Engaging with Meänkieli in family life: parental narratives of language transmission in northern Sweden

The study explores parental narratives of transmitting the national minority language Meänkieli to their children in contemporary Sweden. Focusing on families with young children enrolled in preschools that provide Meänkieli instruction, it examines how parents’ language trajectories shape their affordances and motivations for using Meänkieli in the home. The data consist of autobiographical interviews with ten parents from six families and are analysed through the lens of lived experiences of language within a narrative framework. The findings show that transmission draws on family histories, silences, and imagined futures, shaping the reimagination of Meänkieli in everyday life. The analysis highlights diverse speaker profiles with varying ties to Meänkieli, influencing how it is conceptualised and practiced. While preschool teaching creates spaces for Meänkieli, access to these spaces becomes important for some families’ processes of learning and reclaiming the language. The preschool emerges as an emotionally significant institution, while at the same time revealing tensions related to reclaiming Meänkieli as the language of intergenerational communication. The study contributes to research on family multilingualism and language revitalisation by foregrounding the affective and biographical dimensions of language transmission involving Meänkieli, a largely understudied language rooted in the Arctic region of northern Sweden.