Meänkieli

Meänkieli, literally 'our language', is the Finnic variety of the Torne, Muonio and Kalix valleys in Sweden's far north, separated from Finnish when the 1809 border left the western bank of the Torne river under Swedish rule. It continues the Peräpohjola dialects — mie 'I', sie 'you', syän 'heart', hään 'he/she', apocopated numerals yks and kaks — while its lexicon carries a heavy Swedish layer (taattori 'computer' from dator, häntä-aa for the @ sign, pruukata 'to be in the habit of') and a thin but distinctive Sámi stratum including juttaa 'to migrate with a reindeer train' and katnanen 'hip bone'. A century of Swedish-only schooling and stigmatisation nearly ended transmission, and the great majority of fluent speakers today are middle-aged or older. Since minority-language recognition in 2000 it has gained a standard orthography, broadcasting, a literature led by writers such as Bengt Pohjanen, and a 68,000-entry crowd-edited dictionary, Meänkielen sanakirja.