Larrey said: German was the dominant urban language in Medieval Sweden, not that the towns were anything to speak of. But it meant the Medieval Swedish social elite, especially the part that was trade and manufacture, was largely German speaking. The commoners, the peasants were Swedish and Finnish speaking, with Swedish also being dominant with the nobility. Click to expand...

So Protestantism and the Reformation worked the exact opposite on the Swedish language situation as far as the dominance of German was concerned. It meant the common vernaculars, Swedish, Finnish and even Sami, were given a boost as they became proper literary languages at least for religious purposes. Swedish already had a vernacular secular literature, but for Finnish ans Sami it meant a codification of the common language. Very important for the future. It has been seriously suggested that had the Bible in Swedish not come about at least Swedish as we know it might now have existed, it would have turned into some weird form of Low German Plattedeutsch. Click to expand...

No, no record of Sami. The Sami communities were not recruiting grounds, and had a different functoin. Click to expand...

Larrey said: It is. Really no particular Finnish cav tradition. Not that kind of country. They were being noticed for being perceived as "different" though, and a lot was made of the exotic Finns being-Laplander-Devil-worshipping-magic-users for propaganda purposes in the Imperial lands. (Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie as Chancellor in the 1660's even commissioned a huge, serious peice of academic scholarship from the Uppsala Univ. Professor Johannes Schfferus (another Swedish German, born in Strassburg), his "Lapponia" published in 1673, with translations into German, French, English and Dutch). Click to expand...

Don't forget Latin for every one who had scholarly interests (priests, scientists).Indeed. The effect of the codified common language was very important in Finnish. It has been argued that prior to the spreading ofthe various Finnish dialects were not truly mutually intelligible. And that happened mainly due to church introducing a form of the common Finnish via the bibles.Sami were early on seen as kind of wilders and trade with them was restricted only to limited number of people who tended invariably ended up exploiting the Sami in trade (cheap junkets for furs mainly) which resulted in some families in northern Sweden/Finland gathering quite sizable fortunes. You can find more from here: Birkarls - Wikipedia - in essence the northern areas where Sami lived they were utilized in sort of colonialist way. While the control of the area by the birkarls ended in 1600s - as instead of taxing the Sami through the Birkarls kings started to assert their own power and taxation - the Sami were still in somewhat different status than Swedes or Finns.Lack of tradition may have played part in the reputation since they were not likely to fight like ordinary 'traditional' cavalry. Also it is worth noting that Finnish horses were a far cry from what cavalry in the Central Europe used. They were more like small farm horses (a tad bigger than ponies) than warhorses - Finnhorse - Wikipedia