Standardising Kven: Participation and the role of users

Abstract

Norway’s ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities has had a profound impact on Norwegian minority language policies. This article focuses on how the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in particular has changed the status of Kven, a Finnic language spoken by a minority in Northern Norway. Initially, though covered by the Charter, the Kven language was regarded as a dialect of Finnish and referred to as Kven/Finnish, but in April 2005 Kven was recognised as a language and not just a di alect of Finnish. This article investigates to what extent this recognition has in fluenced the situation of the Kven language by discussing what effects the status of Kven as a separate language has had on practical policies, such as standardisation. The aims of this article are to give an overview of Norwegian minority language policies from a historical and contemporary perspective, concentrating on the Kven language. The primary focus is on the participation and role of users in the standardisation of Kven. In the following, I will give an outline of the history of the Kven people and the Norwegian policies of assimilation a nd discuss to what extent the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages has influenced Norwegian language policies towards the Kven language. I outline how various user groups were included in the standardisation process in order to create a standard that would be seen as legitimate by Kven speakers. In the final section of the article, I analyse how a Kven speaker relates to the idea of a Kven standard when interviewed and how her positioning changes when she reads a text in Kven for the first time. The article concludes by suggesting that a multifaceted methodological approach is called for when analysing complex social processes such as minority language standardisation.