Background of the respondents

This subchapter discusses the background information of the survey respondents. Background information is examined in relation to the corresponding data from the 2022 survey.

Gender, age, and regional data correspond to the actual demographic structure of the Russian‑speaking population residing in Finland. This information about the respondents (sex, age and region) was gained automatically from the respondent register. All entities from the register were selected based on the criterion that their language recorded in the population register is Russian.

Overall, the background information of the respondents closely matched the distribution of background variables from 2022. Women were prominent in the responses, accounting for 60 per cent. Half of the responses are from the Helsinki‑Uusimaa region, 23 per cent from other parts of Southern Finland, 15 per cent from Northern and Eastern Finland, and 12 per cent from Western Finland.

Graph 2 shows the age distributions of respondents with year‑by-year comparisons, where no major changes have occurred.

Almost half of the respondents have a higher university degree (see graph 3). Compared to the previous survey, the proportion of individuals with a lower university degree is significantly smaller, while there are more individuals with only secondary education.

About half of the respondents were employed (graph 4). Respondents were clearly less often retired (13%), unemployed (11%), or entrepreneurs or students (8%).

78 per cent of the respondents were born in the Soviet Union, and 15 per cent in Russia. Other countries, including Estonia and Finland, received only a few mentions. People who migrated from the Soviet Union may refer to any of the former Soviet states, although most have likely moved from Soviet Russia.

It should be noted that a certain portion of Russian-speaking individuals living in Finland may not have officially registered Russian as their mother tongue and are therefore not represented in this study. Such individuals could include, for example, Russian speakers from Ukraine who choose Ukrainian as their official language for ideological reasons. Other examples could include individuals who have arrived from Kazakhstan or Tajikistan. In this survey, the focus is, however, limited to those individuals who have registered Russian as their mother tongue and therefore consider themselves Russian‑speaking. Thus, the targeted group effectively represents the Russian speakers living in Finland. Therefore, a person from Kazakhstan who speaks Russian but wishes to be classified and recognized as a Kazakh speaker does not belong to the study's target group.

Russian speakers who have migrated from Estonia have likely often registered Russian as their mother tongue, as the Russian language is a very central part of their cultural identity. The study reached 2 per cent of those who have migrated from Estonia, but many Russian speakers who moved from the Estonian region during the Soviet era likely reported having migrated from the Soviet Union. Also, in the years following Estonia's independence, some of those who migrated from there to Finland may have reported the Soviet Union as their country of birth. This phenomenon may even extend to some Russian speakers who were born in independent Estonia. The influence and legacy of the Soviet Union may still affect their perceptions of their own history and background, even though Estonia has been independent since 1991.

On an average, the respondents have been living in Finland for quite a long time. Half of the respondents have lived in Finland for over 15 years (graph 5).

Most commonly, the respondents moved to Finland for work (21%) or to join a Finnish spouse (20%, graph 6). The share of return migrants was clearly lower than in 2022, while the share of those who moved with their parents was higher.

44 per cent of the respondents were citizens of both Finland and Russia, 28 per cent were citizens of Russia, and 10 per cent were citizens of Finland. The remaining respondents were either solely citizens of another country or citizens of both Finland and another country, which likely means primarily citizens of Estonia or Latvia (this assumption is based on the fact that 90% of these respondents reported the Soviet Union, Estonia, or Latvia as their country of birth).

Respondents were asked to rate their Finnish language proficiency on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 = not at all and 5 = very good or native language. The average of the responses was 3.4, which is slightly lower than in 2022 (3.6). Half of the respondents rated their Finnish language proficiency as fairly or very good. When assessing Swedish language proficiency on the same scale, 88 per cent of the respondents reported that they do not speak Swedish at all.