16 South Saami and other minority languages in Norway and Sweden
As pointed out in an earlier chapter, Swedish and Norwegian belong to quite another language family than Saami does. Swedish and Norwegian both belong to the Germanic language family, more precisely the North Germanic or Nordic languages. This means that the Swedish and Norwegian language are very different to South Saami, but quite similar to each other. That’s not to say that the language situation of the two countries is identical, though.
Norway is unique in the sense that there are two official versions of written Norwegian of equal status: One based on the language of the Danish colonial government of the period 1537 – 1814 (bokmål [e.i. book language]), and one created in the latter part of the 19th century based on the different dialects of the Norwegian population (nynorsk [e.i.] New Norwegian]). Partly as a function of this, the tolerance for the use of dialects in public space and official contexts has been very large compared to many other nations. However, one could argue that while different kinds of Norwegian has been widely accepted, far less room has been given to minority languages, either the language of Norway’s national minorities or the language of more recent immigrants.
Sweden is linguistically more unified around one standard form of written Swedish, and when Swedes speak in public, they find less acceptance for the use of dialects. This relatively speaking stricter and more standardized conception of “Swedish” also has not always been a hospitable environment for linguistic variation.
In addition to the three Saami language varieties, the state of Norway has defined three additional minority languages: Kven, romani and romanes.
The Kven language is of the finno-ungrian branch and closely related to meänkieli, a minority language spoken in parts of Sweden. Kven was recognized as a minority language by the Norwegian state in 2005. Today Kven is threatened because the natural transference of the language between generations is broken, and there are few active users of the language of the younger generation.
Romani is the language of a group of people that has been a part of Norwegian society since at least the 16th century. Traditionally their lives and culture were characterized by travelling, but today a large part of them have a residentiary lifestyle. Romani is mostly a language used in oral communication, but there are being made efforts to use it in writing. No numbers exist as to how many master and use the romani language in Norway. For most of the Norwegian romani, it is their second language after Norwegian.
Romanes is what the daily language of the romani group is called in Nordic countries to distinguish them from the the Norwegian and Swedish romani (see above). Romanes is an indo-aryan language, and it is the daily language for most of the romanes in Norway and Sweden. Like most of the other national minority languages in Norway, romanes has mainly been an oral language, but there is a growing tendency to written use as well, not least in social media communication. The language is a very important part of the romanes’ social and cultural life, and vital despite the small (but unsure) numbers of speakers.
As a consequence of Norway’s definition of these languages as national minority languages, they are protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ETS No. 148) which Norway ratified in 1993. By this treaty, Norway has to ensure respect for the geographical area of each language; the need for their promotion, and facilitate and/or encourage their use.
