Languages of Sweden
The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly ten million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to SIL's Ethnologue). Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns. The language is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to Ethnologue.
Meänkieli dialects
Linguistically, Meänkieli consists of two dialect subgroups, the Torne Valley dialects (also spoken on the Finnish side of the Torne River) and the Gällivare dialects, which both belong to the larger Peräpohjola dialect group ("see Dialect chart"). For historical reasons it has the status of a minority language in Sweden. In modern Swedish the language is normally referred to officially as "meänkieli", although colloquially an older name, "tornedalsfinska" ("Torne Valley Finnish"), is still commonly used. Sveriges Radio tends to use "tornedalsfinska" for the culture generally and "meänkieli" specifically for the language.