How the North works

I live in California, though I am originally from Sweden. and I tried to use this to inform a teacher that while Finland is part of Fenno-Scandinavia, it is not part of Scandinavia. She told me I was wrong and gave me detention. Go figure.

@CaliforniaLove She sounds like a bitch. She gave you detention for disagreeing (and being right!).

@CaliforniaLove That's why I don't get mad at my students when one corrects me, as long as se or he does it with education and without showing off.

@Yehoshua_Josh Too bad there aren't more teachers like you.

@CaliforniaLove Murica!

@CaliforniaLove
As they say in Texas, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."

@CaliforniaLove Murica...

@CaliforniaLove Some teachers are less open-minded than others...

Level 1 slave - Level 100 Self-governmented island
That's how North works!

@Kikki94
So you're not an expert, then who are you do decide what's in "scandinavia" and what isn't? @finnhare just wrote several reasons why Finland very much IS a part of it. Scandinavia isn't a real country, so there isn't really any real definition of what is and what is not Scandinavia. Just several different definitions.
Hva er poenget med å hele tiden kommentere hva som er eller ikke er deler av skandinavia? Du er ikke den eneste som gjør dette. I tillegg er det helt unødvendig, siden "skandinavia" ikke har noen betydning i dag. "Norden" derimot, er mye viktigere med tanke på samarbeid over landegrensene som skiller disse områdene som har så lik kultur og like verdier.

@Thevstad Instämmer.

@Thevstad You seem to misunderstand the meaning of 'Scandinavia' and 'Scandinavians'. It's about the culture/ethnicity. We're Scandinavians so our "homes" are what's called Scandinavia. That's also why Denmark is Scandinavian even though it is more geographically connected to Germany than to Sweden and Norway. We're in the same culture group. Finland is not. They're "related" to Estonians and even Hungarians but not to Swedes, Norwegians and Danes. That's also why their language is completely different than the rest. It belongs to the Uralic family. Ours don't.

You're right when saying that Scandinavia doesn't really mean anything useful though. It's just like saying "Baltics", "Balkan" or whatever. It's just an arbitrary name for something related. That still doesn't mean there's no "real definition" of it though. There very much is and Finland falls outside of that definition.

Obviously Finland has a lot in common with the Scandinavian countries today, so you could make an argument for modern Finland having a Scandinavian culture I guess, but why would you? Like you said, it doesn't mean anything of any value so what would be the point? A lot of people are talking about it like 'Scandinavian' is some sort of honorable "badge" or something that Finland deserves, but there's nothing inherently good or bad about being Scandinavian. It's just an arbitrary label for three related peoples. You can't "join" it or whatever.

@Corson you forgot finlands history my friend. Finland was 700 years east part of Swedish kingdom. In that time there lived finnish and swedish people, when sweden lost Finland to Russia 1809 there lived finnish and swedish people and when Finland finally got independence 1917 there still lived finnish and swedish people. Today Finns are mixed race between finns/swedish people. Swedish influence is much bigger than some 300 000 finnish swedes who are living today in finland. For example my family changed their swedish lastname in year 1907 to finnish lastname because it was fashion at that time when finlad looked for their own identity. At same time we decided that now we start to speak finnish . Example, one day your own father come to room and say; i have to tell you that i have a secret, i have a child with another women. Do you mean that this boy is not your relative???? Finns and Danish have very little to do with together, but must remember that Finns are younger stepbrother to Swedish. Stepbrothers are relatives to eachothers and that links Finland very strongly to Sweden as 700 years common history.

@finnhare Oh I know, but if "we mixed with them at some point" is enough to qualify people as Scandinavians (Hint: It isn't.) then Northern France (Normandy - Take a wild guess where the "Norman" comes from. Hehe), parts of Sicily and large parts of UK would also be Scandinavian. They're not. For the exact same reason Finland isn't.

The one thing I don't quite get though is Iceland. They're absolutely related to us and if they were still part of Denmark or Norway or whatever, they would undoubtedly be considered Scandinavians. Not sure how they managed to "leave" a culture group. lol it makes no sense from what I can see..

