What happens if you don’t speak Finnish or Swedish and need to take your one-year-old baby to the doctor’s? What about if the doctor isn’t a Finn? Migrant Tales got the following email from one of our readers: Hi, I’ve lived in Helsinki for 3 years and would like to share a story that happened…
Tag: Language discrimination
guardian.co.uk: Latvians reject Russian as official language
Latvian voters have resoundingly rejected a proposal to give official status to Russian, the mother tongue of their former Soviet occupiers and a large chunk of the population.
OP-Pohjola-Group Kangasniemi only serves customers in Finnish and Swedish
Below is an incident that happened at at the offices of insurance company OP-Pohola-Group in Kangasniemi, a small town located between Mikkeli and Jyväskylä. The letter is a complaint to the company for refusing to offer service to a man because he did not speak Finnish or Swedish.
The role of Finnish language in discrimination
I was speaking today with a woman from an African country who had been in Finland for five years and had never held a job. She said that she had tried to find work as a cleaner but, surprisingly, she said that she could not because her Finnish wasn’t good enough.