Analyzes dominant trends in the linguistic situation of Finnish Sami. The aim is to discuss these trends as a component of indigenous people's problems with linguistic inequality. Sami language and its speakers, Sami language shift, Sami schooling, status of Sami the language, and the reification of the language are all discussed. (20 references)…

Focuses on the analysis of six-year-old Finnish-speaking children's second-language acquisition during their first year of Swedish immersion in kindergarten. (JL)

The conditions of the development and the present status of the mother tongue in the Finland-Swedish compulsory school are discussed from an investigation under progress. The aims, contents, and methods are examined from both cognitive and affective points of view in the curricula that have governed teaching in the compulsory school. (Author/CB)

Language use among linguistic minorities of the Northern Calotte (areas of Norway, Sweden, and Finland that lie above the Arctic Circle) is reviewed from the perspective of history and ecology of language. Two case studies examining language shift in these areas, where Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Sami are spoken, are also considered.…

Comparison of free written compositions of 86 bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) and 86 monolingual (Swedish) third-, sixth-, and ninth-graders in a Finland Swedish comprehensive school revealed that bilinguals produced significantly more syntactic, vocabulary, and phraseology errors. Background variables correlating with errors included the student's…