Re:Housing is a human right: How Finland is eradicating home...
by corporate_shi11 on Friday January 31, 2020 @08:44AM
(#22201565)
Think about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.
Re:Housing is a human right: How Finland is eradicating home...
by pavlov on Friday January 31, 2020 @11:23AM
(#22202872)
Finnish is my native language, but I grew up in Helsinki in the 1980s in an environment where essentially everyone I met could speak at least three languages.
The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.
The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory.
Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.