Query (Me änkieli)

[Ante Aikio]

This discussion raises interesting and important questions, but it is
starting to get sidetracked. The original issue at hand was the number of
speakers of Uralic languages today, which raises the question of what
Uralic languages there are in the first place. Therefore we are not
primarily interested in debating interpretations in the field of Finnic
comparative liguistics and historical dialectology in this connection
(even though we think we are quite familiar with these issues).

In our viewpoint, if there is a speech community that shows a consistent
linguistic self-identification as "speakers of X", and X refers to a
linguistic variety that can easily be distinguished from other varieties,
then this should be enough for granting variety X the status of a language.
 

I think we must repeat that there are no such things as "the linguistic
viewpoint" and "the linguistic level" when it comes to drawing language
boundaries. Language is a social phenomenon and in the real world language
boundaries are a part of social reality. It hardly makes sense to choose
to ignore these social factors and
label this as "the linguistic viewpoint", or to classify sociolinguistic
criteria as "non-linguistic".
 

The main issue here is practical rather than theoretical. There are
perhaps some 50 000 people in Sweden who speak a Finnic language variety
labeled "Meänkieli". If Meänkieli is not a language, what language should
these speakers be counted under? It would be very odd to force these
people into the category of Finnish speakers, especially as it goes
completely against the linguistic self-identification of the people in
question.
 


Ante Aikio
Laura Arola


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