Abstract
During the last 20 years the number of the Russian-speaking population in Finland has increased rapidly and they have become the biggest linguistic minority in Finland after the Swedish-speaking population. While in 1990 there were 3884 Russian-speaking people living in Finland, in 2010 their number had reached 51,683 (31 December 2010). Factually the number is even bigger, because all bilingualism does not show in the official statistics. Despite the growing Russian-speaking population, the Russian language has not been granted the status of a minority language in Finland irrespective of the efforts of the Russian-speaking population and the recommendations of the EU. According to Finnish legislation, the official status of a minority language entitles the speakers of the language to have instruction and administrative services in their native tongue.
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© 2012 Mika Lähteenmäki and Marjatta Vanhala-Aniszewski
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Lähteenmäki, M., Vanhala-Aniszewski, M. (2012). Hard Currency or a Stigma — Russian-Finnish Bilingualism among Young Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Finland. In: Blommaert, J., Leppänen, S., Pahta, P., Räisänen, T. (eds) Dangerous Multilingualism. Language and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283566_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283566_6
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