Tornedalian Finnish (Meänkieli, not Lannankieli) new phrases and new information, published 26/12/2025

Meänkieli is a Finnic language spoken in Northern Sweden, primarily in the lower Torne Valley, in Meänkieli and in Finnish: Torniolaakso, in Swedish: Tornedalen. The precise destinctions between Meänkieli and Northern Finnish are hard to determine, although there are such distinctions. Meänkieli generally refers to the dialects of Finnish on the Swedish side of the lower Tornio Valley, and does not necessarily refer to the Lannankieli and Jällivaaranmurre dialect groups or languages, which are sometimes considered to be dialect groups of Meänkieli, but which are sometimes considered to be distinct languages. Meänkieli is also closely related to the Kven language spoken in Northern Norway. These northern Finnic languages are also completely distinct from the indigenous Sámi languages in Northern Scandinavia, and from the indigenous Nordic languages of Northern Scandinavia, and from earlier, less-known languages. Despite that these languages have important - in my opinion, ancient, differences, their general grammar and structure is largely the same, and they are generally mutually intelligible to my knowledge. 

Speakers of Tornedalian Finnish or Meänkieli often refer to their land as Meänmaa, literally meaning "our land", in the same way that they name their language Meänkieli, meaning "our language". As people they may refer to themselves as meänmaalaiset. These words are formed from meän - "our", maa - "land", kieli - "language", and the -laiset suffix, which is the plural of the -lainen suffix, these suffixes are used in Finnish and Meänkieli, commonly to indicate the people of a certain place or land. 

Despite that Meänkieli shares most of its vocabulary with Finnish - even when small phonetic differences are taken into account, Meänkieli does contain many words not found in Finnish. Some of these words are of Swedish origin, e.g. praatata - "to speak", related to Swedish att prata - "to speak", but then the verb puhua - "to speak" is also found in Meänkieli, and in standard Finnish. So in a sense many of the more Swedish-connected words, also have Finnic equivalents. There is also, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere, words in Meänkieli which seem to be of uncertain origin, being ancient in Meänkieli and Meänmaa and perhaps also present in now-extinct substrate languages, the identities of which we do not yet know. Two curious words I recently noticed in Meänkieli are kunksa meaning a "sailing ship" and tyyris meaning a "river bank". 

I sadly do not know much about the spiritual traditions of the Meänmaalaiset as they describe this spirituality themselves. In Meänmaa, a tietäjä is a kind of shaman or wizard-type figure. The same concept is also found in Finland, although, Northern Finland and the present day lands of Meänkieli, Jällivaaranmurre, Lannankieli and Kven speakers, were very much associated with a kind of sorcery, wisdom and magic. The Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala, also gives strong implications that the "north" of the Finnic world, was where a lot of the most ancient magic, and knowledge, seems to have been held.