The Federation of Foreign Language Teachers in Finland (Sukol) warns that Finland's future competitiveness is at risk due to students’ heavy focus on English and declining interest in other languages

In a statement on Monday, the organisation said that exam data from the past decade "reveal a worrying trend" with languages ​​besides English losing ground.

"This is not just a detail of educational policy, but a question concerning the future competitiveness of Finland as a whole," Sukol said. It referred to Finnish Matriculation Examination Board statistics dating back to 2017. Since last year alone, the number of students opting for the advanced English exam has increased from 38,000 to over 44,000.

While "proficiency in English is certainly essential, problems will arise if other language skills are not built alongside it," the federation said in a press release.

Interest in Russian plunges

Sukol notes that the popularity of many traditionally important languages, such as Swedish, German, French and Russian, is slowly fading.

Regarding Finland’s second official language, participation in the intermediate-level Swedish exam remains high, but its popularity has declined over the past decade. The number of candidates taking the Swedish exam has decreased by around 3,000 to around 12,000.

This suggests that Swedish proficiency is increasingly seen as just something that must be achieved, rather than a language that people want to master properly, Sukol said.

The popularity of basic exams in German, French and Russian has also slumped.

The number of students choosing the German exam has dropped from over 1,600 to around 1,200, while the number of French examinees has dropped from about 1,000 to less than 700.

Russian — once a crucial skill for business and tourism in eastern Finland, for instance — has fallen by more than half from around 630 candidates to less than 300 in the past few years. Trade with Russia ground to a halt after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years.

The association points out that these are not marginal languages, as Germany is Europe's dominant economic power, French is a key language in the EU, and Russia remains Finland's largest neighbour.

Spanish gains popularity

Meanwhile, Sukol points to growing interest in Spanish among high school students.

"The number of participants in the advanced Spanish test has multiplied over the past decade, and basic-level Spanish has also remained popular," it noted.

As Sukol sees it, the problem is not the strengthening of English, but the loss of proficiency in other languages.

"For a small country, diverse language skills are a necessity, not a luxury," the group argues. Sukol was established in 1957 and has about 3,000 members.