The Swedish-Speaking Finn – An Endangered Species?

The proposed paper offers a theoretical account of the ontology of collective identity, building on the insights of the philosophy of collective intentionality (Searle 1995), and of the way in which personal identity is tied to collective identities. The paper then studies a particular form of collective identification, namely ethnic collective identification, and offers an interpretation of what change of identification (on an individual level and on the level of the content of the collective identity) consists in. Basing the analysis of collective identity on John Searle’s Constitutive rule of a Status function downplays the necessity of the paradox of identity/difference in collective identification and identity change. Instead identities are constructed positively, trough the creation of behavioural norms associated to and constituting a status collectively assigned to individual carriers of the distinguishing feature of the collective identity. The theoretical work presented in the paper builds on the insights of Ian Hacking 2006, John Searle 1995, Kwame Appiah 2018, Mark Bevir 1999, Charles Taylor 1994, Francis Fukuyama 2018, Erik Allardt 1984 and Joshua Fishman 1989. The paper then goes on to study the construction, consolidation and transformation of one particular case, the ethnic, collective identity of the Swedish-speaking Finn. The collective, ethnic identity Swedish-speaking Finn was centrally constructed within top-down and bottom-up voluntary associations (as distinguished by the author) in late 19th and early 20th century Finland. The Swedish National Movement in Finland constructed a (Finland) Swedish national culture (to use Miroslav Hroch’s 2015 term intellectualized the Swedish language) within top-down associations. The language-based national culture was then introduced to and enacted by the common people in bottom-up voluntary associations. Because of the actions of the Swedish National Movement being a Swedish-speaker in Finland meant by the early 20th century being a member of a kind of people for whom language rationalized action within civil society. Action within voluntary associations became a central arena where the Swedish-speakers reproduced the identity according to the distinguished top-down – bottom-up dynamics. Empirical studies, conducted by the author, of the development of the linguistic structure of civil society in Finland shows that the role of language in rationalizing action within civil society (bottom-up voluntary associations) has changed. The paper offers a theoretically motivated interpretive analysis of what this change in language-based collective behavior means for the collective, ethnic identity Swedish-speaking Finn.