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Mayor suggests Helsinki declare itself an English-language city

132 points by neverminder 5y ago

fy20 5y ago
I live in Vilnius and you can easily get by just by speaking English, you only really need Lithuanian (or Russian, although younger people often don't speak it) if you need to deal with the government. Lots of tech companies hire people from abroad or work with customers abroad, so being able to speak English is basically a given. Is English in Finland not so common?
- antupis 5y ago
  In IT English is de facto language in Finland. For other sectors it depends but generally everyone under 60 speaks at least ok level English.
- drcongo 5y ago
  Anecdotally, every Finn I've met speaks pretty much perfect English.
  - axelroze 5y ago
    Can speak and will speak are two different things. Many people can speak English but would like not to. This is especially the case in groups where foreigners are much less in number than natives. They can all speak English but feel unhappy about having to do that to accommodate the foreigners. Unless Helsinki citizens reach a state in which English is a native language for them and feel other English speakers as co-natives, this whole declaration will be essentially useless at the level of the people foreigners interact with every day. And these matter most. Shopkeeps, colleagues, etc. In essence being able to speak English does not make one less tribal. Cultural integration of foreigners is very hard to do without learning and living with the native language. Due to this 'expats' flock to places where they pay least taxes and have largest amount of other foreigners to socialize with, e.g. Amsterdam.
    - drcongo 5y ago
      I'm not sure this comment was supposed to be a reply to mine. I was just answering the parent and making no claims about desire to speak English, tribalism, cultural integration etc. However I largely agree with what you've written.
    - type0 5y ago
      > Due to this 'expats' flock to places where they pay least taxes and have largest amount of other foreigners to socialize with, e.g. Amsterdam. 'expat' - a word North Americans and Western Europeans like to use to avoid calling themselves immigrants. Usage: Josh is an expat. José is an immigrant. (from urbandictionary.com)
      - TMWNN 5y ago
        >'expat' - a word North Americans and Western Europeans like to use to avoid calling themselves immigrants. Usage: Josh is an expat. José is an immigrant. What nonsense. North Americans and Western Europeans who call themselves expats are exactly that, expatriates, because they aren't planning to stay in the place they're living in forever. If an American or Briton ends up marrying a local, obtaining citizenship, and working in a "normal" (that is, one not typical for expats) job, such a person will readily call himself a immigrant, too. But most don't do that; they will finish their contract, or their educational program, or their series of casual jobs they get to pay their way while "finding themselves" in Prague or Florence or Buenos Aires, and return home.
- gpvos 5y ago
  But how is the situation outside Vilnius and the other large cities and tourist areas? Nowadays you can even get around with English in most of France. Spain is trickier though.
  - fy20 5y ago
    As a tourist it shouldn't be an issue, but if you want to work there (not that there is really much to do outside big cities) you will have issues if you don't speak Lithuanian or Russian. But that's the same as if a non-French speaker tried to find work in somewhere like Valence.
kroltan 5y ago
> But more than 36% of foreign students in Finland leave within a year of graduation, according to government figures, with most citing immigration bureaucracy, high taxation and language difficulties as their main reasons for quitting. Seems like a token gesture then, especially considering: > Many companies require Finnish and public sector employees must master both. So "declaring the city English-speaking" is pointless unless the city actually implements English as an official language, providing legal and civic support for English on all official matters. Seems like streamlining bureaucracy and reviewing the tax code would do more good, but of course it's much more involved than adjusting branding. (I am utterly uninformed in all matters Finland, for all I know Helsinki could already have such support and I do not know it, in that case, good for them and this is effectively a good move!)
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  None of the software companies require Finnish. I don't think many come here and get the education with the aim to become social workers. It's massively easier to get by with english here than almost anywhere else in Europe (besides UK and Ireland).
  - bsmith 5y ago
    Almost all software consulting companies require Finnish, though, as most contracts these consulting firms have with their clients are that the developers are fluent in Finnish.
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      Finland is a relatively small market. Sure, some consultancies make (or customize and integrate) software for local old fashioned companies like banks or for the government. But if you want to build a product and be ambitious and grow, exporting and going international is the only way. The local market just isn't that big. It looks very different compared to a larger country. I bet in Germany, you can make a lot of money with software just for German schools or banks or municipalities. Same in the UK.
Camillo 5y ago
Would be very interesting to hear from a Finn about this. - Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes? - The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? - Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? - Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?
- Kuytu 5y ago
  Some very simplified answers: - Everyone would hire more seniors if possible. Juniors are sometimes seen as expensive and hiring only juniors does not scale. - Education systems do not produce senior people. Also there are other sectors than tech too. I don't know the current situation, but it used to be that places for IT education were never filled completely. There just isn't enough people. - I don't remember this being reported as significant - I believe there is difficulties with taxation etc. if you hire people living in different country.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  > Is the labor shortage real It is pretty real. Hiring programmers is a challenge. The pay you can get is pretty good. > The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? Only 5.5 million people in all of Finland. > Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? No. Finns don't move abroad that often. > Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki? More of that is happening, especially after the pandemic, but obviously the mayor of Helsinki would not want that.
- dsign 5y ago
  I'm going to answer with anecdotal evidence from Finnish people I know, not first hand. - Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes? Both, but mostly the first. A friend of mine chose to work for a local consulting company because it paid more than certain well-known Game Engine company in USA. Furthermore, the Finnish company was more "agile" in the recruitment process, meaning they probably weren't feeling picky, but rather slightly desperate. Caveats: it's just one case. - The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? There seems to be a mismatch between how much Nordic people are in need of the money and job security that a tech profession brings, and the industry needs. In other words, with a social security net, more people pursues other careers, even if they risk finding themselves jobless at certain point. - Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? Hard to answer that one, but it seems the opposite. Last time I checked, Finland had a downright friendly immigration system for qualified people. - Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki? Companies do use remote labor, but I don't think that's a policy the major of Helsinki would go out of his way to promote publicly. Also, when it comes to tech talent, the EU has a peculiar situation: some countries have affordable tech talent slightly in excess, and some countries are searching for affordable tech talent. So there is market competition for the same talent. Hiring out-of-border is not an automatic guaranty of meeting needs. There is another factor, and that's that Finland invests heavily in social security. A local engineer benefits from those investments just by living in Finland. For example, child-care and free, high quality healthcare. Add other benefits the employer already gives to the local workforce, like access to a gym, local cafeteria, and work facilities. An employer may believe they can extract higher-quality labor from somebody by relocating them to a place where they enjoy those investments, and that would come practically at no extra cost for that employer.
