African Languages in Finland: Adding Multicolored Yarn to an Old Ryijy

This article presents an overview of African languages used in Finland today. Although it addresses the Nordic region's colonial past, the focus of the article is on recent immigration to Finland, which took off in the 1990s. A discrepancy exists between the linguistic profiles of African migrants as captured in official census data (which are limited to presumed native language) and the patterns of multilingualism known in migrants’ countries of origin. The monolingual bias of Finnish census data does not allow a full appraisal of African migrants’ language use and language support needs. Since they are but one of many multilingual populations in Finland, I argue for new methods of data collection on repertoires and language use and new ways of supporting linguistic diversity and multilingualism in Finnish society.