It could be thought as a social language code, by which the multicultural and multilingual working class youth, a speech community, formed their own sociolect. The initiative for this grew at first from their needs of basic everyday communication, but soon probably came to signify a certain social status as well. Johannes Kauhanen notes on his slang history page that the first speakers of Helsinki slang were probably not the countryside-born agriculturists who moved to work in Helsinki, but their children. The first known written account in Helsinki slang is from the 1890 short story Hellaassa by young Santeri Ivalo (words that do not exist in, or deviate from, the standard spoken Finnish of its time are in italics): , , , . Kaisikseen. Modernization The old slang continued to develop up until the 1940s. In 1944 the Continuation War between the Soviet Union and Finland ended in the Moscow Armistice, and Finland had to cede large parts of Karelia to the Soviet Union. About 430,000 people became refugees within their own country. Many of them settled in Helsinki while, in the society at large, the transition from the agricultural society continued ever stronger. In practice the following years, especially the 1960s, meant the second major wave of immigration to Helsinki. This had an effect on the slang as well. 1940s mark the beginning of the gradual transition between the old slang () and modern speech (). The new population was, and continues to be, in greater numbers Finnish-speaking, and the Swedish and Russian influences on the language have declined ever since. The language started to move more towards common colloquial Finnish while still strongly borrowing from the old slang. The following generations also grew up in a different kind of cultural environment, where more abundant amounts of foreign culture, especially entertainment such as films and music, was, and continues to be, available. The cultural influence of the English-speaking world, especially the North American youth subcultures, grew, and increasing numbers of English-language words started to find their way to the language of the urban Helsinki youth. With the popularity of television and the advent of the Internet, this trend continues ever stronger in the present day. Evolution Although like any local dialect, Helsinki slang constantly evolves, most adult speakers of Helsinki slang still consider the pre-1960s version the real slang. Many of the now-adult speakers who grew up with the