ericmay 5y ago
It's fascinating to me to see cities do things unilaterally like this (or maybe through some other mechanism that allows it) in order to be competitive and/or attract capital. But how easy/hard is it to immigrate to Finland, or Helsinki in general? You also have to attract people to your city who use the language, etc.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  For EU citizens it's pretty easy, and Helsinki is fine if you only know English.
jpalomaki 5y ago
I guess this would apply mostly to public services. In general you can quite well along with English. Mostly I hear opposite complaints from foreigners here. They say practicing Finnish is difficult, since most of the people automatically switch to speaking English when they recognize you are not native. One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages).
- tribaal 5y ago
  > One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages). Why is that an issue? It seems reasonable to me if you want to have citizenship. But you can surely live a successful life in Finland as a foreign national, no?
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Finnish is the issue since it's fucking hard to learn. Learning Swedish isn't that bad if you're a native English speaker. "In a shop" - "i en butik", there's quite a bit of similarity between the languages. But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). Not all that outlandish either -- a cognate of Swedish köpa and German kaufen.
      - soundnote 5y ago
        He doesn't mean the vocabulary. Swedish is structurally very similar to English, and both contain lots of Germanic words. The difficulty with Finnish for English-speaking foreigners is that Finnish is an agglutinative language, while English is an analytical one. That is, English mostly uses helper words to adjust word meaning, while Finnish appends modifiers like lego blocks. It also has less Germanic and Latin loans than Swedish does.
checkyoursudo 5y ago
I lived in Sweden for a couple of years. I would not be surprised if (at least some of) the Nordics eventually made English an official language within my lifetime. When I was going through my migration process, someone at the tax office said in response to my statement that my Swedish was pretty bad (paraphrasing here): "I think you could live the rest of your life in Sweden pretty easily speaking only English." I lived in way northern Sweden, so not like a cosmopolitan/metropolitan area like Stockholm/Gothenburg/Malmö. After a couple of years, my Swedish barely improved, and I think the tax office agent was probably correct. My very young kids were in public school there. Probably almost all of the Swedish kids wanted to be friends with my kids, because my kids could speak English just like these kids' parents and older siblings. Almost all of the kids in my rural town were excited to learn English, and I met many fully Swedish kids whom at 7 or 8 years old were already gaining a good level of proficiency in English.
- deleted 5y ago
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- polack 5y ago
  I've heard that Sweden didn't want to make Swedish an official language of the EU when they joined, due to the fact that EU would then use a lot of resources to translate all documents to Swedish. But then Finland (with it's Swedish minority population) went ahead and made it an official language anyway. I'm not sure if it's true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
  - gpvos 5y ago
    I understood that each EU country can only declare one language to be an official EU language (to put a limit on the number of language combinations between which translations are needed). Because of this, there was some talk that English might be dropped as an official language when the UK left the EU, since Ireland puts forth Irish (Gaelic) as its official EU language. If so, since Finland can only propose one language, I suppose that will have been Finnish, not Swedish.
    - 5y ago
kntmckenebrt 5y ago
So I've been watching Spanish language soap operas for 20 years (no judgement please). Lately, the Mexican ones have some characters in them speak in half-English, half-Spanish sentences, with no subtitles, or even full on English sentences, between Spanish sentences. Note that these TV series are targeted at a broad part of the audience, so that implies that they kind of require the watchers to know english to understand them. There is no question about it, english is eating the world. Bonus: English is the official working language of the EU, even if English is spoken officially only in Malta.
- poszlem 5y ago
  Wait, is English not also spoken officially in Ireland?
  - gpvos 5y ago
    AFAIK, each country may only designate one language as official for EU business. Otherwise, the number of language combinations for translating (which is n * (n - 1)) becomes unmanageable. Ireland chooses Irish. English, French and German have a higher status as general EU working languages.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Calling telenovelas “soap operas” is a bit dismissive of them. The best are on par with the top-quality productions of HBO/Netflix/BBC, at least from a writing/acting standpoint. They don't always have the production budget of those others, but there's a reason why they get global distribution into a lot of non-Hispanophone markets. Anecdata: Among my wife's family, I think everyone speaks/understands English and most have at least one additional language if not more (one of her cousins is fluent in and speaks accentless English, Spanish, French and Arabic and has a working ability in German as well). English speakers, in contrast, tend to be stubbornly monolingual.
  - kntmckenebrt 5y ago
    Soap opera is the english translation of telenovela, nothing dismissive here (see wikipedia). I would argue that (some) Turkish soap operas/telenovelas are even better produced than spanish language ones.
pembrook 5y ago
Finland is great at home growing engineering talent, hence the crazy high amount of software startups per capita. However, Finland also is the poorest of the nordic countries, with the lowest salaries comparatively—and yet similarly high cost of living and extremely high taxes. With free movement of talent in the EU, brain drain is a problem. And it’s basically impossible to import talent if your value proposition is: “come for the low salaries, stay for the high taxes” English isn’t the issue. If Helsinki companies paid like those in Zurich and had similarly low taxes, there would be no problem retaining or importing talent. For people who didn’t grow up in the country and benefit from the social welfare system at all, why would they want to come from outside and suddenly start paying for it?
- camillomiller 5y ago
  Same is true for Italy. Comparable software jobs in Berlin - not the richest of cities — are easily 2x to 4x compared to Milan, with costs of living that are lower or similar.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >For people who didn’t grow up in the country and benefit from the social welfare system at all, why would they want to come from outside and suddenly start paying for it? From what I understand, Finland has the best education system on Earth, bar none. While migrants themselves might not benefit from this themselves, their children certainly will.
  - pembrook 5y ago
    True of course for the average Finnish citizen. However, if you’re a highly paid white collar worker, you can afford to put your kids in good schools no matter where you’re living.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      That's simply untrue. Many schools that present themselves as "good" or "elite" are some of the most fucked up places you could ever visit. I went to a private school from years 7-10 and could never put anyone I loved our cared about in that position.
jollybean 5y ago
36% is not that bad. It's cold, Finns are a little 'different' and -> wages are low. If wages were higher, that would make a big dent. Removing requirements for any kind of language fluency would help as well.
dhosek 5y ago
I know at least some, if not all, pan-Scandinavian organizations use English as their language of communications. I first became aware of this in the 80s when the Scandinavian TeX Users Group was formed and they did all their publications in English.
eldaisfish 5y ago
