Finland's language strife

To gain higher education, one had to learn Swedish, and Finnish was considered by the upper classes to be a "language of peasants".

[3] The rise to the ruling upper class usually required being Swedish-speaking, and therefore the language of some Finnish-speaking families changed completely to Swedish.

However, another group of the Swedish-speaking population, the Svecomans, did not wish to abandon Swedish and opposed the Fennoman ideology and Fennoman-inspired reforms.

After Finland gained independence in 1917, its relations with Sweden unexpectedly became strained in connection with the Finnish Civil War and the Åland crisis.

These events aggravated the language dispute, and the controversy over Swedish and Finnish became a prominent feature of domestic politics during the 1920s and 1930s.

In the interwar period, the University of Helsinki was the scene of conflict between those who wanted to advance the use of Finnish and those who wished to maintain the use of Swedish.

[10] The conflict at the university generated an international reaction when academics from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland sent letters to the diplomatic representatives of Finland in their respective countries warning that diminishing the role of Swedish at the university would result in a weakening of Nordic unity.

[8] During the resettlement of more than 420,000 Karelian refugees after the Winter War against the Soviet Union (1939–1940), the Swedish-speaking minority feared that the new Finnish-speaking settlers would change the linguistic balance of their neighborhoods.