The damn foreigners

No, I don't mean myself, of course. Nor any other foreigner who lives in Finland and either speaks Finnish or is trying to learn it. I mean the ones who don't.

It seems like a lot of them have appeared lately, much more than there used to be 10 years ago, and not as a linear function as having more foreigners in Finland. More of them everywhere nowadays, except for English-speaking countries. There seems to be quite a lot of people nowadays, most of them from English-speaking countries but some from elsewhere, who like to live abroad but don't find it necessary or even desirable to learn the local language. Moreover, many of them have an attitude of "the locals better learn to speak English if they want to talk to me" and then get upset when locals don't talk to them.

Lately I've heard, from different people in different places:

- that it's a shame the University of Helsinki has some courses in Finnish, all the courses should be in English,
- that if you find a Finn who has any communication skills at all the person will speak English anyway, therefore Finnish is not necessary,
- that it's unjust discrimination that a reasonably fluent Finnish is required for most government jobs,
- that people speak Finnish in a coffee room at work just to spite the foreigners.

One guy said that he likes living in a different country for several years and then moving on, as a way to see the world, but that he is not interested in learning local languages while he is at it. He is not the only one like that. I sometimes wonder what they see in the world when they look it it that way. This is not a rhetorical question, I am really curious.

The people with the worst variety of the "let the peasants learn the white man's language"-syndrome often make me feel like saying "sori, en mä puhu englantia". Unfortunately by that time they usually already know that I do.