Fwd: Re: Query

Florian Siegl florian.siegl at gmx.net
Wed Oct 31 10:10:57 UTC 2012


On behalf of Trond Trosterud whose attempts did apparently not got through.




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: Query
Date: 	Wed, 31 Oct 2012 08:17:00 +0000
From: 	Trosterud Trond <trond.trosterud at uit.no>
To: 	Florian Siegl <florian.siegl at gmx.net>
CC: 	ura-list at helsinki.fi <ura-list at helsinki.fi>



My post to the list from yesterday may not have gone through, I have at 
least not got it:

Trond.

---- quote

The best estimates on the number of speakers of both the Sami languages 
and of Kven in Norway can be given by Torkel Rasmussen. As for Kven:

*Rasmussen, Torkel 
<http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/kvensk/advancedsearch.php?Creator=Rasmussen,%20Torkel&submit=search>*
Kuinka moni osaa suomea ja kveeniä Pohjois-Norjassa? / s. 41-47 /2005 
<http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/kvensk/advancedsearch.php?Date=2005&submit=search>/
Arina : nordisk tidsskrift for kvensk forskning = pohjoismainen 
kveenitutkimuksen aikakausjulkaisu / Nr 1 /


I have a copy of the article (but on the university). The empirical 
material for this article is material achieved as a byproduct from an 
investigation regarding knowledge of North Saami in Norway, and some of 
the follow-up questions given to Saami speakers were not given to the 
Kven speakers. But this investigation is, as far as I know, the best 
there is since the last Norwegian census asking for language knowledge. 
I will not quote any numbers without the article at hand, but as you can 
see, an investigation thus exists.

Some of the census data from the first half of the 20th century are also 
treated in my article
Trond Trosterud: Language Assimilation During the Modernisation Process: 
Experiences from Norway and North-West Russia. 93-122. Acta Borealia 
(2008): Volume 25(2) (ref: 
http://site.uit.no/acta/category/trosterud-trond/)

---- /quote.

Now, I have Torkels article in front of me and cite, from his page 41: 
Elleve present av befolkningen over 18 år i det undersøkte området kan 
finsk. Seks prosejt har svart at de kan kvensk. 13 prosent har opplyst 
at de kan enten finsk eller kvensk eller begge deler.

He then extrapolates the representative data, and get the following 
absolute numbers (op.cit):
"[D]et er 10340 personer som kan finsk og 5640 som kan kvensk. (...) Det 
totalet antallet personer som kan enten kvensk eller finsk eller begge 
deler [er] 12220.

The empirical basis fro the data is a telephone query done by the 
Norwegian query company Opinion, by interviewing 5751 persons in 
potentially Sami municipalities (these municipalities overlap with the 
Kven ones). The absolute numbers are calculated by estimating that the 
sample is representative.

I recommend his article, it also breaks don the numbers according to 
municipality, and e.g. shows that the largest Finnish and/or Kven 
municipalities are Karasjok (32.9%), Kautokeino (32,8%) and Tana 
(30.5%). In the two former municipalities the respondents knowing 
Finnish and Kven also know Sami, whereas in Tana, 250 of the 724 
Finnish/Kven speakers do not know Sami, whereas 477 know both 
Finnish/Kven and Sami.

Trond.





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