Discusses the use of Swedish and Finnish in a bilingual company with offices in both countries. In some work areas, Finnish is the dominant language, in other instances, Swedish is. At many meetings, each person speaks in his/her mother tongue. There seems to be no friction over language choice. (SED)

Provides an overview of the language situation in Finland, an officially bilingual country in Northern Europe. Presents the language profile of Finland, gives a detailed overview of the spread of all the languages used in the country, focuses on language planning and language policy legislation, discusses the current status of languages spoken in…

Analyzes features of the Swedish language from the viewpoint of mono-and cross-language information retrieval. Results of a comparative study that tested the degree of lexical ambiguity in Swedish, Finnish, and English suggest that part-of-speech tagging might be useful in Swedish information retrieval due to the high frequency of homographic…

This article describes problems faced by the individual in different diglossic conditions. It centers on the functional differentiation of the Finnish and Swedish languages in Sweden and the linguistic consequences for two originally Finnish-speaking groups. (CFM)

To test whether additive bilinguals are more linguistically creative than monolinguals, a creativity index, based upon linguistic features thought to correspond to the distinctive features of creativity, was calculated from essays written by pupils in a Finnish-Swedish comprehensive school. The results did not seem to reveal higher creativity…

Describes the alternating and mixed use of Swedish and Finnish in a company in the bilingual city of Vasa, Finland. Tradition, language knowledge of the employees, and occasional factors determine use in internal routines. Use is largely free from conflict, given that most employees know the other national language. (Author/PJM)

Describes the linguistic backgrounds of Sweden and Finland and presents a few examples of recent sociolinguistic research in these countries. (CFM)

The development of language conditions in Helsinki, including its origins in a Swedish-speaking area, makes it possible to observe many processes of sociolinguistic interest. Helsinki's colloquial Finnish has served as a model for the evolution of colloquial Finnish throughout the country. (Contains eight references.) (Author/LB)

This report discusses and compares language planning and the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and the English-speaking minority in Quebec. The report discusses four issues: historical minorities and the demographic dynamic; municipalities; the language of work; and other minority language groups. It is concluded that, despite numerous surface…

Tests given at the German Institute of the University of Stockholm to 32 Finnish students studying German revealed that both their native language and their Swedish interfered with their learning German, in about equal degree overall. The mother tongue, Finnish, caused more interference errors in pronunciation. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Compared verbal characteristics of family interaction in the stereotypically tongue-tied Nordic region of the Western world. Compared mothers' and early adolescents' talkativeness and monologuing and mothers' conversational dominance emerging in real-life video recordings in Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish monolingual and bilingual families. (VWL)

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are cultural differences in topic organization and role-related topic control in dinner conversations; such differences may function as a means for socialization into communicative styles. The research was designed as a comparative study of two geographically close but linguistically very…

The different ways of expressing a nuclear phrase from one language in another language are examined with reference to Finnish, Swedish, and French. Two specific methods of representing the root phrase in surface structure are examined in some detail. (MSE)

Visual recognition of inflected, derived, and morphophonemic Swedish nouns in monolingual Swedish and bilingual Swedish-Finnish speakers was investigated. Bilinguals were slower overall; inflected items yielded disproportionately longer reaction times in the bilingual group. Derived forms elicited fastest reaction times in both groups. The…

A report is presented of work in syllabus construction and language planning in Finland from the middle of the 1960s to the present. An introductory chapter describes Finland's parallel educational systems, which provide for speakers of the two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, and for instruction in the other national language as well as…