| Also Known As: Meankieli,Torne Valley Finnish,Tornedalen,Tornedalsfinska,North Finnish,Meänkieli,Finnish, Tornedalen
Description:
Meänkieli (lit. "our language") is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in the most northern parts of Sweden, around the valley of the Torne River. From a linguistic point of view Meänkieli is a mutually intelligible dialect of Finnish, but for political and historical reasons it has the status of a minority language in Sweden. In Swedish nowadays the language is usually referred to as Meänkieli by the authorities; a common, and older, name is tornedalsfinska which literally means "Torne Valley Finnish". Linguistically meänkieli consists of the Finnish Torney Valley (also spoken on the Finnish side of the Torne River) and Gällivare dialects which belong to the much larger Far-Northern dialect group (see Dialect chart).
Meänkieli is chiefly distinguished from standard Finnish by a lack of influence from modern 19th and 20th century developments in that language. Meänkieli also contains many loanwords from Swedish, pertaining to daily life. However, the frequency of loanwords is not exceptionally high when compared to some other Finnish dialects: for example the dialect of Rauma has roughly an equal frequency of loanwords as Meänkieli. Meänkieli lacks two of the grammatical cases used in..... full article at Wikipedia |
