Åland Islands may secede from Finland, says a politician

[His Divine Shadow]

Bättre = Better

Also speaking of Suomalaisuuden Liitto, their new chairmain Sampo Terho went and proclaimed some pretty swedish-friendly things according to the local newspapers.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Wow, sounds like a crock of shit to me.

As an aside I wasn't aware until now that half the population of Finland were inhabitants of SDN.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I don't hold any ill will towards Swedish-speaking Finns; quite frankly I'd want to learn better Swedish, but every time I try, it fails miserably. But the Swedish-speaking population's supposed elite - their most vocal politicians etc. - still seem to think that they are "bättre folk" and they are the ones who are most quoted in newspapers and news agencies, not those who just wish to live in peace.

I have a suggestion for you: move to southern Sweden (Skåne) and learn the local dialect. Then move back to Finland and annoy all the Swedish speaking Finns by speaking a dialect of Swedish that they have problems understanding. Or better yet, move to actual Denmark and learn Danish. The vocabulary is similar enough to Swedish that once you get used to the totally weird pronunciation, you will pick it up fairly quickly. Then you can really annoy Swedish speaking Finns! After all, one of the often heard arguments for preserving the mandatory Swedish lessons is schools is the ability to learn other Scandinavian languages more easily (and its true, too!).

About the actual question: its all just a lot of hot air. The Åland islands would never survive as an independent nation and Sweden would not take them unless the Finnish government would ask that, which is not going to happen any time soon. The Swedish speaking minority knows that at some point they will have to give up something. My guess is that they will yield the mandatory Swedish teaching in the eastern parts of Finland, but they will try to keep the Swedish language skills requirement for civil servants as long as possible. For me it's actually fine: the requirements are not that difficult; it's not that you have to be truly fluent in Swedish for a government job. In practice most if not all government offices already have special people for communicating with those Swedish speakers who either refuse to speak Finnish to government officials from principle (most of them live in the Helsinki area) or actually can't speak Finnish fluently (most them are in the Vasa region).

[Edi]

I don't hold any ill will towards Swedish-speaking Finns; quite frankly I'd want to learn better Swedish, but every time I try, it fails miserably. But the Swedish-speaking population's supposed elite - their most vocal politicians etc. - still seem to think that they are "bättre folk" and they are the ones who are most quoted in newspapers and news agencies, not those who just wish to live in peace.

I have a suggestion for you: move to southern Sweden (Skåne) and learn the local dialect. Then move back to Finland and annoy all the Swedish speaking Finns by speaking a dialect of Swedish that they have problems understanding. Or better yet, move to actual Denmark and learn Danish. The vocabulary is similar enough to Swedish that once you get used to the totally weird pronunciation, you will pick it up fairly quickly. Then you can really annoy Swedish speaking Finns!

That's what comes from having a dialect that's been largely unchanged in pronunciation for six hundred years while the original Swedish has changed massively in the same time period. I find contemporary Swedish pronunciation and the sing-song speech a fucking pain in the ass and very hard to pick out words, but the dialect spoken in Finland is not really that hard.