Official minority languages of Sweden
Finnish has been spoken in Sweden ever since the (then provincial) borders were drawn in the 13th century. Sweden has always had a significant migration to and from Finland. As the two languages belong to different language families it is easy to distinguish them, unlike the neighbouring languages Norwegian and Danish. The number of Finnish speakers in Sweden today has been estimated to over 460,000. Even though many current Swedes are of full or mixed Finnish descent, Swedish is the main language in practice for many bilinguals.
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.