The voice of a “tongueless” periphery

Abstract

In my study, I am going to examine the relationship between language, politics and poetry in the context of identity development concerning the Meänkieli speaking community living in the Torne/ Tornio Valley. The Torne River Valley (or Tornedalian) Finns were cut off from Finland in 1809, when Sweden lost the territory of Finland in favour of Russia. Ever since, the Tornedalian Finns have become the victims of a definite assimilation policy. Their linguistic emancipation started in the 1980s. Their language, Meänkieli, has been a minority language officially acknowledged in Sweden since 2000. Still, it is a seriously stigmatized and endangered language nowadays, as well. Many people in the world think that “language” should be understood as the language spoken by the majority of a national state. Still, most of the world’s endangered languages are the languages of indigenous and ethnic groups that only exist as minority languages. It is paradoxical that minority languages constitute, in fact, the large majority, although they have been considered peripherical or marginalized. The notion of “periphery versus centre” has a long tradition in being applied in different fields of human sciences, mainly in social and political analysis. The aim of my research on the identity of ethnic and linguistic minorities is to rethink these notions in terms of the dynamics of multilingual ethnic minority versus unilingual national majority. I disapprove of the idea that what belongs to the centre is to be considered a standard and of greater value than what is associated with the periphery. In fact “periphery” and “centre” are related and dynamic terms, depending on the perspective from which we look upon them. The most eloquent example of the spiritual richness of the periphery in Sweden is Bengt Pohjanen who writes poetry, prose, drama, opera librettos, articles, film scripts etc. in three languages: Meänkieli, Swedish and Finnish. Possessing a thorough knowledge of the once lively Meänkieli culture, he is also a consistent representative of alterity in the hegemonic Swedish culture. As Bengt Pohjanen is a writer and a poet, as well as a public figure, a key personality of revitalizing the Meänkieli language, his works are especially suitable to be examined in a complex way, from the point of view of different human sciences (linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology).