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Swedification refers to the spread and/or imposition of the Swedish language, people and culture or policies which introduced these changes. In the context of Swedish expansion within Scandinavia, Swedification can refer to both the integration of Scania, Jemtland and Bohuslen in the 1600s and governmental policies regarding Sámi and Finns in northern Sweden during the 1800s and 1900s.
As part of the Treaty of Roskilde at the end of the Second Northern War, all areas in the historical region of Skåneland were ceded by Denmark-Norway to the Swedish Empire in early 1658. For the Swedish Empire, it was important to integrate these new subjects and to make the Scanians feel Swedish, rather than Danish. On 16 April 1658, representatives of Scania, Blekinge and Halland's nobility, citizens, clergy and peasants gathered in Malmö to swear fealty to Charles X Gustav. The king was not present but was represented by an empty chair surrounded by Swedish soldiers. [1]
In 1662, Sweden aligned taxes and regulations in Scania with other parts of Sweden. Some of the new rules were very different from previous Danish practice; for example, the lilla tullen ("the small customs"), which charged a tax for all goods brought into cities. Other changes required each city council to have least two Swedish-born members. At the same time, inhabitants of Scania received representation in the Riksdag, unlike other areas that had been conquered by the Swedish Empire. [2]
When Charles X Gustav landed in Helsingborg in 1658, he met Bishop Peder Winstrup from Lund on the pier, who became a driving force for the establishment of the University of Lund as a Swedish counterweight to the University of Copenhagen. In 1666, the former was established under the name "Regia Academia Carolina", and its official opening ceremony took place in January 1668.
About two decades after the Treaty of Roskilde, Sweden sought to more fully implement Scania, including enforcing changes to the church and local language. [3] In 1681, local priests aligned with the Church of Sweden and court documents and ecclesiastical correspondence increasingly adopted more standard Swedish grammatical features. [3]
During the Scanian War in the late 1670s, pro-Danish Snapphane fighters aided the Danish invasion. This led to a campaign to capture, torture and execute those who would not swear allegiance to the Swedish king. The policy was effective and by 1709 when Denmark again moved to invade Scania after the Battle of Poltava local militias resisted the effort. [4]
When the Scanian War began in 1675, some 180,000 people lived in Scania. By 1718, only 132,800 were left. Some snapphane fled to Denmark; some 30,000 Scanian boys were sent to the Swedish army, many of whom were relocated to the Baltics. At the same time, Swedes were encouraged to take over Scanian farms and marry Scanian women. [5]
Beginning in 1846, Sweden adopted policies designed to define and control its northern region, and to integrate its Sámi and Finnish populations with the Swedish nation. Although censuses began delineating among Sámi, Finns, and Swedes as early as 1805, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, these definitions changed based on language, occupation, religion, paternal line, and name. [6]
For Sámi, different groups were segregated into reindeer herders, who continued a more nomadic life and were considered less developed, and farmers who were deemed by the government to be Swedes and not Sámi. This Lapp skall vara Lapp (lit. 'Lapp shall be Lapp') policy forced different schooling on settled children versus nomadic children. [7] By the late 1800s, Swedish became the sole language of instruction in the Torne Valley, which was populated largely by Finnish speakers. [8] In the 1930s, boarding schools were set up for Finns and Sámi children, where they were barred from speaking their native languages and encouraged to adopt "civilized" norms. [9] [10]
These Swedification policies ended in the late 1970s as Sweden officially recognized Sámi as an indigenous people of Sweden. In 2009, the Riksdag passed the Language Law ("Språklag" SFS 2009:600), which recognized Sámi languages and Meänkieli as official minority languages of Sweden, ensuring the right to use these languages in education and administrative proceedings. [11]
In 2020, Sweden funded the establishment of an independent truth commission to examine and document past abuse of Sámi by the Swedish state. [12] A parallel commission to examine past treatment of Tornedalians was also established. [13]
The demography of Sweden is monitored by the Statistiska centralbyrån. Sweden's population was 10,538,026, making it the 15th-most populous country in Europe after Czech Republic, the 10th-most populous member state of the European Union, and the 87th-most populous country in the world. The total fertility rate was rated at 1.66 in 2020, which is far below the replacement rate of 2.1.
The Sámi are the traditionally Sámi-speaking people 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.
Östra Göinge Municipality is a municipality in Scania County in southern Sweden. Its seat is located in Broby.
Skåneland or Skånelandene (Danish) is a region on the southern Scandinavian peninsula. It includes the Swedish provinces of Blekinge, Halland, and Scania. The Danish island of Bornholm is traditionally also included. Skåneland has no official recognition or function and the term is not in common usage. Equivalent terms in English and Latin are "the Scanian Provinces" and "Terrae Scaniae" respectively. The term is mostly used in historical contexts and not in daily speech. In Danish, Skånelandene is used more often. The terms have no political implications as the region is not a political entity but a cultural region, without officially established administrative borders.