The problems with Helsinki as a place to relocate go well beyond language. Language is a great place to start because learners of Finnish often ask themselves if the effort is worth it. Finnish is a language that works differently from the majority of other languages and is utterly useless on a metric of utility. If you learn Finnish, where outside the immediate boundaries of Finland are you going to use it and how many people will even speak it? There really isn’t a policy solution to this and switching to English won’t be politically popular. That aside, there are bigger problems in Helsinki such as geography and daylight. There’s too much light in the summer and too little in the winter. Not everyone can adjust to that. There isn’t really a policy solution to that. There is also population and mobility - Helsinki isn’t easily accessible from other population centres and exists in relative isolation. Two of the closest population centres are St Petersburg - in Russia - and Stockholm in Sweden. It’s much the same problem in Stockholm in that it is a population centre without other ones nearby although you can drive from Copenhagen or Oslo to Stockholm. Finally, is the challenge of having a society built around strong ethic ties. Even if Helsinki were to switch to English, there will be always be outsiders i.e. those who are not ethnic Finns. Again, this is not something that policy can solve and is one of the reasons that silicon valley and North America in general do very well at.
- axelroze 5y ago
  > Finally, is the challenge of having a society built around strong ethic ties. Even if Helsinki were to switch to English, there will be always be outsiders i.e. those who are not ethnic Finns. Again, this is not something that policy can solve and is one of the reasons that silicon valley and North America in general do very well at. Recently I read a book called Persian Fire by Tom Holland. One detail which struck me as very interesting was how the first democratic ruler of Athens, Cleisthenes, solved the tribalism problem. Here tribalism is the perfect word as the average Athentian citizen of that time associated with one of the 10 tribes based on surnames. His solution was to invent 150 demesnes and have people arbitrarily assigned to them. He also invented new surnames. Something similar is happening in contemporary Singapore. Every neighbourhood must not have more than X% of any ethnic group. My point is that policy can solve this. Might make many people unhappy, like Finns who are forbidden to live in some zip codes because there are too many Finns, but policy is definitely a way to approach this problem (if it is a problem, nothing wrong with mono-cultural societies who do not want foreigners).
tjansen 5y ago
I never understood why no one did this in Germany or the Netherlands. It would make a city (or whole country) so much more attractive for international businesses.
- eythian 5y ago
  I'm not sure it's necessary in the Netherlands, learning the basic language is pretty easy and not uncommon (it's not strange and weird like Finnish), and additionally it's similarly unnecessary. Getting by in English is very easy, it's rare that I encounter someone without functional English and more and more interactions with government (local and national) can be done in English also. All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public. There's already a bit of a "our language is dying!" talk going on from things like a lot of universities offering some programs only in English.
  - tjansen 5y ago
    > it's rare that I encounter someone without functional English and more and more interactions with government I don't worry so much about the interactions, but I think that top-down communication is difficult if you don't speak Dutch or German. Especially letters, as you can't easily use an online translator. Just basic stuff, like enrolling your kid to school. You get a ton of letters, but none of them in English. Also, you say Dutch is easy to learn, but what about people who stay only for a week or a few months? Or, even if they stay longer, the first few months when people don't speak the local language at all, but have to do a lot of paperwork? > All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public. Certainly, especially in Germany. But my argument is that German is already on the path to obsolescence, and if you don't want the same for German culture, it needs to transition to English.
    - soco 5y ago
      German is already on the path to obsolescence? Mind to expand on this?
beyondcompute 5y ago
I support this!
bluGill 5y ago
I wish everyone in the world spoke one language. English is my preference - but only because I already speak it (I fully recognize it is a terrible choice). It is very bad for the world that there are people who cannot communicate. So many lost opportunities (both business and social) just because two people can't have a conversation. Learning a new language is hard. The hardest thing most adults attempt in their lifetime and most fail. (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that). I have no delusions that we will ever settle on a common language, but I still wish it could happen.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'd love a single global language too. > (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that) I'm not sure if quantum physics really is harder. Learning a new language requires tremendous amount of work over many years (and a lot of that work happens naturally, as people are making use of the new language skills) - I feel very few people ever expended a comparable amount of effort into learning quantum physics, so we don't have a good baseline to compare.
- whomstve 5y ago
  And I wish for the complete opposite. When I go to Finland, I want to hear Finnish, read Finnish, and eat Finnish. I don't want to go to a place where kids speak, write, and think exactly like the kids from the school down the road here in North America. I don't want to travel 8000km to hear and see the same things as I have for my whole life. There's nothing more depressing to me than a world where everything is the same and where there is no friction between anything.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. Same language does not imply same everything else.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    When I go to Finland I want to understand and be understood. When I go to Spain I want to understand and be understood. When I go to - any of the 100+ other countries in the world (most with more than one language) - the same, I want to understand and be understood. If this was just about Finland I would learn their language (or just not go there in my lifetime), but this is about the 3000 other languages spoken in the world as well, and nobody has time to learn them all. If I want to read I'll go to my local library and request a book. Unless you mean streets signs - but there again not enough time.
amelius 5y ago
Taiwan should do the same.
emilfihlman 5y ago
Please no. Finnish is already super threatened as a language, we don't need to speed up trying to kill it.
- Kuytu 5y ago
  4.9 million people speak Finnish as their first language. Does not sound very threatened to me.
bsd44 5y ago
We are living in America Amerika ist wunderbar We are living in America Amerika, Amerika
- trutannus 5y ago
  English isn't an American language, it's an English language, from the English Commonwealth; former British colonies, which America once was. There's a significant number of non American nations who use it as a first language. See any commonwealth nation for instance. It would be more correct to say: We're all living in the United Kingdom.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    America is definitely the exporter of English to the rest of the world. People are learning English by watching American movies and TV shows, listening to American music and playing American video games.
    - trutannus 5y ago
      Now, perhaps. But that's a recent development, really only over the past 50-100 years. English language hegemony predates that. Prior to the very recent development of American cultural export, English was propagated around the world by England and their colonization. In fact, it's more accurate to say that English colonization enabled the United States to export its culture in the first place. Views like yours are exemplars of Americentrism.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      I think you should be much more cautious before making a generalization like that. People also watch British films and TV shows (Harry Potter, James Bond, Dr Who, Peppa Pig), listen to British music (Ed Sheeran, Adele, Little Mix), and play British video games (GTA, Tomb Raider). I think it's probably under 50% of the market in non-English-speaking countries on average, but could be the majority in some countries with closer past or present associations to the UK.
