Thursday, July 11, 2013

expressions - "Finnish Swedes" or "Swedish Finns"?



In Finland, there live 5.6 % Swedes (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/fi.html). They have lived there for many generations, being standard Finnish citizens, just inheriting the Swedish language as their mother tongue.



Which of the following terms is better for them?




  1. Finnish Swedes

  2. Swedish Finns




Of course you may describe them by some more complicated phrase. What I am looking for is just what should be the adjective and what should be the noun.



Note 1



I expect that Americans might feel their citizenship as more important and hence use Finns as the noun, while Europeans might feel their mother tongue as more important and hence use Swedes as the noun, but I may be wrong?



Note 2




The interesting (for me as a native Czech) thing is that in English the word nationality has two very different meanings (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationality):





  • a group of people who share the same history, traditions, and
    language, and who usually live together in a particular country


  • the fact or status of being a member or citizen of a particular
    nation






In other languages, these notions are often expressed by two different words and, most of all, they are perceived as two very different things.


Answer



This problem cannot be removed from context and social/historical nuance



It can depend, among other things on whether people are immigrants, or whether they are descendants of a landowning class of foreigners e.g. the Anglo Irish. (I have never heard anyone talk about the Irish English.) However the Polish Germans could presumably either be Poles who happen to live in Germany, but could also be part of the residue of landowning Germans who remain east of the Oder-Neisse Line in modern-day Poland. Similarly the Sudeten Germans in the Czech Republic. Naming is governed largely by historical convention, I would say.



Do people say Irish Americans or the American Irish?



That too, seems to me as though it may depend on context. If, for example, I am giving a talk about hyphenated Americans, I would almost certainly say Irish Americans, African Americans, Italian Americans etc. But if I was speaking about, let's say, the Irish diaspora, I might talk about the American Irish, the Australian Irish, the UK Irish, the London Irish, the Liverpool Irish etc. (there are societies and sports teams named London Irish, London Scottish and London Welsh) So there is no certainty here.




I don't know much about the circumstances of the Swedish families who live in Finland. But no doubt these sorts of issues could affect the way they are described, within a Scandinavian context, which may be quite different to that of the Anglosphere.



My advice would be to look to local nomenclature, and to use that.


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