I'm finnish and work with a lot of international people, many of whom have lived here for decades. None of them speak Finnish, and I, and all the other Finns I know, would never expect them to speak it. It's not that big of a deal.
I think Saara (her real name is Saara Forsberg) is actually quite fluent in Swedish, and Finnish is her mother tongue. The video is intentionally gibberish. It's indeed a talent that she can sound so real without saying anything that makes any sense at all.
In a somewhat related sort of humour, as a Swedish-speaker you might enjoy this piece of gibberish:
(It's the genuine Soviet anthem in Russian, with Swedish subtitles that will sound similar when you sing them out, and the hallucinatory Swedish sentences are then demonstrated in video. I just love it, though I don't know the guy who did this.)
Finnish: (my first, heritage language) Had the right set of phonemes and the right pace of speech, but no discernible meaning. It confounded me and would have irritated me had it been longer.
English: (my second, dominant language) See above.
And for languages with which I only have a passing familiarity...
Swedish, Estonian, French: Pretty convincing.
Portuguese: A bit off the mark. Sounded almost like Italian.
Japanese: Only sort-of convincing.
Spanish (Castilian): Her stress placement seemed a little off but most of the vowels were good. Sort of an Americanized version.
In most parts of Finland, people only speak Finnish at home. It's mainly just Western Finland (and Helsinki to a lesser degree) where there are lots of finnish-swedish people that are bilingual. Elsewhere everyone tends to know English pretty well, but Swedish isn't nearly that common.
His mother tongue is Swedish, but he is (or at least was) a Finn. Finland is a bilingual country. Well, if you don't count the Sami. If you do, you get more languages.
Thanks, that's something I thought, but wasn't sure, because as a Finn it's hard to get enough samples of the equivalent situation: someone speaking my native language without accent or without grammatical errors.
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