olegp 5y ago
It's interesting to see this story get so much attention, since the Helsinki metropolitan area includes Espoo, which actually made English an official service language recently and it's an unofficial one in the rest of the country. All online government services I ever used have English language versions. You can definitely get by with just English here and have been for a while. In fact, when I first lived in Helsinki in 2000 you had to speak Finnish in some restaurants since the staff didn't speak English, whereas now it's the other way around. There are however problems with English language primary education: while there are enough English language daycares, there's a shortage of (free) places in English language schools. Hopefully that's something that will be addressed soon, though. If you're considering Finland as a place to relocate to, check out these links from our startup's blog: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-developer-22 https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-de... https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/finnish-contract-developer-faq-35 https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/finnish-contract-developer-fa... These links might also be interesting: https://www.helsinkibusinesshub.fi/90-day-finn/ https://www.helsinkibusinesshub.fi/90-day-finn/ https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/do-business-with-finland/work-in-finland https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/do-business-with-finland/w...
zokier 5y ago
> ”Helsinki voisi julistautua englanninkieliseksi kaupungiksi, jossa englantia osaavilta ei vaadittaisi myös suomen ja ruotsin kielen taitoa.” This is the citation the whole story is built upon. The meat of the idea being that for city employees (i.e primarily public servants) Finnish and Swedish language skill wouldn't be a job requirement anymore. So the "declaration" probably would have way smaller impact than one would expect from such grand statement. Basically only means that you would not be guaranteed to get finnish/swedish service from citys public services. So what this would cause is disenfranchise the lower education people who do not have fluent English skills and are also probably in greater need of the public services. All that just in a vain hope to attract more talent.
- sepnax 5y ago
  I don't see Swedish city officials being required knowledge of Finnish language, even though the Finnish minority in Sweden is roughly the same size.
  - dijit 5y ago
    The arrangements aren’t all that reciprocal because one of those countries used to occupy the other. It’s the same(ish) as Russian minority speakers having more rights in Estonia and Ukraine than Ukrainian or Estonian in Russia. I think each of those countries hates the “invading” language though. It’s a memory of oppression. Finns certainly mentioned that they hated Swedish when I was there and I’m also aware of Estonians hating Russian.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      Russian minority in Estonia does not even have guaranteed citizen rights, not to mention any special rights. Ditto for Ukraine where Russian language in some respects threated as third class citizen, i.e., the only language that you can't use in education or in official contexts. They still pretty much continue to speak it, though.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      No, none of those countries "used to occupy the other". No more than Finland at the moment is "occupying", say, Päijät-Häme or Ostrobothnia.
endanke 5y ago
I've been living in Helsinki for 3 years and while I like the idea of supporting foreigners, I also find this a bit disappointing. I only know a handful of expacts who even attempted to learn Finnish, but I know a bunch of people who live here for 10-15 years and still not integrated because they only communicate in English. The simplest alternative would be to replace Swedish with English as the secondary official language, but support people more who wants to learn Finnish, especially because the local language courses were always full when I checked.
- nickff 5y ago
  The non-integration you’re talking about is common in multi-cultural cities. Vancouver, Canada is a very strong example of this, with distinctly Chinese, Philippino, and Indian areas with large proportions of the population who do not integrate. It’s almost the opposite of a melting pot, seems stable, and could be described as ghetto-ized.
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    There's also a large English-speaking population that never learned Squamish, since they settled in Granville about 150 years ago.
    - jszymborski 5y ago
      I'd argue it's a bit harder to endanger a majority language without violent relocation and re-education camps that the Squamish people suffered; but point taken.
    - nickff 5y ago
      I am sure the Kunda, Comb Ceramic, Corded Ware, Kiukainen, and Pöljä who used to occupy most of Finland didn't speak modern Finnish, yet here we are. I understand the desire to make political points about the status of native/first nations populations in Canada, but frankly, English and French are Canada's official languages.
vondur 5y ago
I must say I'm always impressed by how well the Nordic nations teach English. They seem to have a better grasp of writing in English than many American's do.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  > American's QED. I think it helps that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all very similar to English in grammar – but with less flexibility, e.g. a sloppy but understandable word order in English might make no sense at all if spoken in Danish.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  That’s typical. I’m learning French as a second language at one of the formal institutes and whenever I go on French social media, I have absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about because grammar and spelling go out the window, and the slang and shortcuts start.
- soundnote 5y ago
  It's less teaching and more the exposure. Teaching languages is mostly a waste of time because schools do it wrong. But Nordic countries are so small you can't dub everything the way Germany or France do so most TV is only subtitled, video games, Internet and a lot of music are in English. You learn by osmosis.
belval 5y ago
Curious if anyone from Finland can comment: How is it that you are not scared of seeing your culture be erased by the ever-increasing use of English? Some comments mention that you can find restaurants where no one speaks Finnish. Is that not a red flag that at some point the country might flip entirely?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Curious if anyone from Finland can comment: How is it that you are not scared of seeing your culture be erased by the ever-increasing use of English? For that, one needs to have a culture to be worried for... Somewhat less flippantly: How do you know they aren't? I'd guess most people don't worry about that, but some probably do. Personally, I don't; I'm fairly certain Finnish will survive... And I have enough to worry about for the country's minority language, Swedish, which I fear won't survive here for many more generations. > Some comments mention that you can find restaurants where no one speaks Finnish. Is that not a red flag that at some point the country might flip entirely? No. I think you misread that; at least the comment I saw on the subject read not like "nobody" but "not everybody" to me. Your waitress might speak only English, so if you don't, you'd have to ask for another one -- most, or at least some, of the rest of them probably do speak Finnish.
- soundnote 5y ago
  Many are, and it feels bothersome to forget how to speak your native language sometimes. But it's not just the language that erases the culture, it's the actual cultural content and the overwhelming dominance of big players in the market. The entire country has ~5.5 million people, we lose in population to any number of random cities you might pick. As for the latter: Why do you think localist-populist parties are on the rise all across Europe? A lot of people very much worry about drowning in the tide of homogenizing globalism.
eripaha 5y ago
They are trying to get experts to move to helsinki. Mean while we have low wages for programmers and high taxes. We are wasting our money to "moral high ground projects". I am planning to move away from helsinki for these reasons.

