Kven Finnish

Kven is the Finnic language of the Kven people, descendants of Finnish-speaking farmers and fishers who moved to the Arctic coast of Norway from the Torne and Kemi valleys mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Structurally it continues the Peräpohjola dialects and is very close to Meänkieli, but two centuries of separation have left it with dense Norwegian borrowing (daattamasiini 'computer', faari 'father') and its own written norm, codified from 2007 onward by the Kven Institute at Børselv. Its most visible orthographic feature is đ [ð] where standard Finnish writes d (syđän 'heart', syöđä 'to eat'), alongside the epenthetic h of forms like rakkhaus 'love' and juoputella 'to drink heavily'. Norway's harsh Norwegianisation policy broke transmission to children around the middle of the 20th century, so almost all fluent speakers are now elderly, though there is teaching material, a newspaper (Ruijan Kaiku) and a morphological analyser and dictionary from UiT's Giellatekno group.