- From: Kent Karlsson <kentk@cs.chalmers.se>
- Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:37:25 +0100 (CET)
- To: www-international@w3.org, ietf-languages@alvestrand.no
- Cc: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>, Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>, "Tex Texin" <tex@i18nguy.com>
John,
Since you bring up the issue...
> I have excluded languages that are only national/official in a single
> country: thus Swedish is on the list (it is official in both Sweden
> and Finland, and in fact takes sharply divergent forms in the two
> countries)
"Sharply divergent" is overstating the issue. Finlandssvenska is (apart
from a possible finnish accent) mostly a slightly elderly form of Swedish.
It is fully comprehensible in Sweden. The dialects of Swedish in Sweden
itself are more divergent than that.
Note also that the Swedish spoken in Åland ("country code" AX), a
part of Finland, is identical to "rikssvenska" (the de facto official
dialect of Swedish.
And yes, as Keld mentions, Finnish is an official **minority** language
in Sweden, as are four other languages:
finska, Finnish
samiska, Saami
tornedalsfinska (meänkieli), Torndedalian(?) Finnish
(seen as a separate language from Finnish; I don't
know how different it is from official Finnish)
jiddisch, Yiddish
romani (zigenarspråk), Romani
In addition there are around 200 'immagrant languages' spoken in Sweden;
*some* of them sometimes occur in official communications, like voting
information, hospital information, and such. Though they do not have any
offical status.
Kind regards
/kent k
Received on Monday, 13 December 2004 16:37:30 UTC