Dr Riitta Valijarvi and colleagues awarded Swedish Research Council grant
8 December 2023
![Flag of Tornedalians](/ssees/sites/ssees/files/styles/large_image/public/flag_of_tornedalians_2007.svg_.png?itok=t1bp4h5L)
Rogier Blokland (Uppsala University) and Riitta Valijärvi (UCL, Uppsala University) in collaboration with Elina Kangas (The Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore), have been awarded a four-year grant (£500,000) by the Swedish Research Council 2024-2027. The project is called "Meänkieli: Spoken Corpus and Descriptive Grammar" and involves the creation of an annotated corpus with spoken data and a comprehensive descriptive grammar that can be used to revitalise and standardise this endangered and minoritised language. Meänkieli is spoken by 20,000-50,000 people in Northern Sweden. It is closely related to Finnish and Kven.