The Dominions of Sweden or Svenska besittningar were territories that historically came under control of the Swedish Crown, but never became fully integrated with Sweden. This generally meant that they were ruled by Governors-General under the Swedish monarch, but within certain limits retained their own established political systems, essentially their diets. Finland was not a dominion, but an integrated part of Sweden. The dominions had no representation in the Swedish Riksdag as stipulated by the 1634 Instrument of Government paragraph 46: "No one, who is not living inside the separate and old borders of Sweden and Finland, have anything to say at Riksdags and other meetings..."
Sweden Finns are a Finnish-speaking national minority in Sweden.
The Treaty of Roskilde was negotiated at Høje Taastrup Church and signed (NS) during the Second Northern War between Frederick III of Denmark–Norway and Karl X Gustav of Sweden in the Danish city of Roskilde. After a devastating defeat, Denmark–Norway was forced to give up a third of its territory to save the rest, the ceded lands comprising Blekinge, Bornholm, Bohuslän (Båhuslen), Scania (Skåne) and Trøndelag, as well as her claims to Halland.
The history of the province of Scania was for many hundred years, up until the 18th century, marked by the struggle between the two Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden over the hegemony in the Baltic area.
The Tornedalians are descendants of Finns who, at some point, settled to the areas of today's Northern Sweden near the Torne Valley district and west from there.
The Øresund Region, also known as Greater Copenhagen for marketing purposes, is a metropolitan region encompassing the Capital Region of Denmark and Zealand, in eastern Denmark, and Scania, in southern Sweden. Centred around the Øresund strait and the two cities which lie on either side, Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden, the region is connected by the Øresund Bridge, which spans the strait at its southern end, and the HH Ferry route between Helsingør, Denmark, and Helsingborg, Sweden, at the narrowest point of the strait.
The Treaty of Copenhagen was signed on 27 May 1660, and marked the conclusion of the Second Northern War between the Swedish Empire and the alliance of Denmark-Norway and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This treaty was a smaller follow-up treaty to that of the Treaty of Roskilde, which decisively delineated the mutually recognized boundaries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; boundaries which are almost exactly the same to this day.
The Scanian War was a part of the Northern Wars involving the union of Denmark–Norway, Brandenburg and Sweden. It was fought from 1675 to 1679 mainly on Scanian soil, in the former Danish–Norwegian provinces along the border with Sweden, and in Northern Germany. While the latter battles are regarded as a theater of the Scanian war in English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish historiography, they are seen as a separate war in German historiography, called the Swedish-Brandenburgian War.
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.
The Dano-Swedish War of 1658–1660 was a war between Denmark–Norway and Sweden, with the former backed by the Dutch Republic and Poland. It is known in Denmark as the Second Karl Gustav War, in Norway as Bjelkes Feud in Sweden as Karl Gustav's Second Danish War, and in the Netherlands as the Swedish-Dutch War.
Peder Pedersen Winstrup was Bishop of Lund in Scania. Winstrup was bishop there during a period spanning both Danish and Swedish sovereignty and periods of war when the land was contested. He was married to the Danish noblewoman, Dorothea von Andersen who was an influential person in her own right in Scania and known to be strongly pro-Danish.
Scania, also known by its native name of Skåne, is the southernmost of the historical provinces of Sweden. Located in the south tip of the geographical region of Götaland, the province is roughly conterminous with Skåne County, created in 1997. Like the other former provinces of Sweden, Scania still features in colloquial speech and in cultural references, and can therefore not be regarded as an archaic concept. Within Scania there are 33 municipalities that are autonomous within the Skåne Regional Council. Scania's largest city, Malmö, is the third-largest city in Sweden, as well as the fifth-largest in Scandinavia.
The relations between Denmark and Sweden span a long history of interaction. The inhabitants of each speak related North Germanic languages, which have a degree of mutual intelligibility. Both countries formed part of the Kalmar Union between 1397 and 1523, but there exists an inherited cultural competition between Sweden and Denmark. From 1448 to 1790 the two kingdoms went to war against each other at nearly every opportunity; in more than one case a new king tried to prove his worth by waging war on the other country for little or no political reason. Eleven Dano-Swedish wars took place between 1521 and 1814.
Joachim Gersdorff was a Danish politician, from 1650 to 1660 Steward of the Danish Realm. It was Gersdorff who negotiated the Treaty of Roskilde on Denmark's part during the Second Northern War, a war he had himself been in favour of entering. Through this treaty, which was concluded in Roskilde on 8 March 1658 (NS), the eastern Danish provinces of Scania, Halland, Blekinge and Bornholm were ceded to Sweden.
Birgitte "Brita" Scheel(1638–1699), was a Danish noblewoman who married a Danish nobleman who became Swedish with the annexation of Denmark's eastern provinces. For that reason, Birgitte belongs both to Danish and Swedish history, and her family lives on in the now Swedish province of Scania (Skåne).
Jens Mikkelsen Ehrenborg was a Danish soldier and public servant who later became a Swedish nobleman. He was born in 1621 in Fredericia in southern Jutland in Denmark. His name was also spelled Jöns Michelsson, Jens Michelsen or Jöns Michaelson. Upon his ennoblement in 1687, he was given the surname Ehrenborg.