LULEÅ. En dryg vecka in i SHL-säsongen pratar hela ligan om Leo Komarov. Motståndare har kallat honom för fjant, hemmapubliken älskar honom – och som så ofta förut målas han ut som en buse. Så vad är det för statistik som får honom att le? Varför bor han i Linus Omarks hus? Och finns det för få...
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"Your swedish is brilliant"
Why would they expect anything else?
It’s tiresome that journalists and others still fail to recognize and remember that some Finns have Swedish as their native tongue and that theirs are accents, not “broken Swedish”, and it has to be even more tiresome for Swedish speaking Finns having to repeat and explain the fact to surprised Swedes on an almost daily basis.
However, to be quite honest, I wasn’t aware Komarov spoke Swedish until I watched a video posted from the locker room celebrating the win in the first game, where Komarov wore the ore miner’s gear rewarded the man of the match (he had immediately honey badgered his way to everyone’s hearts with I think eight hits in the season premiere). He held a lovely little speech and suggested the team should celebrate with a few beers.
I think the man’s born in Estonia to Russian and Finnish parents, and it’s easy to miss that he grew up in a majority Swedish community.
For Finnish speaking Finns in general it seems they tend to be more comfortable speaking English no matter their proficiency in Swedish. Jarmo Myllys generally spoke English in interviews throughout his years in Sweden, however when Luleå retired his number he did give a short and simple speech in Swedish. Juhani Tyrväinen has recently made interviews in Swedish for the club’s media outlets, but for Cmore and to be understood as well as possible I think he prefers English, understandably.
As an aside, growing up in Luleå, my family sometimes crossed the border to go shopping licorice and pierogies in Tornio or Kemi, and my parents would instruct me to preferably speak English to the personnel despite most of them knowing functional Swedish, since according to my parents many Finns resented Swedes or being forced to speak in their language. With the expansion of cross border retail and the ideology of “service mindedness”, you don’t as often sense the uncomfortable aversion from Finnish cashiers if speaking Swedish to them, but it’s still on the back of my mind if I cross the border, that I feel like a Swedish imperialist pig expecting Finns to speak my native tongue.
It’s also sad that I know zero Finnish: my grandparents on my mother’s side had it as a secret language if they didn’t want my mom and her siblings to understand what they were talking about, and they weren’t taught Finnish in school. When I was like 8 or 9 my mom said that she probably could have applied for me to receive home language education, which I think she regretted not thinking of earlier. At that point, I had absolutely no interest in any more school than I already was getting, and I also wonder how much good it would’ve made since no one knew Finnish at home, and few did or were comfortable speaking it in school. I got very little out of five years of French classes as well: you really have to apply yourself with learning another language and I wasn’t very studious or interested in learning until later.
