Meänkieli dialects

Meänkieli (lit. "our language") is a group of distinct Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost part of Sweden along the valley of the Torne River. In Sweden it is recognized as one of the country's five minority languages.

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 (see Dialect chart). For 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 too; a common, and older, name is tornedalsfinska, which literally means "Torne Valley Finnish".

Meänkieli is distinguished from Standard Finnish by the absence of 19th- and 20th-century developments in Finnish. 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 as many loanwords as Meänkieli. Meänkieli lacks two of the grammatical cases used in Standard Finnish, the comitative and the instructive (they are used mostly in literary, official language in Finland). In Finland, Meänkieli is generally seen as a dialect of Northern Finnish. There is also a dialect of Meänkieli spoken around Gällivare that differs even more from Standard Finnish.