Summary:
Helena Ruotsala, “It would be finer if the letter F was missing”
This article concentrates on the narratives and experiences of the language border in the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda as it is experienced by the Swedish speaking people. Tornio-Haparanda is situated in the cross-border region of the Tornio River Valley between Finland and Sweden. The Tornio River Valley was divided after the Finnish War of 1809 and, until then, people spoke the same language and shared the same culture and religion. Borders (according to Massey 1995, 67–68) are tools for organising social space and part of a process wherein places and their identities are produced.
Despite the Swedification policy and various constraints, contacts and dealings with those on the other side of the border continued to take place. A common language and religion and the desire to see relatives and old contacts were the key factors helping people maintain diverse and active connections. The local inhabitants refused to accept the border as divisive; rather, they emphasised a common history, language and culture: “And that goes for these nations, because this wasn’t the frontier then. Yes, because you were sister, brother to someone on the other side, to many, the contacts were enormous, it wasn’t thought of as a border. (---) But, for us, Finnish is the mother tongue, even though we are proper Swedes, but our mother tongue has been Finnish, yes. But we learn Swedish in school.” Later, authorities began to emphasize assimilation and the importance of only speaking Swedish; for example, one person born in a village near Haparanda in the 1950s told me that in the annual report of the school, lists of pupils were published and if the pupil could speak Finnish, F was written after the name. According to him, it was much better if the letter F was missing.
Today, the Tornio River Valley area is a border region wherein the political – or national – boundaries do not coincide with the cultural and linguistic boundaries. The multi-ethnic border zone of the Tornio River Valley is a vital area for the hybridisation of cultures as well as for the study of power relations and everyday activities. In this article, I have focused on the Swedish-speaking minority living in the Swedish town of Haparanda. According to the Swedish Statistical Central Office, the share of Finnish speakers in Haparanda in 2008 was 66%. To belong to a language minority within your own country is – according to my interviews – a new and strange situation. The narratives and descriptions can be understood as social practices that create and maintain borders. So, by studying the narratives, it is possible to study how people continuously construct and reinforce differences between “our own places” and “their places”.
