Swedish isn't technically foreign language in Finland
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Lol I literally came here to say that.
Dutch isn't a foreign language in Wallonia either.
And considering English is shown for Flanders I assume French is counted as first "foreign language" there.
Yeah, true.
This holds for Dutch and French in Belgium either. Though it is a difference, if a language is tought to a native speaker, e.g. Swedish to a Swedish speaking Finn, or as a foreign language, e.g. Swedish to a Finnish speaking Finn.
Yes it’s a Reddit link, but I know consider Reddit as a glorified Imgur. Also it avoids consuming storage on the Lemmy servers.
If someone wants to upload it to catbox.moe or Imgur, feel free to comment with the link, I’ll update it
I think people are missing that this is the 2nd most taught foreign language, not the 2nd most taught language. So there's the native language, then the most taught foreign language, and then the 2nd most taught foreign language. I'd imagine for quite a few countries that English is the most taught foreign language, particularly ones that heavily rely on tourism.
Edit: just noticed it even says that in the text on the right.
Danish of all languages being 2nd in Iceland caught me off guard. In Finland Swedish is 2nd because we're a bilingual country, but why on earth would Icelanders go for Danish? Does Icelandic have like a large vowel inventory or something that makes Danish more natural to learn than say Norwegian (Nynorsk maybe?) or even Swedish? Because while grammatically Danish is nothing all that surprising among the Germanic languages here, their pronunciation is something else and their vowel inventory is so large that Danish kids acquire language slower than eg Swedish or Norwegian because the language is a frickin nightmare to learn to listen to
edit: ah I didn't even know they were under Danish rule at one point, so it's the same as we Finns have with Swedish
I asked in a direct comment but I'll also put here: should Sweddish really be considered a foreign language in Finland? It's a state ofiicial language ( as you know being a Finn)
Depends on how you view it, I guess. Officially we are a bilingual country and everybody speaks both Finnish and Swedish, but practically since the Fenno-Swedish minority is only about 6% of the population and they're highly concentrated in specific areas, the vast majority of Finns don't speak Swedish all that well if at all. Sure, we all have mandatory "other national language" classes all the way up to university level, but if you rarely use the language outside some tests, it might as well be a foreign language. Been 20 years since my last Swedish class, and I need a dictionary to read anything but the simplest Swedish text and speaking it would be painful to say the least.
So, officially it's not a foreign language, but practically it might as well be
edit: here's how Finnish, Swedish and Sámi are distributed when looking at the official languages of municipalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_population_of_Finland#/media/File:Languages_of_Finnish_municipalities_(2016).svg
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There's Italian in the map legend, yet it isn't used? Or is it on the map somewhere I didn't see?
Malta is Italian colored
Ohhhhh, I see now, thank you so much!
Should Sweddish really be considered a foreign language in Finland? It's a state official language.
Glad I read the small print note BEFORE I posted my original comment!!
I enjoyed the fact that Netherlands, belgium and Luxemburg created the german flag on the map
Netherlands is in blue, think you're looking at Flanders & Wallonia (both part of Belgium)