132 points by neverminder 5y ago

fy20 5y ago

I live in Vilnius and you can easily get by just by speaking English, you only really need Lithuanian (or Russian, although younger people often don't speak it) if you need to deal with the government. Lots of tech companies hire people from abroad or work with customers abroad, so being able to speak English is basically a given. Is English in Finland not so common?

antupis 5y ago
In IT English is de facto language in Finland. For other sectors it depends but generally everyone under 60 speaks at least ok level English.
drcongo 5y ago
Anecdotally, every Finn I've met speaks pretty much perfect English.
- axelroze 5y ago
  Can speak and will speak are two different things. Many people can speak English but would like not to. This is especially the case in groups where foreigners are much less in number than natives. They can all speak English but feel unhappy about having to do that to accommodate the foreigners. Unless Helsinki citizens reach a state in which English is a native language for them and feel other English speakers as co-natives, this whole declaration will be essentially useless at the level of the people foreigners interact with every day. And these matter most. Shopkeeps, colleagues, etc. In essence being able to speak English does not make one less tribal. Cultural integration of foreigners is very hard to do without learning and living with the native language. Due to this 'expats' flock to places where they pay least taxes and have largest amount of other foreigners to socialize with, e.g. Amsterdam.
  - drcongo 5y ago
    I'm not sure this comment was supposed to be a reply to mine. I was just answering the parent and making no claims about desire to speak English, tribalism, cultural integration etc. However I largely agree with what you've written.
  - type0 5y ago
    > Due to this 'expats' flock to places where they pay least taxes and have largest amount of other foreigners to socialize with, e.g. Amsterdam. 'expat' - a word North Americans and Western Europeans like to use to avoid calling themselves immigrants. Usage: Josh is an expat. José is an immigrant. (from urbandictionary.com)
    - TMWNN 5y ago
      >'expat' - a word North Americans and Western Europeans like to use to avoid calling themselves immigrants. Usage: Josh is an expat. José is an immigrant. What nonsense. North Americans and Western Europeans who call themselves expats are exactly that, expatriates, because they aren't planning to stay in the place they're living in forever. If an American or Briton ends up marrying a local, obtaining citizenship, and working in a "normal" (that is, one not typical for expats) job, such a person will readily call himself a immigrant, too. But most don't do that; they will finish their contract, or their educational program, or their series of casual jobs they get to pay their way while "finding themselves" in Prague or Florence or Buenos Aires, and return home.
gpvos 5y ago
But how is the situation outside Vilnius and the other large cities and tourist areas? Nowadays you can even get around with English in most of France. Spain is trickier though.
- fy20 5y ago
  As a tourist it shouldn't be an issue, but if you want to work there (not that there is really much to do outside big cities) you will have issues if you don't speak Lithuanian or Russian. But that's the same as if a non-French speaker tried to find work in somewhere like Valence.

kroltan 5y ago

> But more than 36% of foreign students in Finland leave within a year of graduation, according to government figures, with most citing immigration bureaucracy, high taxation and language difficulties as their main reasons for quitting. Seems like a token gesture then, especially considering: > Many companies require Finnish and public sector employees must master both. So "declaring the city English-speaking" is pointless unless the city actually implements English as an official language, providing legal and civic support for English on all official matters. Seems like streamlining bureaucracy and reviewing the tax code would do more good, but of course it's much more involved than adjusting branding. (I am utterly uninformed in all matters Finland, for all I know Helsinki could already have such support and I do not know it, in that case, good for them and this is effectively a good move!)

Gravityloss 5y ago
None of the software companies require Finnish. I don't think many come here and get the education with the aim to become social workers. It's massively easier to get by with english here than almost anywhere else in Europe (besides UK and Ireland).
- bsmith 5y ago
  Almost all software consulting companies require Finnish, though, as most contracts these consulting firms have with their clients are that the developers are fluent in Finnish.
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    Finland is a relatively small market. Sure, some consultancies make (or customize and integrate) software for local old fashioned companies like banks or for the government. But if you want to build a product and be ambitious and grow, exporting and going international is the only way. The local market just isn't that big. It looks very different compared to a larger country. I bet in Germany, you can make a lot of money with software just for German schools or banks or municipalities. Same in the UK.

Camillo 5y ago

Would be very interesting to hear from a Finn about this. - Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes? - The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? - Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? - Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?

Kuytu 5y ago
Some very simplified answers: - Everyone would hire more seniors if possible. Juniors are sometimes seen as expensive and hiring only juniors does not scale. - Education systems do not produce senior people. Also there are other sectors than tech too. I don't know the current situation, but it used to be that places for IT education were never filled completely. There just isn't enough people. - I don't remember this being reported as significant - I believe there is difficulties with taxation etc. if you hire people living in different country.
user-the-name 5y ago
> Is the labor shortage real It is pretty real. Hiring programmers is a challenge. The pay you can get is pretty good. > The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? Only 5.5 million people in all of Finland. > Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? No. Finns don't move abroad that often. > Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki? More of that is happening, especially after the pandemic, but obviously the mayor of Helsinki would not want that.
dsign 5y ago
I'm going to answer with anecdotal evidence from Finnish people I know, not first hand. - Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes? Both, but mostly the first. A friend of mine chose to work for a local consulting company because it paid more than certain well-known Game Engine company in USA. Furthermore, the Finnish company was more "agile" in the recruitment process, meaning they probably weren't feeling picky, but rather slightly desperate. Caveats: it's just one case. - The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent? There seems to be a mismatch between how much Nordic people are in need of the money and job security that a tech profession brings, and the industry needs. In other words, with a social security net, more people pursues other careers, even if they risk finding themselves jobless at certain point. - Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers? Hard to answer that one, but it seems the opposite. Last time I checked, Finland had a downright friendly immigration system for qualified people. - Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki? Companies do use remote labor, but I don't think that's a policy the major of Helsinki would go out of his way to promote publicly. Also, when it comes to tech talent, the EU has a peculiar situation: some countries have affordable tech talent slightly in excess, and some countries are searching for affordable tech talent. So there is market competition for the same talent. Hiring out-of-border is not an automatic guaranty of meeting needs. There is another factor, and that's that Finland invests heavily in social security. A local engineer benefits from those investments just by living in Finland. For example, child-care and free, high quality healthcare. Add other benefits the employer already gives to the local workforce, like access to a gym, local cafeteria, and work facilities. An employer may believe they can extract higher-quality labor from somebody by relocating them to a place where they enjoy those investments, and that would come practically at no extra cost for that employer.

ericmay 5y ago

It's fascinating to me to see cities do things unilaterally like this (or maybe through some other mechanism that allows it) in order to be competitive and/or attract capital. But how easy/hard is it to immigrate to Finland, or Helsinki in general? You also have to attract people to your city who use the language, etc.

