US Library of Congress: A Country Study: Finland , Library of Congress Call Number DL1012 .A74 1990.
  3. ↑ Niemi, Heli (2007). "Russian Immigrants in Finnish Society" (PDF). University of Vechta. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 February 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2017.
  4. ↑ "Ulkomaiden kansalaiset". Tilastokeskus (in Finnish). Retrieved 22 January 2017.
  5. ↑ "Population structure 2012 - annual review". Statistics Finland. 2013. Retrieved 21 January 2017.
  6. ↑ Population of mainland Finland (excluding Åland) according to language, 1990-2015 Archived 2013-01-06 at archive.today Statistics Finland
  7. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 January 2021. Retrieved 19 February 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. ↑ "Karjalan kieli sai virallisen aseman". 26 November 2009.
  9. ↑ "Saame". Kotus (in Finnish). Retrieved 22 January 2017.
  10. ↑ "Tietoa meistä". Saamelaiskäräjät (in Finnish). Retrieved 2024-02-14.
  11. ↑ "Romanit ovat etninen vähemmistö | Näin se näkyy meillä". Romanit.fi (in Finnish). Retrieved 2024-02-14.
  12. ↑ "Tavismuslimit". Ylioppilaslehti (in Finnish). 2004. Retrieved 21 January 2017.
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