|
|
Meänkieli is a language - or a Finnish dialect, depending on who you ask - spoken in the most northern parts on Sweden, around the valley of the Torne River and west. Meänkieli literally means "our language." In Swedish it is usually called tornedalsfinska - "Finnish language of the Tornio valley".
| Contents |
The language
| Torne Valley Finnish (Meänkieli) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Sweden, Finland |
| Region: | Torne Valley |
| Total speakers: | 40,000-70,000 |
| Ranking: | Not in top 100 |
| Genetic classification: | Uralic languages Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Lappic Baltic Finnic Finnish Meänkieli |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Recognized minority language in Sweden |
| Regulated by: | - |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | - |
| ISO 639-2 | fiu |
| SIL | FIT |
| See also: Language – List of languages | |
Compared to standard Finnish, 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. 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.
The development of meänkieli
Since the split of the Swedish realm in 1809, the language developed in partial isolation from standard Finnish. In the 1880's, the Swedish state decided that it would be better if all citizens of the country talked Swedish. Part of the reason was based on military concern; one felt that people close to the border talking the language of the neighbouring country rather than the major language in their own country might not be trusted, in case of war. The schools in the areas were now teaching in Swedish, and the children were forbidden to speak their own language at school even during the breaks.
A language thus separated from all public life and only maintained in the private sphere, looses grounds. When new items of modern life arrived and a word for it was needed, the Swedish word was often incorporated. Thus meänkieli can be regarded an oldfashioned nothern Finnish dialect, with many loan words from Swedish. People whose mother tongue is meänkieli are very well aware of the fact that they don't speak "proper" Finnish. From a linguistic point of view, meänkieli might not be so different from Finnish that it deserves to be labelled as a language; but the language politics and the effects it had made this the most reasonable way of looking on it.
Meänkieli today
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.
Numbers of how many people speak meänkieli differ, since no people today speak meänkieli as their only language; it depends on what you mean by "speaking" a language. Numbers from 30,000 to 70,000 people are mentioned, most of them living in Norrbotten. Many people understand some meänkieli, but those who speak it regularly are fewer. People with meänkieli-speaking roots are often referred to as Tornedalians although the Finnish-speaking part of Norrbotten is a far larger area than the Tornio river valley; judging by the names of towns and places, it stretches as far west as the city of Gällivare. Today meänkieli is declining as an active language. Few of the young people 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. The author Mikael Niemis novels, and a film based on one of them, has greatly improved the general knowledge among average Swedes regarding the existance of this Finnish-speaking minority in the country that was not immigrated. Since the 1980s, the people who speak meänkile have gotten more aware of the importance of the language as a marker of identity, that one should not be ashamed of - as they so often were. Now, grammar books are getting written in meänkieli, the Bible is getting translated to meänkieli, there is drama performed in meänkieli and some TV-programs are getting made in meänkieli - ironically first now, in a time where the number of people who do speak meänkieli as their first language has grown increasingly smaller.
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
External link
- Tornedalen Finnish (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=FIT) at ethnologue.comde:Meänkieli