Languages of Sweden
The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly ten million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to SIL's Ethnologue). Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns. The language is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to Ethnologue.
2011 Finnish parliamentary election
Yet another important issue during the campaign was that of the languages in the country. The status of the Swedish and Russian languages was an hot-button issue. A growing number of people believe that the Swedish language should be abolished as the country's second official language, as only a small percentage of the country use Swedish as their first language and that a large number of government officials do not use Swedish. A report by the Council of Europe stated that the Swedish language's status as Finland's second official language was in danger of being eroded in the longer term because of the officials' poor language skills and the lack of opportunities to study the language. However, the status of Russian was considered to be rising as several municipalities in eastern Finland sought to increase the role of the language at local schools. At the time, Swedish was spoken by 5.42% of the population as their mother tongue, with Russian spoken by 1.01% and the Sami languages spoken by 0.03%.