Language maintenance through corpus planning – the case of Kven

ABSTRACT

The Kven language that is spoken in northernmost Norway was officially recognized as a language in 2005. The history of the language community dates back to the sixteenth century according to tax books. There is still an ongoing discussion among certain language users, whether Kven is in fact a language or one of the Finnish dialects. The language planning of Kven has started in 2007 by determining the orthography and choosing principles for the standardization. This article discusses the history of the process that led to the recognition of Kven as a language and reviews the progress of the language standardization until the present. The principles of language planning are reviewed through document analysis – earlier literature, minutes or summaries and participant observation of the language board’s meetings, and expert interviews – and analysed according to Lars S. Vikør’s language planning model. Some of the preferred features seem to follow the language planning ideology of the Norwegian standards – Bokmål and Nynorsk – in terms of allowance of variation and parallel forms as well as dialectal diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Minority language
• language planning
• corpus planning
• revitalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Peräpohjola dialects are western dialects of Finnish spoken along the border between Finnish and Swedish Lapland.

2 KI (2018).

3 According to Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Dictionary of the Swedish Academy) a technolect is defined as a specialized language of a specific occupational group, jargon (SAOB).

4 Meänkieli (“our language”) is also a Finnic language closely related to Finnish and Kven, and it has a status as a national minority language in Sweden.

5 About the proximity of these two languages, see e.g. Söderholm (2010b).

6 This document is a summary of decisions regarding Kven standardization, provided by the Kven Institute.

7 Consonant gradation means that the number of consonants decreases or increases between the last and second last syllables of a word that in being inflected or conjugated, for example kukka - kukan ('a flower – a flowers).

8 Parallel forms are common in both Bokmål and Nynorsk, meaning a wordform written in two or more slightly differing spelling, e.g. mogleg and mogeleg in Nynorsk for English “possible”.

9 According to a report by Norway’s Ministy of Education (Nygaard and Bro 2015) the amount of Kven/Finnish students has gone down since 2005.