The identification with a specific group has been considered easier in such case the status of that group is seen positive (Liebkind et al. 1995:16). Today in Finland the status of both Swedish language and the Finnish Swedes as a group is good. Karina Liebkind (1984) notes this and states, that there is even a popular stereotype of the Swedish-speaking minority as an upper class
population, which is based on that the only Swedish-speakers many Finns from totally Finnish-speaking regions have met have been individual managers or while collar workers in industrial enterprises located in these areas. Popular images easily allow these individuals to represent the entire Swedish-speaking minority (Ibid: 107, see also Allardt and Starck 1981). The fact, however, is that the Swedish-Finns are a historically heterogeneous group and the Swedish-speakers do not generally define themselves in terms of the upper class stereotypes (Liebkind 1984:107). While Swedish speakers were predominant in the tiny upper class, this class was so small in the country as a whole that both language groups must have consisted predominately of rural populations of modest social status (McRae 1999:128). Thus, majority of the Swedish-speaking Finns has never
3 of the total number 5 236 611 of the population in the year 2005
belonged to the upper classes, but they have had manual occupations in farming, fishing, transportation and industry (Liebkind et al. 1995: 71).
The primary reasons for the stereotype of the Swedish-speakers as the members of the upper class are not based on statistical facts, but rather on a historical symbol value. The language of the ruling class in Finland was Swedish until the end of the 19th century. Therefore, it was necessary for all the Finns to adopt the Swedish language in order become upwardly mobile. Furthermore, the memory of the status of Swedish language lasts longer that does the reality and the stereotype of Finnish Swedes has not faded albeit the objective cultural, political, social and economic mobility of the Finnish-speaking Finns has changed(Liebkind et al. 1995: 73).
The heterogeneity of the Finnish Swedes comes clearer when scrutinising the origins of the Swedish settlement in Finland. Historians agree generally that the vast majority of the present population settlement in the coastal area arose in the population movements around 13th century, in the era of the Swedish crusades and the colonisation of Finland. However, since the era of these large
population movements two historically distinct parts can be specified among the Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. The first one, the rural part, has been consisting of farmers, fishermen and persons connected shipping on the southern and western coasts of Finland, while the second one, the upper classes part, has been including the higher estates of the bourgeoisies and nobility of Finland. In comparison to the rural population, the ruling class was quite heterogeneous and consisted over the centuries of several groups, such as the officials and merchants and noble immigrating from Sweden, the upwardly mobile Swedish-speaking peasantry and the upwardly mobile Finnish-speaking peasantry adopting Swedish language, as well as the artisans and the merchants originating from all over the Baltic region and adopting the Swedish language (Liebkind et al. 1995: 69).
Thus, while Swedish was the language of the ruling class until 19th century, the great vast of the Swedish-speaking Finns had, however, little or no contact with the politically and economically ruling elite. Before the last decade of the 19th century, when the Finnish national popular movement caused as a counter-reaction nationalism as a popular movement among the Swedish-speaking Finns united the Swedish bourgeoisies and the Swedish lower classes, language was not a ground for a social bond between the two distinct parts of the Swedish-speaking population.
Furthermore, while the popular stereotype views the Finnish Swedes as a homogenous, upper class group, the heterogeneity of the Swedish-speaking Finns has always been a soil for some conflicts
and cleavages within the group. The cleavages were earlier more common between the social classes than between the regions, but recently the regional cleavages seem to have become more important (Liebkind et al. 1995:69-70).
The regional cleavages within the group of Finnish Swedes are based on many differences. Besides the different structure of industries also the different linguistic environments in the various Swedish regions give rise to different interests and patterns of identification. The rural west-coast is
traditionally the most unilingual Swedish area, while the Swedish-speaking population in the coastal towns and in the southern areas has experienced a bilingual environment for a longer time.
Moreover, the rural and urban parts of the Finnish-Swedish population are also facing different problems in terms of vitality. The problem of emigration is more acute in the west-coast rural areas, while the finnicization problem is more severe in the densely populated, southern urban areas. From this follows that the question of vitality for the Swedish-speakers in the rural areas is how to
maintain unilingual Swedishness, and the Finnish Swedes in the urbanized bilingual or Finnish environments have to find an answer to the question of how to maintain a living bilingualism (Liebkind et al. 1995:73-74, see also Grönroos 1978).
Because of the different approaches to it, the bilingualism as such causes very different reaction within the rural and the urban Finnish Swedes. The persons living in the bilingual environments are usually proud of their bilingualism, while the unilingual Swedish-speakers in the rural areas hold very negative attitudes towards this phenomenon (Liebkind et al. 1995: 74). The internal conflicts takes a provoking form in the way the unilingual Swedish-speakers from rural areas tend to call the linguistic pliability of the bilingual from the urban areas a "noxious weed which has spread too much among the Swedish-speaking Finns" (Allard and Starck 1981; Rosenberg 1981:66).
Moreover, this inbuilt conflict within the group of the Finnish Swedes causes also different forms of linguistic protests. On one hand, there is a protest against ongoing Finnish 'penetration' of the last Swedish regions and a struggle for the right to be unilingual Swedish presented in the rural regions, while on the other hand, there is an urban centre protest against the strive towards separatism expressed by the rural regionalists and a struggle for the right to be bilingual (Liebkind et al. 1995:
74, see also Rosenberg 1981).
In my work I interested in the heterogeneity of the Finnish Swedes and how is it unfold in the speech of the interviewees who are located in both urban and rural regions that vary traditionally much from each other especially in relation to bilingualism. I am, however, not interested about, for
instance, the personal language skill of the interviewees, but rather about the positions they take for themselves and to their television stations, for instance, in relation to bilingualism. These positions that are formed in the speech can be considered as ways to perceive relationships to bilingualism which are reaching wider than to personal conceptions and related to culturally shared structures of meanings. Moreover, I am researching into what extent the interviewees consider that this
heterogeneity is manifested in the Finnish-Swedish television stations.
Moreover, the heterogeneity of Finnish-Swedes makes them a group that is difficult to approach.
One way to do this is to approach them as a minority, while even this approach is, according to Allardt and Starck (1981:76) not self-evident. I shall in the following chapter clarify this statement by introducing the different approaches and minority categories that earlier academic research has used in order to define the Finnish Swedes as a group: as a linguistic minority (Moring 2002) as a geographical minority (Lönnqvist 1981) or as an ethnic or cultural minority (Ståhlberg 1995: 26;
see also Allardt and Starck 1981).