Helsinki wants to switch to English

This is pure pragmatism in the view of Helsinki’s Social Democratic Mayor Juhana Vardianen. Highly qualified foreigners do not want to settle permanently Finland Due to difficulties in learning Finnish or Swedish, the second official language of the country. This is an observation of the “Helsinki Business Hub” operation conducted last year, which offered experts ninety days to see if they want to root.

Glamor problem

what happened “Terrible failure”, Sorry for the chosen one. So the trained economist presents this proposal in the newspaper columns Helsing’s Sanomat newspaper : “Helsinki can be declared an English-speaking city. “ This is why he needs a population: “We are an aging society, the working age population is shrinking.”, He insists.

Today, English-speaking people born in Helsinki are the capital’s fifth language group. The interest in using English as a common language is beyond this community: by 2030, a quarter of the population (today 655,000 people) will have a language other than Finnish or Swedish. Shakespeare’s language appears to be a useful binder because 86% of Finns already speak English.

This is the method of study conducted by the Labor Institute on Taiwanese experts. These intelligence or telecommunications professionals have returned to their home country or elsewhere in Europe, not inspired by Finnish, and became famous as one of the most difficult languages ​​with its variations on fifteen grammatical phenomena. Taiwanese also cited the unattractiveness of pay and the difficulty in finding work for their spouse. However, their profile is in high demand in the country that saw the birth of Nokia, SMS, 5G or Linux operating systems.

Shout out to Swedish speakers

Becoming an “English-speaking city” will have specific implications. The mayor of Helsinki defends less stringent language requirements. He would be willing to drop the requirement to speak Swedish to become a city employee. It also proposes to strengthen English in nurseries and primary schools. However, this needs to be verified nationally.

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This proposal is causing a stir. In an interview Hufvudstadsbladet, J தலைrn Manson, chairman of Helsinki’s bilingual group and adviser to the Swedish People’s Party, did not like it. “Compromise on the constitutional right of Swedish speakers to receive city services and communicate with them in their mother tongue”. To which Juhana Verdianen replied that municipal jobs that are not directly related to the population can only be in English as a whole.