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:
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)