Vaasa

Vaasa (Finnish: [ˈʋɑːsɑ]; Swedish: Vasa, IPA: [ˈvɑːsa]) is a city on the west coast of Finland. It received its charter in 1606, during the reign of Charles IX of Sweden and is named after the Royal House of Vasa. Today, Vaasa has a population of 66,581 (30 June 2015) (approximately 90,000 in the Vaasa sub-region), and is the regional capital of Ostrobothnia (Swedish: Österbotten, Finnish: Pohjanmaa).

The city is bilingual with 7,001,698,000,000,000,000♠69.8% of the population speaking Finnish as their first language and 7,001,248,000,000,000,000♠24.8% speaking Swedish, but the surrounding municipalities have much higher rates of Swedish-speakers than that.

History

Name

Over the years, Vaasa has changed its name several times, due to alternative spellings, political decisions and language condition changes. At first it was called Mustasaari or Mussor after the village where it was founded in 1606, but just a few years later the name was changed to Wasa to honor the royal Swedish lineage. Mustasaari (Finnish) or Korsholm (Swedish) remains as the name of the surrounding mostly rural municipality, which since 1973 surrounds the city. The city was known as Wasa between 1606 and 1855, Nikolaistad (Swedish) and Nikolainkaupunki (Finnish) between 1855 and 1917, Vasa (Swedish) and Vaasa (Finnish) beginning from 1917, with the Finnish spelling of the name being the primary one from ca 1930 when Finnish speakers became the majority in the city.