Language
The Kven language is a Finnic language. From a linguistic point of view the Kven language is a mutually intelligible dialect of Finnish, but for political and historical reasons it received in 2005 status of a legal minority language in Norway, within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
The Kven language differs from Finnish, since the Kven population was in effect isolated from other Finnish-speaking people. The Kven language has come to incorporate many Norwegian loan words, and Finnish words no longer used in Finland are still used. In a 2005 government report, the number of people speaking the Kven language in Norway is estimated to be between 2000 and 8000, depending on the criteria used.
Read more about this topic: Kven People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
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“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
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—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)