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Is Finland in Scandinavia?
What do you call a deer with one eye? Obviously, the answer is ‘one-eye-deer’. What do you call a deer with no eyes? or Is Finland in Scandinavia? The most common answer is no-eye-deer.
Joking aside, I have asked this question literally hundreds of times during my time as a business English teacher. I remain surprised at how provocative and controversial such an innocuous question is. Opinion is very much divided with many students stating “yes” while an equal number argue vigorously “no”. So what is the definitive answer?
Historically, the ancient Greeks and Romans were the first to write about Scandinavia. They had a vague knowledge about what they called "an island on the edge of the civilized world", populated by the barbarian tribes from Germania.
Geographically speaking, the Scandinavian Peninsula is a territory principally consisting of the mainland territories of Norway and Sweden (a small section of northwestern Finland is also on the peninsula and on its isthmus). The Scandinavian countries would, therefore, only be Norway and Sweden. But, according to my encyclopaedia, Scandinavia (ancient Scandia) is applied collectively to three kingdoms of northern Europe – Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Thus, historically Scandinavia can be defined as a geographical region centred on the Scandinavian Peninsula. These countries are also linguistically connected and share a common word ‘Skandinavien’ which refers to the ancient territories of the Norsemen, and for most people in these three countries, ’Scandinavia’ consists only of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
However, the other Nordic countries, Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, are frequently included in Scandinavia because of their close historic and cultural relations to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The problem comes when even northern Europeans can't agree themselves on the meaning of ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Nordic’.
Iceland was also a Norse territory and Icelandic belongs to the same linguistic family as Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Therefore, you will find some people for which Scandinavia is Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. To cloud matters further, Swedish is also the official second language of Finland and Sami languages are spoken in Finland, Sweden and Norway. Thus, linguistically the definition of Scandinavia is widened to include Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland.
There is also a strong historical and cultural argument for including Finland in Scandinavia - ‘Fenno-Scandinavia’, often with reference to the nation's long history as a part of Sweden. But, it must be remembered that although Finland is culturally closely related to the other Scandinavian countries, the Finns form a distinct linguistic and ethnic group, with a Finno-Ugric population that has incorporated features from both Eastern and Western Europe.
In such a state of linguistic and geographical confusion, it was the French who came to help by inventing the term "Pays Nordiques" or "Nordic Countries", which has become the most standard term to bring together Scandinavia, Iceland and Finland under the same umbrella.
The creation of the Nordic Council in 1956 gave us another new word to define the cultural affinity of the five countries: "Norden". Norden is commonly used in the Nordic countries, although this term is rather unknown in English.
From an English perspective in the 20th Century, the five countries have become synonymous with the term ‘Nordic Welfare State’, a term used to unite the region and give the identity ‘Scandinavia’.
Finally, my favourite definition comes from a former student at Sampo. ‘IF’, I remember correctly, it was still an insurance company at the time. She stated that “politically Finland is in Scandinavia but geographically it is not.”
Mike Bangle is the owner of Talking English language consultancy and can be contacted at mike.bangle(at)phnet.fi
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