Historical varieties of Finnish are spoken in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia. Some of them have developed into separate varieties, which have recently become identified as languages. Northern Norway, with the Kvens and Kven Finnish, and Northern Sweden, with the Tornedalians and Meänkieli, present the two most distinct developments. Also the roots of Finnish, or Sweden Finnish, in the remainder of Sweden, go back at least to the 15-16th centuries. Both Meänkieli and Finnish/Sweden Finnish became official minority languages of Sweden in 2001. Their legal rights differ somewhat, as do their populations, their demographic patterns, linguistic characteristics and levels of language standardisation. Meänkieli is now being standardised through several processes: it is being codified by some writers, who have for example translated the Bible, written novels and children's books, etc. There is also literacy acquisition by adults. This partly takes place through an e-mail list, where some members write in Meänkieli for the first time ever.
The situation for Sweden Finnish is different. First, the high proportion of migrants from Finland is crucial for the cultural and written language domains of Finnish in Sweden. They retain the similarity to Finland Finnish. The Sweden Finnish Language Board consequently has stated as a leading principle, that the distance to Finland Finnish standard (FFSt) should not be allowed to increase dramatically. FFSt is used for mother tongue instruction in both compulsory school and in higher education in Sweden, but it may be felt by the children as a different and remote variety. Other factors complicate the corpus planning of Finnish in Sweden. The lack of diffusion of modern FFSt, the geographical and social dialects of Finland and their further developments in Sweden, youth/bilingual Finnish varieties in Sweden, and the slowly emerging Sweden Finnish, all contribute to the formation of a common spoken Sweden Finnish variety, which ultimately could function as a norm for an independent corpus planning. Still, the natural norm for most Sweden Finns is traditional written FFSt. In other words, an evident clash is developing between the norm and language use in practice, the latter of which furthermore is poorly described.
The paper will discuss some more recent linguistic representations of Sweden Finnish, and their implications for corpus planning. The role of a linguistically more extensive corpus planning than that of lexical work for the status planning of Sweden Finnish, as well as the need of sociolinguistic basic studies will also be discussed. The problems of implementing such work will also be briefly discussed.