Disclaimer: It's not just Americans who think it's annoying, but it's funny when it's JUST them

[yvannairie]

It's always amusing to hear that someone American thinks me being very Loudly Finnish is annoying and self-involved

:D

Yeah it's less cute when it's done at you, ain't it?

Comments

[cimorene]

What???

Are you talking like, a bullhorn and everything draped in Finnish flags? Are you dropping it into conversation every other sentence like a mansplainer who went to Harvard????

Actually the idea of being loudly Finnish is inherently kind of funny...

[yvannairie]

Right??? I am such a bad Finn :'D

It's like... whenever I'm in a mixed-culture space, I feel like I'm starting every other sentence with "in my language...", "over here...", "aS A FiNnIsH PeRsOn". Like, yeah, it's me being Fucking Petty b/c I'm sick of US-centrism and working through Some Bullshit I went through on a few American servers while in a vulnerable state, but I do really feel kind of bad for all the other Europeans and non-Americans who have to put up with me.

(It also occurred to me that no fucking wonder my socially awkward arse couldn't really parse the kind of culture I'd been socialised into as a teenager b/c that's honestly just what Americans are like.)

[cimorene]

And yet I bet you still don't talk about it as much as plenty of monolingual midwesterners who know nothing about other cultures to compare it to! I have like a learned intense and hostile suspicion response to American flag stickers.

Plus Finnish is always a fantastic linguistic example because it's a rare language family with a unique and cool grammar and a phonetic system in which stuff almost always sounds cool, so what's not to like?

[yvannairie]

Yeah and Finland is... so strange, culturally, b/c we're a prosperous Nordic country with some fucked-up cultural trauma that we haven't quite processed in the scant hundred years we've been independent, and I always get interesting responses when I bring up stuff like Russophobia and our relationship to Sweden, Germany and the United States.

[cimorene]

Yeah, there are some highly unusual features of Finnish culture relating to Finland's geopolitical position between the so-called East and West. Even just the legal status of Swedish is pretty unusual (although there are plenty of countries with multiple official languages in the world of course, but the scale of the minority and the types of protections on the minority language - I took a course on it and read a really fascinating textbook that compares it in a million tiny ways to French in Canada).