The other official language: How migrants are finding home in Finland through Swedish 

It can provide a way into a supportive community. It can be the practical choice. But it also has its limitations. Although the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland is small, for some immigrants their language has offered the pathway to integration.

Experiences of integrating in Swedish vary depending on location and the support people receive from the local community.

Ali Belhaj

Sercan Alkan

Published 30.12.2025 at 4:59

Updated 30.12.2025 at 5:09

Despite the Finnish Constitution guaranteeing the right to use Swedish with public authorities, some migrants say their experiences with the language have been far from smooth. 

A researcher, a cook and an artist shared their stories with Satakieli. 

Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau: Through choir into a community 

Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau got familiar with the languages of Finland already in her native France.  

Her Scandinavian Studies degree at Sorbonne University included language courses both in Swedish and Finnish. But it was a Swedish-speaking choir in Paris that introduced her to a community. 

She arrived in Finland in 2011 on an Erasmus exchange program and has stayed ever since. 

She chose Helsinki over Stockholm as Finland felt less explored than Sweden among her peers, and because she had heard that adapting to Stockholm’s “closed-off” social life could be tough. 

Community interactions through the choir motivated her to seek out Swedish-language choirs as soon as she landed in Finland. It became her “gateway” into the Swedish-speaking Finns in Helsinki, even though she had taken a similar course in Finnish. 

“It was easy for me to integrate with Swedish speakers in Helsinki because we shared a lot of cultural capital,” Matikainen-Soreau explains.  

She is referring to the similarities in manners, social etiquette, and academic orientation that resonated with her own background as a scholar and as someone who grew up in the suburbs of Paris. 

She feels that compared to the Finnish speakers, Swedish speakers in Finland are more used to interacting with people whose first language is not Swedish but who try to speak it. Because Swedish is a minority language in the country, they tend to value such efforts. 

“They’ll be patient and grateful to hear someone trying,” she says. “They’ll help, give you time, provide words when you get stuck, and so on.” 

Matikainen-Soreau currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Swedish School of Social Science. Although she has a solid conversational command of Finnish, she describes herself as “living” in Swedish. 

“I always watch Swedish theatre. I start my day listening to the radio in Swedish, and I watch and read the news in Swedish,” she emphasizes. 

But Matikainen-Soreau acknowledges the challenges that arise from resistance to providing services in Swedish within various Finnish public and private administrations. 

She counters this by always requesting services in Swedish first and by “negotiating” as much as possible to make sure that happens. She turns to other languages only as a last resort. 

Mohamed Jebali: Ostrobothnia’s reality is not Espoo’s reality 

Mohamed Jebali’s experience of Finland began in the Ostrobothnia region, where Swedish is the majority language. Originally from Tunisia and having worked as a cook in southern France, he moved to Finland in 2010 with his then Finland-Swede partner. 

He prioritized Swedish as his integration language, living in predominantly Swedish-speaking Kronoby and Pedersöre, and because his work in a restaurant required regular interaction with clients and colleagues. 

When Jebali had to move to Kokkola in 2021, a city where 83 percent of the population is Finnish-speaking, he began to feel the limitations of functioning socially and professionally in Swedish. 

He had faced countless rejections – solely because he was unable to speak Finnish – before securing a job in the city as a cook at an organization that promotes health care for Swedish-speaking people in Finland. 

Jebali encountered difficulties with customer transactions in Finnish and with novelties in internal systems, such as fire safety manuals and first aid training, which were provided exclusively in Finnish rather than bilingually. 

This challenge intensified when he relocated to Espoo later in 2021. Although officially a bilingual city, Jebali encountered some officials actively resisting providing service in Swedish.  

“For instance, in healthcare, staff hung up on me twice after I selected the option to communicate in Swedish via the autoresponder,” he says. 

Nowadays, he relies on his current partner, who studied Finnish for integration, to handle crucial phone calls and administrative operations. This is to avoid inconvenient reactions or wasting time with referring him to distant offices that have Swedish-speaking staff members. 

Nicola Lombardo: “Practical, not ‘lazy’” 

Initially, Nicola Lombardo tried it with Finnish. He relocated from Italy to Finland with his Finnish partner and started studying Finnish six months later. 

The experience didn’t turn out to be as smooth as he had hoped, due to his struggle with the language-bath method – an approach of immersing students in Finnish without involving an intermediate language. 

He notes that this method is effective if you already speak a language from the same or a closely related family as Finnish, which he does not. 

Lombardo developed an interest in Swedish while in Italy through music, a passion he now pursues as a singer-songwriter alongside his main work. 

Consequently, learning Swedish at Arbis – a journey he started in August – came to him as a more “relaxed, motivating, and holistic” experience, thanks to an approach that also involved dynamic activities such as cooking and drawing. 
 
Lombardo justifies his choice by the “practicality” of integration and rejects the idea that people choose it out of laziness.  

“Simply based on specific situations, I had to make decisions.” 

Lombardo faced discouraging remarks about the change, telling him it would be hard to find work using Swedish. 

However, he believes that the language can open more doors within Swedish-speaking circles, and that opportunities eventually arrive when you are active, make contacts, and are prepared.