"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?
- Finnish Swedes
- 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.
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.
Neither is very apt, I feel.
There is no accepted term in English for this group of people, only a rather varied array of proposed terminology, including:
- Finland-Swede / Finland-Swedish
- Finland Swede / Finland Swedish
- Fenno-Swede / Fenno-Swedish
- Swedish-speaking population of Finland / [no attributive form]
- Swedish-speaking Finns / [no attributive form]
- Finnish Swedes / Finnish Swedish (?)
- Swedes of Finland / [no attributive form]
(I have never seen Swedish Finns before. It sounds rather like the reverse, i.e., the Finnish minority in Sweden—although, to be fair, the parallel Swedo-Finnish is given as a possible attributive form in the Wikipedia article linked to above. I’ve never seen that in actual use, either, though.)
Of these, Fenno-Swedish and Finland Swedish are the only two terms with any currency used for the dialect of Swedish spoken by this group of speakers.
For the group themselves, however, you can basically take your pick. On English versions of [insert adjective of choice here] websites, I have most commonly seen Finland-Swede / Finland-Swedish and Fenno-Swede / Fenno-Swedish used, but this is purely anecdotal and from memory—I have no statistics whatsoever to back it up.
On a more personal level, Finland-Swede / Finland-Swedish gets my vote for being the direct translation of finlandssvensk, the term used in (Fenno-)Swedish by the group themselves. It is the term that, to me, comes closest to having the same ring to it as the Swedish word, describing Swedes/Swedish that just happens to be from Finland, rather than dually describing the group/language as being simultaneously Swedish and Finnish in identity.
Neither is good. Calling us Swedes could be regarded as an insult, especially if if comes from a Finn. Swedish-Finns refers to Finnish-speaking people who moved to Sweden (not born there). I would call myself a Swedish-speaking Finn or part of a Swedish speaking minority living in Finland. When travelling abroad I usually just call myself a Finn if no further enquiries are made.
(I stumbled upon this post, so I'm not a linguist)