We studied how individuals’ ethnolinguistic affiliation relates to the ethnolinguistic structure of kinship in contemporary Finland, a society in which Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking ethnolinguistic groups have coexisted for centuries and mixed marital unions are common. Using multigenerational data from the population register, we determined how the ethnolinguistic registration of children born in 1990–2015 relates to three generations of ancestors. We created a family tree that links children to their parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents. Our intention was to both map the ethnolinguistic background of young people and predict a child’s affiliation based on their ancestry. The data revealed that ethnolinguistic affiliation is a more fluid and complex feature than expected when assessed only through child and parental characteristics. We found substantial diversity in ethnolinguistic background within the Swedish-speaking minority group, while most individuals in the Finnish-speaking majority group had a uniform background. We identified three types of bias in the ethnolinguistic affiliation of mixed-origin children: a matrilineal bias, a kinship majority bias and a Swedish ethnic minority bias. The analyses advanced our understanding of how the size of minority groups can shrink even when most couples in mixed unions favour minority group affiliation for their children.

中文翻译：

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亲属关系、遗产和民族选择：当代芬兰四代人的民族语言登记

我们研究了个人的民族语言归属与当代芬兰的民族语言亲属结构之间的关系，在这个社会中，芬兰语和瑞典语的民族语言群体已经共存了几个世纪，混合婚姻也很常见。利用人口登记中的多代数据，我们确定了 1990 年至 2015 年出生的儿童的民族语言登记与三代祖先的关系。我们创建了一个家谱，将孩子与其父母、四位祖父母和八位曾祖父母联系起来。我们的目的是绘制年轻人的民族语言背景，并根据血统预测孩子的归属。数据显示，当仅通过儿童和父母特征进行评估时，民族语言归属是一个比预期更加流动和复杂的特征。我们发现瑞典语少数群体中的民族语言背景存在很大差异，而芬兰语多数群体中的大多数人都有统一的背景。我们发现混血儿童的民族语言归属存在三种类型的偏见：母系偏见、亲属多数偏见和瑞典少数民族偏见。这些分析加深了我们对少数群体规模如何缩小的理解，即使大多数混合婚姻的夫妇都支持他们的孩子属于少数群体。