It Feels Like Home : Linguistic repertoire and language identity among elder Tornedalians in Uppsala

Abstract: Based on the accounts by four elder speakers of the Swedish minority language Meänkieli, given in October 2020, this study investigates the attitudes and sentiments among elder speakers of Meänkieli towards the languages they speak. The participants have migrated as young adults from the Torne Valley, where Meänkieli is traditionally spoken, to places in Sweden where their language use has been restricted by the lack of Meänkieli domains. The testimonies have been collected via semi-structured interviews and analysed through thematic analysis, taking perspectives from theories on language ideology, linguistic identity and linguistic biography, revealing how the participants' linguistic personas and repertoires have taken form throughout their lives, alongside their life experiences.  The results show that the participants highly value their multilingualism, and that their language use is a deliberate as well as subconscious tool for expression and affirmation of identity and belonging. It is also shown that the languages often are associated with discrete chronological and geographical parts of the participants' lives. Furthermore, have the participants not passed Meänkieli on to their children, due to the lack of parental strategies and learner motivation, showcasing the importance of linguistic context and child agency in language acquisition. Future research would benefit from inclusion of a wider spectrum of social class, and from testimonies of the children of migrated Meänkieli speakers to complement the parental perspective, in order to further investigate the factors behind language shift outside of a minority language's domains.