@finnhare I know that Finland was a part of Sweden for a time, but I also know that the Swedes didn't exactly treat you guys all that well.. To put it mildly. It wasn't like they saw the Finnish people as equals and mixed happily with them. Hell, they even made Swedish the official language of everything important. Finnish was for the poor and uneducated etc.

Obviously the actual Swedes (The ones actually belonging to the Scandinavian culture group) living in what's now Finland are of Scandinavian origin but the others aren't. It's not something I'm personally deciding or me trying to keep the Finnish people out or whatever, but it's just a fact like Denmark not being Baltic is a fact. It doesn't matter if I want to be Baltic or whatever. I'm just not. If I move to Latvia and settle there, I'm still Scandinavian. I can't become Baltic no matter what I do.

If my father had a child with another woman, that child would be my half brother/sister because we have the same father. Swedes and non-Swedish Finns don't have that "common father" unless we go so far back that current culture groups didn't even exist yet. Back then we all had that "common father" regardless of skin color, current nationality, current language group etc. etc.
Finns and Swedes from completely different culture groups. Stepbrothers aren't related either btw. If they share a parent, they're half brothers. Not stepbrothers. Stepbrothers have different parents. Obviously it's ideal if stepbrothers like each other so much that they see each other as brothers, but that doesn't make it biologically true, which is what matters when it comes to ethnic and cultural groups. You can't just decide to join another ethnic or cultural group. That's also why they've been able to track the origin of some African Americans back the Africa for example. Just because they're all black doesn't mean they're the same cultural group just like everyone white doesn't belong to the same one either.

To use your own family-example, the Swedish-Finnish relation is more like a roommate (Or stepbrother like you said). Just because you live together for years doesn't make you related. You can become close and call each other brothers etc. but you're really not. You're just really great friends.

@Corson Hi, I know my friend very well that when Finland was east part of Swedish Kingdom Swedish was official language and if you wanted succeed good Swedish language was necessary.

If you open this link;
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/World_Map_of_Y-DNA_Haplogroups.png

"Dominant Y-chromosome haplogroups in pre-colonial world populations, with possible migrations routes".
You can see that west part of Finland was "blue/Scandinavian color and East part of Finland was green/Finnic color"
Finns arrived to Finland something about 8 000 years ago from somewhere Siberia and Scandinavians arrived from somewhere near current Saudi Arabia.
All the european races have became from somewhere from asia or from middle east.
So, Finland was already genetic mixed (Scandinavia/Finn) many thousands years before Swedish came to Finland in year 1100.
This is what i meant, when i sad that Finland is "mixed race" between Finn/Swedish. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia 1809
all Swedish how lived in Finland stayed to Finland. When Finland become independent 1917 here lived Finns and old Swedish people whose home country was Finland. Today In Finland there's more genetic difference between Western Finns and Eastern Finns than there is between Germans and Brits.

Here are some direct speech from doctoral thesis : "Genetic structure in Finland and Sweden : aspects of population history and gene mapping" ;
"The genetic structure of populations is a potential source of population history information and an important factor in gene mapping studies. The main aim of this thesis was to study the population structure in Finland and Sweden using, for the first time, genome-wide data from thousands of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Furthermore, this thesis introduced a novel gene mapping approach, subpopulation difference scanning (SDS), and tested its theoretical applicability in the Finnish population.

The study subjects included 280 Finnish and 1525 Swedish individuals, and genotypes from Russian, German, British and other populations served as reference data. The results revealed that the Finns differed clearly from central Europeans. Within Finland, the genetic difference between eastern and western Finns was striking. The Finns, particularly eastern Finns, also showed reduced genetic diversity as well as an increased genetic affinity to East Asian reference populations. In Sweden, the overall population structure seemed clinal and lacked strong borders. The population in southern Sweden was relatively homogeneous and genetically close to the Germans and British, while the northern subpopulations differed from the south and also from each other. Overall, these results are congruent with earlier observations from smaller numbers of markers and with population history, particularly the small population sizes that have led to genetic drift. "Although the Finnish gene pool is mainly European, it also harbors distinct eastern elements. Estimates of the relative contributions of these sources to the nuclear gene pool have been 75% European and 25% non-European
(Nevanlinna 1984) or 90% European and 10% Uralic (Guglielmino et al.1990)." Finns appear to be genetically closest to Swedes, Estonians, Germans, and Poles, among others (Seldin et al. 2006, Bauchet et al. 2007, Lao et al. 2008, Novembre et al. 2008, McEvoy et al. 2009, Nelis et al. 2009).

