Unlike in many other places around the world,
here in Finland we are not used to hearing bad
or incomplete finnish. Even for the time being
non-native "bad" finnish speakers hardly exists.
You either speak finnish as your first language,
mother tongue or then you don't speak it at all.
Even most of our swedish or russian speaking
minorities fit in these two categories.
That's the way we learn for speaking a language,
it's either fluency or keeping one's mouth shut.
And we Finns have no problems with quietness,
- companionable silence.
Proudly we explain to our foreign friends
that the secret of our close to fluent english
is tv-programs that are not dubbed, so we
are used to listening foreign languages from
early age. By the same token we are perfectly
unused to hearing fragmental language,
regardless of the language.
(With one particular exception: when finnish
politicians are forced to speak our second
official language swedish in television interviews
or programs - and how do we laugh at them.)
When our immigrant population grows
incomplete finnish will become more common.
We will have new dialects, exotic loanwords
and hilarious situations. But most of all,
maybe variety of incomplete finnish speakers
will encourage us native finnish speakers.
Maybe then we will dare to use those four to five
different languages that most of us have mugged up
at school for years. Even though we wouldn't yet be
fluent.
(freely revised and translated from Joanna Palmén's column,
"Suomalaisten loistava kielitaito" Ylioppilaslehti 2/08)
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