Meänkieli, or Torne Valley Finnish, is a dialect of Finnish that since the split of the Swedish realm in 1809 has developed in partial isolation from standard Finnish. Meänkieli literally means "our language." In Swedish it is called Tornedalsfinska. On political grounds it is sometimes held to be language distinct from Finnish, but based on purely linguistic criteria, it is a dialect of Finnish.

Meänkieli is spoken by some 40,000-70,000 people in the Torne River Valley, in Norrbotten, along the border between Sweden and Finland. An unknown number of people with Meänkieli as mother tongue have migrated to more southerly parts of Sweden in search of employment, and are not tracked.

Meänkieli is chiefly distinguished by a lack of influence from modern 19th and 20th century standard Finnish. Meänkieli also contains many loanwords from Swedish which pertain to daily and public life, for instance from the fields of law and governmental administration. Meänkieli lacks two of the declensions used in standard Finnish, the comitative case and the instructive case. In Finland Meänkieli is seen as a sub-dialect of the northern Finnish dialect. There is also a dialect of Meänkieli spoken around Gällivare which differs even more from standard Finnish.

On April 1, 2002, Meänkieli became one of the five officially recognized "minority languages" of Sweden. It is most commonly used in the municipalities of Gällivare, Haparanda, Kiruna, Pajala and Övertorneå. However, very few of the employees in the public sector have sufficient literacy in the language; some 50% of civil servants have oral proficiency in Finnish and/or Meänkieli.

Today Meänkieli is declining as an active language in Sweden. Few young Swedes in the region speak Meänkieli in daily life, though many have passive knowledge of the language from family use. The language is taught at Luleå University of Technology and Umeå University.

Controversy

Education in and on Meänkieli has been criticized on the ground that standard Finnish would give the pupils considerably greater possibilities for further studies, access to the much richer Finnish literature , and additionally improve the relations between Finland and Sweden and between Swedes and Ethnic Finns in both countries.

The governmental and legal support for Meänkieli as a minority language has proved to be weaker than in comparable countries, such as Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands.

Different Swedish cabinets argued for many years that the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages did not make a sufficient distinction between recent immigrants and indigenous minorities, which in the case of Finnish speakers made a great difference for Sweden; from 1940 to 1970 Sweden had received some 400,000 immigrants from Finland to its urban and industrial centers. By 1995 this dilemma was solved by emphasizing the difference between standard Finnish, spoken by immigrants, and Meänkieli, spoken by the indigenous minority in the far north.

See also

• Demographics of Sweden
• Sweden Finns

External link

• Tornedalen Finnish at ethnologue.com