(I mean, at least in the Metropolitan area) Earlier I waited in line at a shop in Helsinki and behind me was a large group of schoolkids, all various people of colour and all speaking American English with each other. It's a fairly common occurrence in Eastern Helsinki and makes you feel like you're in the US or Canada

It's interesting how quick things have developed just since I was a kid

I think it's cool but it seems to cause Finnish boomers enormous existential anxiety of the Great Replacement variety

  • flan [they/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    Ive only been there a couple of times and not very recently but I did ask about that and the explanation I got was that there are a lot of russian people there and the finns refuse to learn russian and the russians refuse to learn finnish so everyone just speaks english to each other. not sure how true that is or why finland in particular would go out of its way to switch to english when so many other european countries dont.

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Yes, there's lots of Russian immigrants but even more people from other places. The kids I'm talking about were mostly black and brown

      Speaking of Russians, in my neighbourhood at least it seems all the white kids are Russian. Probably relatedly there's an abandoned building with a bunch of anti-Ukrainian graffiti on it nearby

      Ukraine = Nazi and stuff in Cyrillic I can't understand