Y_Y 5y ago
For EU citizens it's pretty easy, and Helsinki is fine if you only know English.

jpalomaki 5y ago

I guess this would apply mostly to public services. In general you can quite well along with English. Mostly I hear opposite complaints from foreigners here. They say practicing Finnish is difficult, since most of the people automatically switch to speaking English when they recognize you are not native. One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages).

tribaal 5y ago
> One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages). Why is that an issue? It seems reasonable to me if you want to have citizenship. But you can surely live a successful life in Finland as a foreign national, no?
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Finnish is the issue since it's fucking hard to learn. Learning Swedish isn't that bad if you're a native English speaker. "In a shop" - "i en butik", there's quite a bit of similarity between the languages. But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). Not all that outlandish either -- a cognate of Swedish köpa and German kaufen.
    - soundnote 5y ago
      He doesn't mean the vocabulary. Swedish is structurally very similar to English, and both contain lots of Germanic words. The difficulty with Finnish for English-speaking foreigners is that Finnish is an agglutinative language, while English is an analytical one. That is, English mostly uses helper words to adjust word meaning, while Finnish appends modifiers like lego blocks. It also has less Germanic and Latin loans than Swedish does.

checkyoursudo 5y ago

I lived in Sweden for a couple of years. I would not be surprised if (at least some of) the Nordics eventually made English an official language within my lifetime. When I was going through my migration process, someone at the tax office said in response to my statement that my Swedish was pretty bad (paraphrasing here): "I think you could live the rest of your life in Sweden pretty easily speaking only English." I lived in way northern Sweden, so not like a cosmopolitan/metropolitan area like Stockholm/Gothenburg/Malmö. After a couple of years, my Swedish barely improved, and I think the tax office agent was probably correct. My very young kids were in public school there. Probably almost all of the Swedish kids wanted to be friends with my kids, because my kids could speak English just like these kids' parents and older siblings. Almost all of the kids in my rural town were excited to learn English, and I met many fully Swedish kids whom at 7 or 8 years old were already gaining a good level of proficiency in English.

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polack 5y ago
I've heard that Sweden didn't want to make Swedish an official language of the EU when they joined, due to the fact that EU would then use a lot of resources to translate all documents to Swedish. But then Finland (with it's Swedish minority population) went ahead and made it an official language anyway. I'm not sure if it's true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
- gpvos 5y ago
  I understood that each EU country can only declare one language to be an official EU language (to put a limit on the number of language combinations between which translations are needed). Because of this, there was some talk that English might be dropped as an official language when the UK left the EU, since Ireland puts forth Irish (Gaelic) as its official EU language. If so, since Finland can only propose one language, I suppose that will have been Finnish, not Swedish.
  - 5y ago

kntmckenebrt 5y ago

So I've been watching Spanish language soap operas for 20 years (no judgement please). Lately, the Mexican ones have some characters in them speak in half-English, half-Spanish sentences, with no subtitles, or even full on English sentences, between Spanish sentences. Note that these TV series are targeted at a broad part of the audience, so that implies that they kind of require the watchers to know english to understand them. There is no question about it, english is eating the world. Bonus: English is the official working language of the EU, even if English is spoken officially only in Malta.

poszlem 5y ago
Wait, is English not also spoken officially in Ireland?
- gpvos 5y ago
  AFAIK, each country may only designate one language as official for EU business. Otherwise, the number of language combinations for translating (which is n * (n - 1)) becomes unmanageable. Ireland chooses Irish. English, French and German have a higher status as general EU working languages.
dhosek 5y ago
Calling telenovelas “soap operas” is a bit dismissive of them. The best are on par with the top-quality productions of HBO/Netflix/BBC, at least from a writing/acting standpoint. They don't always have the production budget of those others, but there's a reason why they get global distribution into a lot of non-Hispanophone markets. Anecdata: Among my wife's family, I think everyone speaks/understands English and most have at least one additional language if not more (one of her cousins is fluent in and speaks accentless English, Spanish, French and Arabic and has a working ability in German as well). English speakers, in contrast, tend to be stubbornly monolingual.
- kntmckenebrt 5y ago
  Soap opera is the english translation of telenovela, nothing dismissive here (see wikipedia). I would argue that (some) Turkish soap operas/telenovelas are even better produced than spanish language ones.

pembrook 5y ago

Finland is great at home growing engineering talent, hence the crazy high amount of software startups per capita. However, Finland also is the poorest of the nordic countries, with the lowest salaries comparatively—and yet similarly high cost of living and extremely high taxes. With free movement of talent in the EU, brain drain is a problem. And it’s basically impossible to import talent if your value proposition is: “come for the low salaries, stay for the high taxes” English isn’t the issue. If Helsinki companies paid like those in Zurich and had similarly low taxes, there would be no problem retaining or importing talent. For people who didn’t grow up in the country and benefit from the social welfare system at all, why would they want to come from outside and suddenly start paying for it?

camillomiller 5y ago
Same is true for Italy. Comparable software jobs in Berlin - not the richest of cities — are easily 2x to 4x compared to Milan, with costs of living that are lower or similar.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>For people who didn’t grow up in the country and benefit from the social welfare system at all, why would they want to come from outside and suddenly start paying for it? From what I understand, Finland has the best education system on Earth, bar none. While migrants themselves might not benefit from this themselves, their children certainly will.
- pembrook 5y ago
  True of course for the average Finnish citizen. However, if you’re a highly paid white collar worker, you can afford to put your kids in good schools no matter where you’re living.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    That's simply untrue. Many schools that present themselves as "good" or "elite" are some of the most fucked up places you could ever visit. I went to a private school from years 7-10 and could never put anyone I loved our cared about in that position.

jollybean 5y ago

36% is not that bad. It's cold, Finns are a little 'different' and -> wages are low. If wages were higher, that would make a big dent. Removing requirements for any kind of language fluency would help as well.

dhosek 5y ago

I know at least some, if not all, pan-Scandinavian organizations use English as their language of communications. I first became aware of this in the 80s when the Scandinavian TeX Users Group was formed and they did all their publications in English.

