Sweden-Finland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sweden-Finland is a modern term, used especially in Finland, to refer to the Swedish Kingdom between the Kalmar Union and the Napoleonic wars, or the period from the 14th to the 18th century. In 1809 the realm was split and the eastern half came to constitute the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, in personal union with Imperial Russia.
Although the term has didactic merits, for instance when used in conjunction with the terms Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Norway, it is also misleading and contradicting contemporary usage: Finland (proper) - as understood from the Middle Ages forth - was from 1353 up to 1809 one of the provinces of Sweden.
However, at the time "Finland" was used only of a very small part, less than three percent - only the extreme southwestern corner - of the area inhabited by the Finns, or approximately three percent of the modern-day Finland.
That extreme southwestern corner of what today constitutes the Republic of Finland was then a province of the Swedish realm comprising the eastern part of Sweden proper. For some time - less than a century - this Finnish area was known in official Swedish government language as Österlanden ("the Eastern lands"), to separate the rest of the territtories inhabited by the Finns, which the expansion of Sweden-Finland had not yet reached.
The Swedish government term, Österland, fell from use in Sweden within less than a century (Vahtola, Suomen Historia - History of Finland), and "Finland" again took over in the official Swedish government terminology as the commonly used term for the land of the Finns, where the Finnish language was spoken by the vast majority of the commoners.
The northern and western borders of modern Finland were established with the Russo–Swedish Treaty of Fredrikshamn in 1809 when Finland and Sweden were separated. The eastern provinces became the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian empire, and remained so until 1917.
The large northern territories on the Swedish side of the new Finnish-Swedish border remained sparsely populated Finnish ("Meänkieli") speaking areas, and Finnish mothertongue was dominant in some other parts of what remained of Sweden as well.
In Sweden as a whole, the size of the Finnish speaking minority decreased with the secession; most of it has become assimilated with the Swedish speaking majority population in the ensuing centuries. The feeling of cultural belonging, however, remained strong. During and following the Second World War Sweden saw large scale immigration from Finland. Thus the number of Sweden Finns has again increased.
