Is Finland paticularly patriotic?

GuestUser   Thu Feb 25, 2010 8:59 pm GMT
Often a good guage of how patriotic a country is, is how many singers use their own language to write lyrics. Often really wimpy, self-loathing, unpatriotic countries, such as The Netherlands never use their own language for singing at all, and the Dutch language isn't particularly insignificant either, not for how few singers actually use it.

However, in Finland it strikes me 80% of singers actually use Finnish predominantly to write songs. There are a few Finnish musicians who sing in English and have acheived popularity internationally, but the bulk of popular Finnish musicians actually sing in Finnish. And often Finnish musicians who sing in English for the international market often release songs and albums in Finnish for the home market.

However, in Northern Europe this trend is only prevalent in Finland, in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, very view musicians use their own language, they have very limited pride in their own language and activiely adopt English words when there are perfectly good native ones, and very rarely sing in their own language. Any musician that uses their native language in the Scandinavian countries is usually regarded as a novelty, while in Finland it is pretty much the norm, and it is somewhat more unusual to sing predominantly in English.

Why is this? Are the Finnish just much more patriotic than the other small countries in Europe, or is it simply as Finnish is extremely different to English, not even an indo-european language, most Finnish peoples English is not at the level where they could write good, creative lyrics?

Cheers
Toodaloo   Thu Feb 25, 2010 10:57 pm GMT
They're further away and more independent due to their proximity to Russia. During the cold war they were less in the grip of Western Europe and had to be more measured in their pro-Americanism. They are less cuntified as a result.