The deadline set for the working group is 31 December 1999. According to the report, most of the information sent by state authorities to Swedish-unilingual and bilingual municipalities is in fact available only in Finnish. The Swedish Assembly of Finland has also been active in the promotion of the reform of the language legislation. In February 1999, the Assembly issued a Language Manifesto on the future of the Swedish language in Finland and invited the leaders of the political parties to the University of Helsinki, to a debate on the bilinguality of Finland in the new millennium. The programme of Prime Minister Lipponen s II Government contains a mention of the reform of the Language Act.
Reform needs The present Language Act is, for some parts, difficult to understand.
The provisions are terse and often hard to interpret and apply. This is the case especially as regards the provisions on the language to be used in courts of law, the said provisions being obscure as a whole and therefore leave too much for the discretion of the applier a difficult problem of legal security. There is also ample scope for the reassessment of the focus of the Language Act, so that there would be more emphasis on the realisation of linguistic rights in spoken communication, and less on mere written dealings with the authorities. In addition, the Language Act is, for some parts, inflexible and hence impractical. This is the case especially as regards the provisions on the internal language of the authorities, where there would be a good reason to consider more flexible provisions, as international communications are becoming more and more usual.