UTC As a close follower of the language political issues in Finland I have always disliked this intentional fudging of mother tongue s significance in defining what if you will we could call ethnic identity especially when it comes to Finnish speakers Swedish speakers have identified themselves very clearly as essentially an ethnic group all the way until the latter half of last century when it became much more politically convenient to start pushing the idea of the entire people having two languages which from individual people s mother tongue point of view is patent nonsense the mother tongue of say my entire family tree is Finnish and what Swedish they speak has been taught to them at school as essentially foreign language Whatever happens in the future our language policy has not yet managed to implant Swedish as a general second language in the population and this must be taken into account here I can well understand how Fenno Swedes can identify as some sort of particular subgroup and still be considered Finnish but there is always the flipside of such a coin 13 39 21 August 2009