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I am not the OP but I can hazard a guess. "Nordic" has multiple meanings. One is "of the Nordic countries", which are the sovereign states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; the autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands and Greenland; and the autonomous region of Åland, plus a handful of other Norwegian areas. Some also include Estonia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_identity_in_Estonia). "Nordic" can also mean more specifically "Scandinavian", for example, the North Germanic languages are also referred to as the Nordic languages, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_folklore says "Nordic folklore" is "the folklore of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and the Faroe Islands", which you'll see does not list Finland or Greenland. And if you look more closely, you'll see it's not actually "the folklore of Sweden" but "the folklore of ethnic Swedes", since Nordic folklore does not typically include Sámi folklore. There's also a long history of discrimination against the Sámi. Taking it about 10 steps more extreme, Nordicism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordicism) used race psuedoscience to characterize the Nordic peoples as the most superior Aryans, and the master race. Finns were not seen as part of the Nordic race, but members of, for examples, the East Baltic or Mongolian races. In the US, Finns were sometimes not seen as white Europeans but as Asians, and thus justifying discrimination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... Thus, when someone says "Nordic", do they mean the inclusive version which includes the Uralic Finns and Sámi? Or do they mostly mean the Scandinavian parts of the Nordic countries, with the Uralic and Greenlandic inhabitants as afterthoughts or even forgotten? Even if they mean the former, it can carry with it the exclusion of the latter. The linked-to Nordic Names site includes Sámi, Finnish, and Greenlandic names, so it's more into the inclusive category. |