If you are Finn or Swedish or interested about genetic this is fascinating research.
Link to 136 pages doctoral thesis : Genetic structure in Finland and Sweden : aspects of population history and gene mapping.
https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/36772

Everyone's smiling, and then Greenland is just like ~_~

rare sighting of sparkleless iceland

https://ibb.co/mjQ7az

I would add that before this, all of us were united in the Kalmar union. And before that again, Iceland and the Faeroe islands were part of Norway, not Denmark

@Bruskork, true, though the Kalmar union was effectively dominated by Denmark. Which was the reason that Sweden began freeing themselves almost immediately after they had joined. Norway probably would have left too, but the plague had decimated the population and simply didn't have the strength. But yes, this is obviously an oversimplification and in the aftermath of the death of Cnut the Great was for a while the strongest Scandinavian power.

Fun fanct for ppl who wonder why Finlad is not part of Scandinavia:

Swedish, Norwegian and Danish and Icelandic are all Scandic languages. They belong to North Germanic languages (part of Indo-European languages, in Family of three Germanic languages).
Germans (not from Germany, Germany came later) lived in South Scandinavia, and around 500 B.C.E the languages started to turn in their own directions.
850 B.C.E the climate started to change colder and part of the people moved south to the area nowadays know as Germany and Holland, and that is why the languages have a lot of similarities.

The language is the reason why it's called Scandinavia


Finnish is Uralic language. Uralic languages include Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.
Finland is not part of Scandinavia since they does not speak Scandinavian language

@punasinerva I'm not a linguist, but I don't believe Germanic and Uralic are at the same level as comparisons. Maybe Indo-European and Uralic are? Nevertheless, Uralic is going way, way back. I'm not sure even Finno-Ugric would be comparable (includes Hungarian and languages on the east side of the Ural mountains). Finno-Permic (doesn't include Hungarian or the far away eastern languages) might be a closer match. From my limited pov, the major Germanic languages are closer to each other than Finnish is to Hungarian, after all. I could be utterly wrong, though. Comparing Scandinavian languages to Balto-Finnic languages might serve as some sort of highest level comparison.

I'm not a linguist, so you are free to take this as nonsense.

Sweden's smug ass face makes me wanna crush his glasses and stuff it down his throat

@TheArcherOfBlaze Im with ye!

@TheArcherOfBlaze woAH THERE!

@TheArcherOfBlaze

O_o
Got a lot of free-floating hostility there, don'tcha, Mr Teenager?

If you ask me Finland is more scandinavian than Denmark since we r on same level with Sweden and Norway but I quess we r too different for 'em to accept us :P

@Gabe i was shocked to learn finland was not a scandinavian country when i was a kid. i still think it is not fair for finland. for me, finland will always be scandinavian.

@Gabe in my junior high school geography book I read that Scandinavian were Sweden,Norway, and Finland not Denmark... Than I know not that that book was wrong..

@Zuperkrunch thats fennoskania you are talking about

@Agpalinguarsuaq no.. I'm kinda confused between skandinavian peninsula and skandinavian countries.. I think the book refering to the skandinavian peninsula thats why finland one of them and not denmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Peninsula

@Gabe Finland became independent from Russia (Unlike Norway that became independent from Denmark), which technically makes it a big Baltic country. Also, no one understands the weird language (I've tried, it makes no sense), but a Swede, Dane and Norwegian can understand each other to a degree.

Finland's relationship with Sweden and the cross flag just kinda turned it Nordic

@Gabe
Finland does not speak Scandic language. We speak Uralic with Holland and Estonia. That's why we are not Scandinavia Would be easier in school though since pakko-ruotsi (we have to study Swedish).
Germaanit ei asuttaneet Suomea, vaan me otettiin kieli tuolta Venäjän puolelta, Ural-vuorilta.