Torne Valley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Torne Valley or Torne River Valley, is a valley on the border of Sweden and Finland. It is named after the Torne River flowing through the valley and into the Gulf of Bothnia. Some of the townships and municipalities that make up the Torne Valley area are Haparanda, Tornio, Ylitornio, Övertorneå, Pajala and Kolari.

The Finnish and Swedish sides of the river were once one cultural entity, as before 1809 they were both parts of Sweden. Once the current border between the two countries had been established, each side of the river has become influenced by the majority cultures in their respective countries, but still retain some traditional elements. As an example, on the Swedish side of the Torne Valley one still makes types of food, such as rieska, that are usually considered Finnish rather than Swedish.

Many of the towns and villages were built around the river, and some of those were thus split in two when Finland was ceded to Russia in 1809. There are still several villages that have the same name on the Swedish and Finnish sides of the river.

On the Swedish side of the valley, Finnish was still the majority language until the 20th century. This is obvious in the many Finnish village and other place names on the Swedish side of the border. The amount of Finnish speakers has now declined drastically, because of national Swedish influence and compulsory schooling in Swedish. People in the younger generations mostly have Swedish as their mother tongue. The local dialect of Finnish, Torne Valley Finnish or, with a neologism, Meänkieli, has today been acknowledged as a minority language in Sweden. The people who speak it are often referred to as Tornedalians, although this term could also be defined as referring to people living in the Torne Valley, who are not all speakers of Meänkieli. The originally Finnish-speaking land area is far greater than the actual river valley; it extends as far west as Gällivare. Although confusing from a geographic point of view, this whole area is often referred to as Torne Valley.

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