Mandatory Swedish

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Swedish is a mandatory school subject in Finland for Finnish-speaking pupils in the last four years of primary education (grades from 6 to 9), although only about 5% from citizens of Finland are Swedish-speaking; this minority is still shrinking, and many of Swedish speakers in Finland are practically bilingual and in other parts of the world this language is spoken almost only in the neighbour state Sweden. In elementary school, there are three Swedish lessons a week.^[1] The linguistically nationalist Swedish People's Party in Finland would like to increase the number of compulsory Swedish lessons by more than 50%, make Swedish compulsory again in matriculation essays and remove the obligation for Swedish-speaking civil servants to know how to speak Finnish properly. The party also demands that Finnish taxpayers' money be used to pay for a campaign in Sweden, Norway and Denmark to attract people to study in Swedish-speaking educational institutions in Finland.^[2]

In Finland, the study of Swedish has always been compulsory in high school (however, no longer since 2004 in the matriculation records). In the 1970s it became compulsory in primary school at the request of the Swedish People's Party (RKP, SFP) and Johannes Virolainen. According to education experts, English should have been made a mandatory subject in comprehensive schools (previously, foreign languages were generally not taught at all in Finnish comprehensive schools), but at the last minute, the mandatory foreign language for all Finnish speakers was changed from English to Swedish at the insistence of the Finnish-Swedish nationalist party, the Swedish People's Party, against the wishes of education experts.

Later, at the request of the Swedish People's Party, compulsory Swedish teaching was expanded from comprehensive schools and high schools to most other educational institutions in Finland: Now this other domestic language is also mandatory in vocational schools (ammattikoulu, yrkesskola), business schools (kauppaoppilaitos, handelskola), police school, theater school, folk colleges and universities and the other tertiary education instituties for students of all fields.

The Swedish-Speaking president Alexander Stubb wants, that already from the first grade of primary school^[3] (from 2016 it is compulsory to start from the sixth grade, previously it started from the seventh^[4][5]). He has also said that he and his wife do not speak Finnish but only Swedish and English to their children.^[6] Swedish is also partly mandatory in the army.^[7][8] Anna-Maja Henriksson, a patriotic Finnish-Swedish politician specializing in language policy, former chairwoman of the Swedish People's Party, has also demanded that Swedish should be compulsory already in preschool (esikoulu/förskolan), which is mandatory from 2015. It has not come true, but the demands of the Swedish People's Party of Finland have become even tougher: now the party demands that Swedish be taught as compulsory already in kindergarten.^[9] This is one of the election themes of the Swedish People's Party in the municipal elections held in autumn 2025.^[10]

Furthermore, since 1987 at the request of the Swedish People's Party all university graduates must demonstrate a certain level of proficiency in Swedish (the so-called public servant's Swedish, in Finnish virkamiesruotsi). Altogether, 89% of Finnish citizens are native Finnish speakers, whereas 5.3% of the population report Swedish as their mother tongue.^[11] It is currently possible for Finnish citizens to report a different mother tongue for themselves as many times as desired by submitting a form to the Population Register Center.

According to the Finnish constitution, both Finnish and Swedish are national languages. The employees of the national government and the bilingual municipal governments are required to be capable of serving citizens in Swedish. The official term for both mandatory Swedish and Finnish is the other domestic language. The requirement to study Swedish is often referred to as pakkoruotsi, a term in Finnish meaning "mandatory Swedish", or "forced Swedish," and similarly, Finnish as a mandatory school subject for native Swedish speakers in Finland is sometimes referred to as "mandatory Finnish" or "enforced Finnish" (tvångsfinska, pakkosuomi),^[12] but since Swedish speakers in Finland are nowadays only a small minority (5%) (earlier maybe 20 %) and many, specially en Uusimaa, maybe half of the young people, are practically bilingual, the term "mandatory Finnish" is not as widely used. It is not a similar phenomenon, although governed by the same laws In practice, learning Finnish in Swedish-speaking educational institutions in Finland is considerably more extensive than learning Swedish in Finnish-speaking educational institutions. According to Kari Sajavaara (1938–2006), a Finnish applied linguistics researcher and professor at the University of Jyväskylä who is familiar with the subject, the meaning of the Finnish language for Swedish speakers in Finland is quite different from the meaning of the Swedish language for Finnish speakers.^[13]