Finnish, Swedish, or English? In-house communication in recently merged Finnish-Swedish corporations

The first research project carried out in 2000-2002 focused on company-internal communication and dealt with two corporate mergers over the Gulf of Bothnia. In both cases a Finnish company merged with a Swedish one in the late 1990s and two new corporations were formed (see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005). One of them is a globally operating paper manufacturer and the other a banking group whose markets used to be in Scandinavia but have since expanded to the Baltic countries.

The paper company chose English as their corporate language and the bank initially opted for Swedish as the ‘reporting language and the language for management’. At this point, it is essential to remember that Swedish is the second official language of Finland with some 6% of the population speaking it as their mother tongue.

The starting point for our research was to find out how the employees of the new entities coped with the new linguistic and cultural challenges of the cross-border mergers. We started with a communication survey and interviews in both companies to find out about their communication practices and, in particular, how the Finnish and Swedish employees perceived their each other’s communication cultures. We then analyzed meetings and emails to see if, and how, the survey findings were reflected in authentic data. Here I primarily focus on some of the survey findings and on email messages written in English and exchanged between Finns and Swedes in the paper company.

The findings from the survey were based on around 400 responses from a randomly selected group of Finnish and Swedish employees in both companies (for the full report, see Louhiala-Salminen 2002). The respondents represented different organizational positions, units, and ages. The most interesting findings concerning intercultural issues are related to language choice on both the individual and corporate level and the perceptions about Finnish vs. Swedish communication.

On the individual level, language choice seemed to be a highly pragmatic one: English was used if the participants did not share a mother tongue. Around 20% of all internal communication took place in English and the rest in the respective mother tongue.

Swedish was used to some extent in social settings. On the corporate level, the bank’s decision to use Swedish as the ‘reporting language’ was considered problematic, especially by the Finns. They pointed out how the Swedes gained the upper hand since they were able to use their mother tongue, whereas most Finns had to resort to a foreign language, which they felt they did not master so well. Finns applauded the change of the ‘reporting’ language to English a few years later when the bank expanded into Denmark.

The survey findings related to the Finnish and Swedish respondents’ perceptions of each other’s communication cultures seemed to support the anecdotal evidence of issue-oriented, direct Finns who are economical with words and people-oriented Swedes who enjoy talking. When Finns and Swedes described their own communication, they used positive language such as ‘effective’ vs. ‘open discussion’, whereas the characterizations of their partner’s communication were more negative, such as ‘too direct’ vs. ‘endless talk’.

All in all, it was a question of how much talk was considered effective communication. Both Finns and Swedes considered their own communication effective and the other’s less so. Although the respondents found it difficult to separate the impact of national, corporate, and organizational cultures, it was evident that BELF communication carried such characteristics that were explained by the cultural background of the user. Here it must be noted, however, that the survey questions might have guided the respondents to emphasize nationality as an explanatory factor.

Email messages in BELF

To find out how the perceptions about Finnish and Swedish communication were reflected in authentic data, 282 email messages written in BELF by the Finnish and Swedish employees of the paper company were investigated (for details, see Kankaanranta 2006). The analysis was based on the textualisations of 106 requests with a special focus on their directness to find out about the alleged ‘directness’ of the Finns and the nature of impositions to find out about the alleged ‘discussion-orientation’ of the Swedes.

In the data, every second request could be classified as direct, but the Finns were still somewhat more direct than the Swedes. Of all requests made by the Finns, 63% were classified as direct using either imperatives (e.g. Please comment.) or questions (e.g. What do you think?), whereas the Swedes used more indirect forms such as modal initials (e.g. Could you please comment on this?). More interesting than the relative directness of the requests was the fact that both groups used expressions that the other one never used or at any rate used less frequently.

One example of this difference is the use of kindly by the Finns to replace please; the Swedes never used it. Although the data was limited in size, it could be suggested that kindly is transference from the equivalent Finnish adverb ystävällisesti, which is an integral element in Finnish requests. For some Finnish speakers it may come more easily than please, which represents a functional equivalent for the adverb. What may confuse some Finnish speakers is the dictionary translation for please (olkaa hyvä), which is used when offering something, i.e. in the meaning of here you are.

Another example of different usage is that the Swedes clearly used modal initials more than the Finns. To put it simply, when the Finns wrote Please comment on this, the Swedes preferred Could you please comment on this. More research is needed to further explore this difference.

The nature of impositions in the requests did not generate any clear differences between Finns and Swedes. Most of the impositions (63%) called for communication-related activities: contacting people, informing them about something, and delivering something to them. Interestingly, one-fourth of all requests called for comments or opinions about other texts or business issues and was equally distributed among Finns and Swedes (see examples above).

This result seems to suggest that discussion and dialogue were ongoing and extensive in the company and both Finns and Swedes could be described as discussion-oriented. When this characteristic is combined with the fact that first names were frequent in salutations and complimentary closes of the emails, we gain an image of a people-oriented, democratic corporate culture reflected in the actual use of BELF.

To sum up, the authentic email data supported the survey findings only to some degree and the same applies to the authentic meeting data (see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005).