The Estonian Swedish-speaking minority lived (just some hundred of them still do) mostly in the northwestern coastal areas of Estonia. Before the Second World War there were about 8 000 of them. Some of the islands off the Latvian and Estonian coasts were totally Swedish speaking (Runö in Riga bay (or: the bay of Riga); Ormsö close to the “capital” of this population, Haapsalu). In connection with the Second World War the vast majority of them were forced to leave their homeland - Soviet Union military forces demanded their areas for bases.
How long this minority has been living in Estonia is one of the many riddles about this folk group. For sure their presence is documented from the second half of the 13th century, but some scholars have taken for granted that their presence goes back to the Viking age if not longer. Among many amazing facts about them is that in the 1780s, under Russian rule, a whole parish was forced to move from their homes on Hiiumaa (Dagö) to newly conquered areas in Ukraine, at the river Don. There, in Gammalsvenskby, a group still lives, while others of them emigrated to Sweden in the 1920s. On Dagö the Swedes had become assimilated before that time. Nowadays, most of the descendants of the Estonian Swedes live in Sweden, where they have assimilated, but at the same time keep their historical heritage alive. A new and interesting feature in their history is that they to some degree go back to their old homeland, now mostly as summer cottage owners, owing to Estonian laws for returning land and buildings to owners before Estonia became a Soviet Republic. What does this mean to the area and to the identity of those returnees?
These traces of the history of the Estonian Swedish-speaking minority is only a skeleton around which many studies have been done, starting from the mid-nineteenth-century German scholar Carl Russwurm, who “discovered” this group, and described their language - a very old-fashioned variant of Swedish - their history, their habits, and their material and immaterial culture. There remain a lot of unanswered questions, and many scholars from different disciplines and different countries have shown a deep interest in answering at least some of them.
In the end of October 2003 a conference was held at Uuemõisa close to Haapsalu, Estonia, with about 40 participants from Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Germany and other countries, to discuss a five-year project on an interdisciplinary and international level, concentrating on the study of this minority from many aspects. There were distinguished researchers from several fields, but the majority of the participants were people with projects for their MA or PhD theses.
One of the conclusions from the conference was that yearly interdisciplinary meetings during a five-year period were to be held, where progress in research could be presented and discussed, but also that general issues concerning minorities and minority study could be taken into consideration, with support from minority researchers from many countries, inside and outside the EU. We regard it as a challenge to develop minority study theoretically - these meetings can be regarded as training camps for researchers within the area of minority studies.
Many more people than those who attended this low budget conference have marked an interest to participate in the project. One of the ideas that was accepted at the conference was that all results within the project could be used for the production of a multimedia disc (CD-ROM or perhaps DVD) where the interested laymen can also take part in the results of the project.
Other forms for publication will of course also come to be. A homepage for the project is already to be launched, where the participants can get in contact and present results underway, and where they can download or otherwise use the data and different documentation, which have to be collected. A fairly expensive part of the project is to make data easily accessible on the Internet for the network members and eventually for the public (dialect records, music and folklore collections from different archives, documentary photos and films, little-known collections of objects in magazines in different countries, including Russia (St. Petersburg) and Latvia (Riga)).
Our hope is that this project, partially using new high tech technology (developing a virtual Rågö-museum is one of the suggested projects) will implement a new standard for minority study in general.
Financing of the project will be tried from different sources: private and public foundations from the EU, the Nordic countries as a whole, and from Sweden, Finland and Estonia.
