Which is actually pretty bad because the city and administration is literally the one place where a Finnish citizen should be guaranteed to communicate in the official language.
I don't mind as much what language requirements private companies have if it works for them, but it would be pretty comical to go to my municipal office and have someone work my case who doesn't speak his own country's language.
This is pandering to the potential of foreign investment --which could benefit already rich people and who potentially price out the locals. Yay, globalization.
If in a few centuries some part of Finland (say, Päijät-Häme or something) is an independent nation, do you think it would be natural for them to talk about the old days — our present — as "back when we were part of Finland", or should they say "our dark age of oppression under the bootheel of the Finnish colonial project"?
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.
You’re very wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_under_Swedish_rule?wpr...
That should have been a clue.
> You’re very wrong.
No, I'm not. The very first sentence in the WP article you cite:
"In Finnish history, Finland under Swedish rule refers to the historical period when the bulk of the area that later came to constitute Finland *was an integral part of Sweden."*
Are you saying it would be correct in a future where they are independent countries to retroactively say Ostrobothnia-now and Päijät-Häme-now were "colonies of Finland" back in the twentieth century? If not, then Finland wasn't a "colony of Sweden" either.
The rest of the article is liberally sprinkled with
A) Tendentious phrasing like "Finland was annexed as part of the Western Christian domain" ("annexed" to a religion?), and
B) Grammatical mistakes typical of Finnish-speakers with a bad grounding in Germanic languages like Swedish and English.
So... No. If you think the bigoted view on history some parts of that WP article espouses are to be taken seriously, it is you who are wrong.
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.
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.