Official minority languages of Sweden
Finnish has been spoken in Sweden ever since the (then provincial) borders were drawn in the 13th century. Sweden has always had a significant migration to and from Finland. As the two languages belong to different language families it is easy to distinguish them, unlike the neighbouring languages Norwegian and Danish. The number of Finnish speakers in Sweden today has been estimated to over 460,000. Even though many current Swedes are of full or mixed Finnish descent, Swedish is the main language in practice for many bilinguals.
Finland Swedish
A common misconception among many Swedes is that Finland Swedish is simply Swedish spoken with a Finnish accent, something that can be a considerable source of frustration to most native Swedish-speakers in Finland. Any language adopts features, especially pronunciation habits, from dominant languages it comes in touch with, but many of the traits of Finland Swedish exist also in monolingual areas and some are in fact preserved features of old Swedish, as with Scots in comparison with English, Afrikaans in comparison with Dutch, or Galician and Brazilian and African dialects in comparison with modern mainland European Portuguese.