Posted by Anna Ikeda
I’m sorry this post is a bit late. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been away. I went to Finland! Oh yes, I can just feel your excitement in the air like static electricity.
But wait a second now! There is a reason why I am writing about Finland here. You see, they also speak Swedish over there. In fact, it’s one of the country’s official languages, the other being Finnish, naturally. Finnish itself is a totally incomprehensible oddity and to me sounds like Klingon spoken backwards. Or, as my friend who lives in Finland says, “I’ll let you in on a little secret, it IS Klingon spoken backwards.”
Fortunately, quite a few people across the Bay of Bothnia do speak something more understandable as their mother tongue. Swedish! There are even several municipalities in Finland that are totally mono-lingual, where the inhabitants speak Swedish and nothing else. The most famous one is Hammarland on the Åland archipelago, and the other is just down a spit across the bay from me – Korsnäs. Korsnäs has the distinction of being the most Swedish municipality in the world, percentage-wise it has more Swedish speakers (around 98%) than any municipality in Sweden. If that’s not impressive then I don’t know what is.
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
I promised you that we would talk about Skåne today. And depending on how we do, we may have to spread it over several posts. Why? There’s much to talk about!
Skåne is a very odd part of Sweden. And some may argue that it’s not even Sweden at all. Well, once upon a time it was called Skåneland (Scania in English) and was one of the three lands of Denmark. The city of Lund was its center. So those who say that if you scratch a skåning, you’ll see a Dane underneath, are kind of sort of right. And those skåningar may even say that as far as the historical details go, the province is a quite recent Swedish acquisition.
In order to learn more about the event that gave Skåne to Sweden, I started to read about the Northern Wars (1655-1661) and the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26, 1658) but the overload of war-mongering kings, conquests, and who did what to whom was slowly putting me to sleep.
Roskilde is in Denmark, by the way, and today is more known for its music festival than for some old historical treaties.
And why am I telling you all this boring stuff? Because it’s hard to understand what Skåne is all about without a little bit of background research. It’s closer, much closer in fact, to Copenhagen than to Stockholm, people talk funny there, and even the climate and nature are different from the rest of Sweden.
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