The invisible opponent

A study about feelings of national belonging, Finnishness and immigration of second generation Finns in Sweden

Abstract

In 2002–2003 I participated to a one-year Master of Philosophy course organized by the Graduate School for Humanities, Universiteit van Amsterdam to study Pragma-Dialectics and argumentation theory. In the final thesis I analysed interviews with Finnish speaking Finnish immigrants’ second generation in Sweden1. These interviews were conducted during the spring and summer 2002 with the aim to gather information about the connection between a minority language- and minority identities of the second-generation immigrants. And, of course, to get a glimpse of their everyday life in a middle-sized city in the area of Mälardalen, one of the most ’Finnish’ areas is Sweden. The interviews were semi-structured and the language was either Finnish or Swedish according to the interviewee’s wish.