Talk:Meänkieli

message: Today the border between a language and a dialect has been very political for example norwegian and swedish are diffirend languages. ALso meänkieli doesnt only have swedish loans but saami loans. Some saami words for example:
* kaanij = kummitus
* mella = hiekkamäki
* tseeru = lapinkylä
* kieppä = alanko
* kobbo = kukkula
* gaissa = korkea tunturi
* fjeruavesi = alivesi
* kiena = mäki
These are all saami loanwords.
* In meänkieli how much you can understand depends on the topic for example
* mie pruukaan praatata meänkielelä ko laulan köökissä ( now there are altmost no simular words to finnish )
* Meänmaa on maa missä torniolaaksolaiset ja saamelaiset ellää ( fully understandable to finns )
* If meänkieli is a finnish dialect then norwegian and swedish are the same language. Also for example in china cantonese and mandarin are officialy the dialects of chinese but they can not understand each other. 
--Palmtree222 — Preceding undated comment added 09:46, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Why meänkieli is a language

message: I started to revise this article on my laptop, but am now busy with studies and preparations for an exam, why I think I better post my version here - unfinished and unpolished as it may seem. /Tuomas 13:15, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Meänkieli language is an unnecessary redundancy, since "kieli" means language as Kizor already pointed out. Either meänkieli or meän kieli should do fine. I see it written as meänkieli most of the times, and Google supports this (36,700 vs. 522). "Meänkieli language" gets 859 hits. I now move this page to meänkieli. / Habj 20:05, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

text: ..."unnecessary redundancy" is self-referent — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.109.252.196 (talk) 09:37, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: .

message: Well, not bias as in valuing one thing over another, but this article seems to assume a Swedish context when it talks about legal and societal issues.  When you look at the sentence "Meänkieli is spoken by some 40,000-70,000 people in the Torne River Valley, in Norrbotten, along the border between Sweden and Finland," it sounds as if it is spoken in both countries, to someone who doesn't know where Norrbotten or the Torne River Valley are.  Yet, later, you have the sentence 
"The governmental and legal support for Meänkieli as a minority language has proved to be weaker than in comparable countries, such as Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands."  What government?  If support for Meänkieli is stronger in Norway, Finland and the Netherlands, why focus on Sweden so much?
I may just be confused, but I think there may be something confusing in this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rschmertz (talk • contribs) 18:26, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I hope my recent additions have made it clearer - meänkieli is a phenomenon located in Sweden. I think it hardly exists in Finland; the dialects on the Finnish side of the Torne River are regarded Finnish dialects. Maybe my additions are a bit POV; I personally find it a shame that we have deliberately oppressed this language, and made people ashamed of themselves because of their language. I trust someone else to wash my additions a bit, and make them look a bit more encyclopedic. /Habj 23:18, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Meänkieli is spoken on the Finnish side of the Torne valley as much as on the Swedish side. The Finnish government, however, considers meänkieli a Finnish dialect, not a language. Linguistically I agree with that. Reasons for its status in Sweden are mostly political, as pointed out. --Oami 17:19, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Furthermore, the word meänkieli is not used in standard Finnish; it is called "tornionlaakson murre", "Torne valley dialect". --Oami 17:21, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sweden Bias 

message: Meänkieli lacks two of the declensions used in standard Finnish, the comitative and the instructive cases.
I would reword this: Meänkieli lacks two of the cases used in standard Finnish, the comitative and the instructive.
The word "declension" has two closely related meanings in grammatical terminology. It means the process of declining a word or group of words, i.e, of giving them their appropriate case forms. If a student is asked to decline the Latin word mensa, he will respond with the catalogue of all its case forms - mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensā; mensae, mensae, mensās, mensārum, mensīs, mensīs.  The verb "decline" can also be used intransitively:  puella declines like mensa. "The declension of mensa" means the pattern of case-endings of mensa.
The other meaning of "declension" is a particular pattern of endings, in contrast with other patterns of endings. It is tempting to speak of Finnish having two declensions, with fronted and non-fronted vowels, but the correspondences are so precise and invariable, that it is a question of phonology rather than morphology. In Latin, many words are declined like mensa. This pattern is called the first declension, or a-declension.  The noun servus declines, servus, serve, servum, servī, servō, servō; servī, servī, servōs, servōrum, servīs, servīs. This pattern is the second declension or o-declension.
The sentence quoted above from the article implies that different nouns have different sets of endings, that Finnish has three or more such patterns, of which Meänkieli lacks two.
Cheers - Neil Copeland — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.109.252.196 (talk) 04:04, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Terminology: declension 

message: Meankieli is arguably a term that has been introduced for political purposes to refer to Finnish dialects spoken in northern Sweden. 
There has been considerable pressure on the Swedish authorities to grant Finnish an official status in view not only of the indigenous and historic Finnish minority in the north of the country, but also because of the existence of a more recent Finnish immigrant community in southern and central Sweden.
By classifying the northern Finnish dialects as a separate language, the Swedish authorities have been able to meet their international treaty obligations towards established minority groups and circumvent the need to grant an official status to Finnish -- a move that they have been relectant to make in view of the size of the Finnish immigrant population and the repercussions it would have had on the status of other immigrant languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.185.144.120 (talk) 18:13, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The politics of Finnish in Swedish 

