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Language, identity and immigration in Finland: What’s more important to fit in, language skills or true ‘sisu’? The mayor of Helsinki, Juhana Virtiainen, told Helsingin Sanomat in August 2021 that Helsinki should perhaps be declared an English-speaking city. The idea behind this proposal was to encourage Finnish companies to recruit larger numbers of technically skilled workers from abroad, in order to address the worsening labour shortage in medical, technical and administrative fields that the Finnish Chamber of Commerce called “alarming”, according to a report by Yle News. Could Finland’s language policy be the key to solving its skilled labour shortage? By John Weston
One obstacle to coming to work in a highly skilled job in Finland is that companies often still stipulate a native-like command of Finnish – something that can seem unreasonable, and which is normally not allowed under Finnish equality law. Such language requirements must always be directly linked 142 | Issue 137 | December 2021
to the nature of the job itself. However, many expert roles do indeed require a high level of control and precision in speaking and writing. But does a high level of speaking and writing have to imply the use of Finnish? Adjoining Helsinki to the west is the mu-
nicipality of Espoo, the second-largest urban area in Finland. Of its 300,000 inhabitants, one in six does not speak Finnish or Swedish as their first language, as noted by Kai Mykkänen, Chair of Espoo City Council in Helsinki Times in June. In 2017, English was made an official service language in Espoo, making it possible to use public services there in English. English is also available for the most common aspects of national infrastructure, such as transport, health and social security, and taxation. However, when foreigners deal with more complex or less common issues, they invariably reach the limit of the roll-out of English-language information, and find themselves confronted with a dense PDF