eldaisfish 5y ago

The problems with Helsinki as a place to relocate go well beyond language. Language is a great place to start because learners of Finnish often ask themselves if the effort is worth it. Finnish is a language that works differently from the majority of other languages and is utterly useless on a metric of utility. If you learn Finnish, where outside the immediate boundaries of Finland are you going to use it and how many people will even speak it? There really isn’t a policy solution to this and switching to English won’t be politically popular. That aside, there are bigger problems in Helsinki such as geography and daylight. There’s too much light in the summer and too little in the winter. Not everyone can adjust to that. There isn’t really a policy solution to that. There is also population and mobility - Helsinki isn’t easily accessible from other population centres and exists in relative isolation. Two of the closest population centres are St Petersburg - in Russia - and Stockholm in Sweden. It’s much the same problem in Stockholm in that it is a population centre without other ones nearby although you can drive from Copenhagen or Oslo to Stockholm. Finally, is the challenge of having a society built around strong ethic ties. Even if Helsinki were to switch to English, there will be always be outsiders i.e. those who are not ethnic Finns. Again, this is not something that policy can solve and is one of the reasons that silicon valley and North America in general do very well at.

axelroze 5y ago
> Finally, is the challenge of having a society built around strong ethic ties. Even if Helsinki were to switch to English, there will be always be outsiders i.e. those who are not ethnic Finns. Again, this is not something that policy can solve and is one of the reasons that silicon valley and North America in general do very well at. Recently I read a book called Persian Fire by Tom Holland. One detail which struck me as very interesting was how the first democratic ruler of Athens, Cleisthenes, solved the tribalism problem. Here tribalism is the perfect word as the average Athentian citizen of that time associated with one of the 10 tribes based on surnames. His solution was to invent 150 demesnes and have people arbitrarily assigned to them. He also invented new surnames. Something similar is happening in contemporary Singapore. Every neighbourhood must not have more than X% of any ethnic group. My point is that policy can solve this. Might make many people unhappy, like Finns who are forbidden to live in some zip codes because there are too many Finns, but policy is definitely a way to approach this problem (if it is a problem, nothing wrong with mono-cultural societies who do not want foreigners).

tjansen 5y ago

I never understood why no one did this in Germany or the Netherlands. It would make a city (or whole country) so much more attractive for international businesses.

eythian 5y ago
I'm not sure it's necessary in the Netherlands, learning the basic language is pretty easy and not uncommon (it's not strange and weird like Finnish), and additionally it's similarly unnecessary. Getting by in English is very easy, it's rare that I encounter someone without functional English and more and more interactions with government (local and national) can be done in English also. All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public. There's already a bit of a "our language is dying!" talk going on from things like a lot of universities offering some programs only in English.
- tjansen 5y ago
  > it's rare that I encounter someone without functional English and more and more interactions with government I don't worry so much about the interactions, but I think that top-down communication is difficult if you don't speak Dutch or German. Especially letters, as you can't easily use an online translator. Just basic stuff, like enrolling your kid to school. You get a ton of letters, but none of them in English. Also, you say Dutch is easy to learn, but what about people who stay only for a week or a few months? Or, even if they stay longer, the first few months when people don't speak the local language at all, but have to do a lot of paperwork? > All this said, it could be a useful marketing thing, though I wouldn't be surprised to see pushback from a portion of the public. Certainly, especially in Germany. But my argument is that German is already on the path to obsolescence, and if you don't want the same for German culture, it needs to transition to English.
  - soco 5y ago
    German is already on the path to obsolescence? Mind to expand on this?

beyondcompute 5y ago

I support this!

bluGill 5y ago

I wish everyone in the world spoke one language. English is my preference - but only because I already speak it (I fully recognize it is a terrible choice). It is very bad for the world that there are people who cannot communicate. So many lost opportunities (both business and social) just because two people can't have a conversation. Learning a new language is hard. The hardest thing most adults attempt in their lifetime and most fail. (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that). I have no delusions that we will ever settle on a common language, but I still wish it could happen.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I'd love a single global language too. > (Learning quantum physics would be harder, but few adults attempt that) I'm not sure if quantum physics really is harder. Learning a new language requires tremendous amount of work over many years (and a lot of that work happens naturally, as people are making use of the new language skills) - I feel very few people ever expended a comparable amount of effort into learning quantum physics, so we don't have a good baseline to compare.
whomstve 5y ago
And I wish for the complete opposite. When I go to Finland, I want to hear Finnish, read Finnish, and eat Finnish. I don't want to go to a place where kids speak, write, and think exactly like the kids from the school down the road here in North America. I don't want to travel 8000km to hear and see the same things as I have for my whole life. There's nothing more depressing to me than a world where everything is the same and where there is no friction between anything.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. Same language does not imply same everything else.
- bluGill 5y ago
  When I go to Finland I want to understand and be understood. When I go to Spain I want to understand and be understood. When I go to - any of the 100+ other countries in the world (most with more than one language) - the same, I want to understand and be understood. If this was just about Finland I would learn their language (or just not go there in my lifetime), but this is about the 3000 other languages spoken in the world as well, and nobody has time to learn them all. If I want to read I'll go to my local library and request a book. Unless you mean streets signs - but there again not enough time.

amelius 5y ago

Taiwan should do the same.

emilfihlman 5y ago

Please no. Finnish is already super threatened as a language, we don't need to speed up trying to kill it.

Kuytu 5y ago
4.9 million people speak Finnish as their first language. Does not sound very threatened to me.

bsd44 5y ago

We are living in America Amerika ist wunderbar We are living in America Amerika, Amerika

trutannus 5y ago
English isn't an American language, it's an English language, from the English Commonwealth; former British colonies, which America once was. There's a significant number of non American nations who use it as a first language. See any commonwealth nation for instance. It would be more correct to say: We're all living in the United Kingdom.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  America is definitely the exporter of English to the rest of the world. People are learning English by watching American movies and TV shows, listening to American music and playing American video games.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Now, perhaps. But that's a recent development, really only over the past 50-100 years. English language hegemony predates that. Prior to the very recent development of American cultural export, English was propagated around the world by England and their colonization. In fact, it's more accurate to say that English colonization enabled the United States to export its culture in the first place. Views like yours are exemplars of Americentrism.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    I think you should be much more cautious before making a generalization like that. People also watch British films and TV shows (Harry Potter, James Bond, Dr Who, Peppa Pig), listen to British music (Ed Sheeran, Adele, Little Mix), and play British video games (GTA, Tomb Raider). I think it's probably under 50% of the market in non-English-speaking countries on average, but could be the majority in some countries with closer past or present associations to the UK.

