National minority languages in Sweden: Introduction

In Sweden, of course they speak Swedish. It's the country's main language that is spoken by most people living here. But there are also a lot of smaller groups of people who don't speak Swedish but different languages: Minority groups In Sweden there are at least 150 other languages being spoken: minority languages. Some of these minority languages belong to a special group: languages that have been spoken in Sweden for more than a hundred years. Imagine, a hundred years, that is as far back as when your mother's or father's grandparents were kids.

Three generations ago that is. That makes them somewhat more Swedish, don't you think? That is why the Swedish parliament has decided that these particular languages have to be protected and get special help to be able to live on in Sweden. These languages are called: Sweden's national minority languages. So the ones speaking them get different kinds of support.

Like school lessons in this language. Or medical care and home care in this language. The kind of support differs from language to language. To be counted as a national minority language it must - along with being spoken for at least three generations - be a language of it's own and not just a dialect of Swedish. In Sweden there are five languages that fit into this distinction: Finnish, Meänkieli, Sami, Romani Chib and Yiddish.

Some of them you might have heard of but perhaps not all. So now you are about to find out some more. The Finns that live in Sweden but speak Finnish as mother tongue are called Sweden Finns. Finland belonged to Sweden between the 12th century and 1809. During the 16th century, a big group of Finns moved from the Finnish part of the country to the Swedish part.

But many Finns have moved to Sweden in later times as well. What about Meänkieli? That also sounds like Finnish, doesn't it? It is - or rather... it was, to begin with.

Meänkieli used to be known as Torne Valley Finnish. When Sweden and Finland were separated in 1809, the border was drawn here, next to the Torne river. The rest of Finland became Russian and the Finns living in the Torne Valley became Swedes. So Meänkieli is a Finnish dialect that has survived here since that border was drawn. But Meänkieli has developed in other ways than modern Finnish.

Today the languages differ quite a lot. Sami is spoken by the Sami. For thousands of years, the Sami have lived in this area: Sápmi. Sápmi stretches across the most northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. But there are Sami living all over Sweden.

Since Sápmi is a such wide area, the Sami spoken there doesn't only consist of one language but several. One thing Finnish, Meänkieli and Sami have in common is that they belong to a different language group than Swedish. They belong to the Finno-Ugric language group while Swedish belongs to the Indo-European group. What about Romani chib? What's that?

It's the language of the Roma. The Roma are an ethnic group that originally lived in India and then spread throughout Europe, via Persia and Armenia. This journey lasted several hundred years and it was during this time that their language developed. During the 16th century, the first Roma arrived in Sweden. Romani chib is actually not one language but a collective term for several dialects.

Romani chib is distantly related to Swedish since it belongs to the Indo-European language group. The fifth of Sweden's official minority languages is Yiddish, a Jewish language that was developed in what we now call Germany, about 1000 years ago. Yiddish has the same alphabet as Hebrew but these two languages do not belong to the same language group. Yiddish is an Indo-European language which Hebrew isn't. Jews have been living in Sweden since the 16th century.

In the year 2010, these languages were designated national minority languages in Sweden. Hopefully, these languages will survive, at least here.