I recently had the pleasure of making a (very) quick trip to Helsinki. While I was in a shop (it was probably Stockmann), I noticed that the staff all had little flags on their name badges to indicate which languages they could speak. Nothing new there, it's quite common practice. Obviously a British flag indicated knowledge of English, French flag French and so on. But then I wondered about the Finnish flag which the staff were wearing.
I know that Finland is an officially bilingual country, with a small Swedish-speaking minority. So could it be taken for granted that the Finnish flag that some people were wearing would indicate knowledge of both Swedish and Finnish? In the U.K and in most other countries, the Finnish flag is used to represent only the Finnish language, but I guess that's not the case in Finland? Is bilingualism in Finland something that people pay lip-service to, or is it more entrenched?
