An interview with Leena Huss

Leena Huss was born in Sweden but grew up in Finland.After studying at the Helsinki School of Economics, where she obtained a Master of Science in Economics, she moved to Sweden and shifted to studies in Finnish and Finno-Ugric Languages at Uppsala University.Raising a (Finnish-Swedish) bilingual family of her own in Sweden inspired her to pursue studies in child bilingualism which in 1991 led to a dissertation called Simultan tvsprkighet i svensk-finsk kontext [Simultaneous bilingualism in a Swedish-Finnish context].Later on, she conducted several research periods in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland, to study the situation of the northern minority languages Smi, Menkieli and Kven, all of which were (and still are) regarded as endangered languages even in their core areas.When Sweden ratified the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in the year 2000, she became the first Swedish member of the Expert Committee for the Charter.The five years she spent in the Expert Committee gave her a broader insight into the endangerment of minority languages in Europe and impacted her research, making her gradually begin to focus more and more on language loss and language reclamation in northern Europe.Today, Leena Huss is Professor Emerita at Uppsala University (the Hugo Valentin Centre) in Sweden.She has published extensively on reversing language shift in northern Scandinavia and Finland and has edited and co-edited volumes on managing multilingualism in Sweden, linguistic revitalization in education, language emancipation in Europe, the situation of the Smi and Smi languages, and language reclamation and revitalization worldwide.Her current research interests include language policies and language planning in Scandinavia, multilingualism, and linguistic revitalization.In addition to her own minority language Finnish in Sweden she has a special interest in the revitalization of South Smi, and together with South Smi colleagues she has started projects and published articles and booklets on language revitalization in practice.It has also been important for her to assist minority language communities in Sweden by contributing to community and municipal language revitalization projects as well as giving talks about child bilingualism, language maintenance and language revitalization in theory and practice.Her present focus is on the impact of language loss and