message: Meänkieli may have some differences to standard Finnish, but this must be a joke:
"...Meänkieli also contains many loanwords from Swedish, pertaining to daily life, such as "ampulansi" as "ambulance"..."
In Finnish "ambulance" is "ambulanssi", a loan word from Swedish.
"...Meänkieli lacks two of the declensions used in standard Finnish, the comitative and the instructive cases..."
The comitative and instructive case do not de facto exist in the Finnish language either.  Certainly they
are not "used", except in some grammar books. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.78.197.64 (talk) 15:01, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course it's a joke. I don't wish to offend anyone, but the whole idea of "Meänkieli" being a language is a joke. It's a Finnish dialect, and a pretty standard dialect too. There are many Finnish dialects that are more different from Standard Finnish than Meänkieli and are still seen as Finnish dialects. This isn't even like the differences between English in the US and the UK, it's more like inventing a bunch of new languages in Devonshire, Kent, Shropshire etc. JdeJ 20:25, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Of course the comitative and instructive exist in Finnish. I don't see a problem in using f.ex. the instructive containing phrase tuli varkain in speech either. --88.114.252.193 22:25, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

text: Don't the instructive and comitative cases exist in Mäenkieli? This is the first thing I've read about the language that actually makes it different from any other dialect of Finnish. For example when using the comitative do you have to use the word kanssa, you absolutely cannot use -ine?. The comitative and instructive cases are very common in the Finnish language, like the above user said. Kankkis (talk) 08:47, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: In Finnish very comitative and instructive can be replaced by postposition. What can or cannot be used only depends on how are the rules made but it is Finnish even if you make grammatical or spelling mistakes. Instructive or comitative are not natural in dialects.--SM (talk) 12:00, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meänkieli different from Finnish? 

message: Would anybody have any links to sources regarding the ethnic identity of the 40-70,000 speakers in Sweden? Do they declare Finn? Meänkieli? or simply Swedish? or anything else? Is there proof that some declare one thing whilst others something else? I'm just curious to know. Evlekis 09:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Meänkieli speaking population 

message: There seems to be a fairly clear case to be made that the variety of Finnish spoken by the majority of Finnish Americans living in North America (U.S. and Canada) is most closely related to Meänkieli, not to proper standard Finnish. Some researchers have been working on this topic, and are attempting to establish a solid basis for this theory, effectively proving it to be true. One man in particular (I am reluctant to give his name here without his permission) who grew up speaking Finnish in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has traveled to the Torne Valley in Sweden and made copious notes about the similiarities between the Meänkieli dialect and that of the dialect spoken in the most heavily concentrated Finnish American region of North America among Finnish-speaking people (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the Iron Mountains region of northern Minnesota, to be precise). 
There is an actual historic basis for this: there were large numbers of immigrants coming from the Torne Valley region to North America between 1840-1930, effectively about 10-15% of the population of that area emigrated. These people also brought with them their Laestadian religion, whose followers typically have very large families. Although other waves of Finnish-speaking immigrants arrived in North America over the decades, the Torne Valley Finns arrived early and basically overwhelmed the rest of the Finnish Americans by simply outbreeding them, until today the vast majority of Finnish speaking people in the U.S. and Canada are descended from people who spoke the Meänkieli dialect. 
I think it would be useful to make a note of this in the article. I will try to find some solid sources to back this up. If anyone has any additional information or suggestions, I'd like to hear. Thanks. --Saukkomies talk  03:40, 23 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do Finnish Americans speak Meänkieli? 

message: I made some changes into the samples of comparisions between meänkieli and standard finnish into the standard finnish sections. In the source there were only meänkieli and swedish but not standard finnish, so I used both the meänkieli and swedish texts. I myself do not speak meänkieli, I am only native speaker of Finnish and have learnt swedish at shcool. My version probably is not the best possible, as translating even into one's own native language requiers professional skills and not only that one is a native speaker. So other users are encouraged to make a better translation. Now the meänkieli section seems to be clear and beautiful language, but the finnish section is not as professional. But anyway, before my modifications the standard Finnish section  was still worse, I guess.--Urjanhai (talk) 10:16, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: The samples

message: Currently the name is VERY biased with the name "meänkieli dialects" its implying that it is a dialect. The name should be cahnged to just Meänkieli where it does not favor any side because meänkieli is the name of the form of speech in swedish torneo valley. 
Even if someone consideres it a dialect wikipedia should not be biased.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pepethefrog1234567890 (talk • contribs) 15:20, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Meänkieli is de jure one of the official minority languages of Sweden. Finnish is de jure another minority language in Sweden. Thus, the status of the language from a linguistic point of view is irrelevant. There are also different standardizing institutions. The articles name Meankieli dialects is also not a good choice, since the article hardly is dealing with the dialects of meänkieli at all. // 158.174.186.199 (talk) 07:04, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Renaming this