olegp 5y ago

It's interesting to see this story get so much attention, since the Helsinki metropolitan area includes Espoo, which actually made English an official service language recently and it's an unofficial one in the rest of the country. All online government services I ever used have English language versions. You can definitely get by with just English here and have been for a while. In fact, when I first lived in Helsinki in 2000 you had to speak Finnish in some restaurants since the staff didn't speak English, whereas now it's the other way around. There are however problems with English language primary education: while there are enough English language daycares, there's a shortage of (free) places in English language schools. Hopefully that's something that will be addressed soon, though. If you're considering Finland as a place to relocate to, check out these links from our startup's blog: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-developer-22 https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-de... https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/finnish-contract-developer-faq-35 https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/finnish-contract-developer-fa... These links might also be interesting: https://www.helsinkibusinesshub.fi/90-day-finn/ https://www.helsinkibusinesshub.fi/90-day-finn/ https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/do-business-with-finland/work-in-finland https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/do-business-with-finland/w...

zokier 5y ago

> ”Helsinki voisi julistautua englanninkieliseksi kaupungiksi, jossa englantia osaavilta ei vaadittaisi myös suomen ja ruotsin kielen taitoa.” This is the citation the whole story is built upon. The meat of the idea being that for city employees (i.e primarily public servants) Finnish and Swedish language skill wouldn't be a job requirement anymore. So the "declaration" probably would have way smaller impact than one would expect from such grand statement. Basically only means that you would not be guaranteed to get finnish/swedish service from citys public services. So what this would cause is disenfranchise the lower education people who do not have fluent English skills and are also probably in greater need of the public services. All that just in a vain hope to attract more talent.

sepnax 5y ago
I don't see Swedish city officials being required knowledge of Finnish language, even though the Finnish minority in Sweden is roughly the same size.
- dijit 5y ago
  The arrangements aren’t all that reciprocal because one of those countries used to occupy the other. It’s the same(ish) as Russian minority speakers having more rights in Estonia and Ukraine than Ukrainian or Estonian in Russia. I think each of those countries hates the “invading” language though. It’s a memory of oppression. Finns certainly mentioned that they hated Swedish when I was there and I’m also aware of Estonians hating Russian.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Russian minority in Estonia does not even have guaranteed citizen rights, not to mention any special rights. Ditto for Ukraine where Russian language in some respects threated as third class citizen, i.e., the only language that you can't use in education or in official contexts. They still pretty much continue to speak it, though.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    No, none of those countries "used to occupy the other". No more than Finland at the moment is "occupying", say, Päijät-Häme or Ostrobothnia.

endanke 5y ago

I've been living in Helsinki for 3 years and while I like the idea of supporting foreigners, I also find this a bit disappointing. I only know a handful of expacts who even attempted to learn Finnish, but I know a bunch of people who live here for 10-15 years and still not integrated because they only communicate in English. The simplest alternative would be to replace Swedish with English as the secondary official language, but support people more who wants to learn Finnish, especially because the local language courses were always full when I checked.

nickff 5y ago
The non-integration you’re talking about is common in multi-cultural cities. Vancouver, Canada is a very strong example of this, with distinctly Chinese, Philippino, and Indian areas with large proportions of the population who do not integrate. It’s almost the opposite of a melting pot, seems stable, and could be described as ghetto-ized.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  There's also a large English-speaking population that never learned Squamish, since they settled in Granville about 150 years ago.
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    I'd argue it's a bit harder to endanger a majority language without violent relocation and re-education camps that the Squamish people suffered; but point taken.
  - nickff 5y ago
    I am sure the Kunda, Comb Ceramic, Corded Ware, Kiukainen, and Pöljä who used to occupy most of Finland didn't speak modern Finnish, yet here we are. I understand the desire to make political points about the status of native/first nations populations in Canada, but frankly, English and French are Canada's official languages.

vondur 5y ago

I must say I'm always impressed by how well the Nordic nations teach English. They seem to have a better grasp of writing in English than many American's do.

Symbiote 5y ago
> American's QED. I think it helps that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all very similar to English in grammar – but with less flexibility, e.g. a sloppy but understandable word order in English might make no sense at all if spoken in Danish.
Scoundreller 5y ago
That’s typical. I’m learning French as a second language at one of the formal institutes and whenever I go on French social media, I have absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about because grammar and spelling go out the window, and the slang and shortcuts start.
soundnote 5y ago
It's less teaching and more the exposure. Teaching languages is mostly a waste of time because schools do it wrong. But Nordic countries are so small you can't dub everything the way Germany or France do so most TV is only subtitled, video games, Internet and a lot of music are in English. You learn by osmosis.

belval 5y ago

Curious if anyone from Finland can comment: How is it that you are not scared of seeing your culture be erased by the ever-increasing use of English? Some comments mention that you can find restaurants where no one speaks Finnish. Is that not a red flag that at some point the country might flip entirely?

CRConrad 5y ago
> Curious if anyone from Finland can comment: How is it that you are not scared of seeing your culture be erased by the ever-increasing use of English? For that, one needs to have a culture to be worried for... Somewhat less flippantly: How do you know they aren't? I'd guess most people don't worry about that, but some probably do. Personally, I don't; I'm fairly certain Finnish will survive... And I have enough to worry about for the country's minority language, Swedish, which I fear won't survive here for many more generations. > Some comments mention that you can find restaurants where no one speaks Finnish. Is that not a red flag that at some point the country might flip entirely? No. I think you misread that; at least the comment I saw on the subject read not like "nobody" but "not everybody" to me. Your waitress might speak only English, so if you don't, you'd have to ask for another one -- most, or at least some, of the rest of them probably do speak Finnish.
soundnote 5y ago
Many are, and it feels bothersome to forget how to speak your native language sometimes. But it's not just the language that erases the culture, it's the actual cultural content and the overwhelming dominance of big players in the market. The entire country has ~5.5 million people, we lose in population to any number of random cities you might pick. As for the latter: Why do you think localist-populist parties are on the rise all across Europe? A lot of people very much worry about drowning in the tide of homogenizing globalism.

eripaha 5y ago

They are trying to get experts to move to helsinki. Mean while we have low wages for programmers and high taxes. We are wasting our money to "moral high ground projects". I am planning to move away from helsinki for these reasons.