Meänkieli
Variant of Finnish spoken in northern Sweden / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Meänkieli (literally 'our language') is a Finnic language or a group of distinct Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost part of Sweden along the valley of the Torne River. Its status as an independent language is disputed, but in Sweden it is officially recognized as one of the country's five minority languages and is treated as a distinct language from standard Finnish.[2] According to the Swedish National Association of Tornedalians, 70.000 individuals are able to understand Meänkieli, at least to some level.[3]
Meänkieli | |
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meänkieli | |
Native to | Sweden |
Region | Torne Valley |
Ethnicity | Tornedalians |
Native speakers | (70,000 cited 1997–2020)[1] |
Uralic
| |
Official status | |
Recognised minority language in | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | fit |
Glottolog | torn1244 |
Map of the area where Meänkieli has an official status. |
Linguistically, Meänkieli consists of two dialect subgroups, the Torne Valley dialects (also spoken on the Finnish side of the Torne River) and the Gällivare dialects, which both belong to the larger Peräpohjola dialect group.[4] It has the status of a minority language in Sweden. In modern Swedish the language is normally referred to officially as meänkieli, although colloquially an older name, tornedalsfinska ("Torne Valley Finnish"), is still commonly used. Sveriges Radio tends to use tornedalsfinska for the culture generally and meänkieli specifically for the language.[5]
Meänkieli is distinguished from Standard Finnish by the absence of 19th- and 20th-century developments in Finnish.[6]