Marie Nelson

Stockholm University, Sweden

Swedish as a non-dominant dominant variety - The language Situation on the Aland Islands

Keywords: the Aland Islands, language policy, language use, non-dominant dominant variety

The Aland Islands, an archipelago of 6,700 islands and skerries situated between Finland and Sweden in the Baltic Sea, is a Swedish-speaking autonomous province in Finland. Finland has two national languages: Finnish and Swedish. The Swedish-speaking population in Finland comprises a total of 290,000 Speakers out of 5.2 million, that is 5.6% of the total population (Norrby et al. 2012). Almost 10% of them, or 27,000, live on the Aland Islands.

In many ways, not least in terms of language use, the Situation of the Aland Islands is special. In 1921 the Council of the League of Nations decided that the Aland Islands, which had attempted to rejoin the country of Sweden, should remain under the sovereignty of Finland. Finland, though, had to guarantee the protection of the Swedish language on the islands (Loughlin & Daftary 1999, Hepburn 2014).

By definition and previous terminology the Swedish language, spoken by 95% of the Älanders (Hepburn 2014:472), is a non-dominant variety. In this talk I will discuss the language Situation on the Aland Islands from a pluricentric point of view and will argue for the introduction of the clarifying term non-dominant dominant variety. The study is part of the research Programme Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages - Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish (c.f. http://www.su.se/svefler/ivip/in-english).

References:

Hepburn, Eve, 2014: Forging autonomy in a unitary state: The Aland Islands in Finland. Comparative European Politics 12. P. 468-487.

Loughlin, lohn & Farimah, Daftary, 1999: Insular regions and European Integration: