Fennoman

The Fennomans were the most important political movement in the 19th century Grand Duchy of Finland. After the Crimean War, they founded the Finnish Party and intensified the language strife attempting to raise the Finnish language and Finnic culture from peasant-status to the position of a national language and a national culture. The evoked opposition, the Svecomans, tried to defend the status of Swedish and the ties to the Germanic world. Although the notion of Fennomans has hardly been used by anyone after the generation of Paasikivi (born 1870), their ideas have, partly in synthesis with the legacy of the Svecomans, since dominated the Finns' understanding of their bi-lingual nation.

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Many of the first generation of Fennomans were originally Swedish-speaking (mother tongue), but not all. Those Fennomans originally Swedish-speaking learned Finnish, and made a point of using it both in the society and at home, giving their children what they missed themselves: the Finnish mother tongue.

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Several of the Fennomans were of Finnish or bilingual homes. Even such may have had originally Swedish surnames, as it was very common in Finland those days.

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Most of the Fennomans also Finnicized their family names, particularly beginning from the end of the 19th century.

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In the last years of the 19th century, and in the first years of the 20th, the Fennoman movement split into two political parties: the Old Finnish Party and the Young Finnish Party.

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19th century: :Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical)...

Grand Duchy of Finland: The Grand Duchy of Finland was a state that existed 1809–1917 as part of the Russian Empire....

Crimean War: The Crimean War lasted from 28 March 1854 until 1856. It was fought between Russia and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, and the Ottoman Empire, joined somewhat tardily by Piedmont-Sardinia....