Languages of Sweden
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forming a dialect continuum. Five "national minority languages" are also recognized by Swedish law: Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, Romani and Sami.
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.