this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Second most taught foreign language in European secondary schools (i.redd.it)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Blaze@lemm.ee to c/map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
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[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] undeffeined@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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)

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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