Finnish Kalo language

Finnish Kalo (kaalengo tšimb) is a language of the Romani language family (a subgroup of Indo-European) spoken by Finnish Kale. The language is related to but not mutually intelligible with Scandoromani or Angloromani.

Finnish Kalo
kaalengo tšimb
Native toFinland, Sweden
Native speakers
10,000 in Finland (2001 census)[1]
1,700 in Sweden (2009)[1]
Indo-European
Language codes
ISO 639-3rmf
Glottologkalo1256[2]

Finnish Kalo has 6.000–10.000 speakers and many young people do not know it anymore, the majority of the speakers are from older generations and about two thirds of the Romanis in Finland still speak the language. There have been some revival efforts. Dictionaries and grammar books have been made and you can learn it in some universities. Finnish Kalo has some similarities with the Romani languages in Hungary where stress is placed on the first syllable of the word. This is due to both Finnish and Hungarian being part of the Uralic language family and them having influenced the Romani language. Finnish Kalo has been taught in schools since the late 1980s and there were some courses available in the 1970s.[3]

Current situation

In 2012 only 30% of the 13.000 Romanis in Finland spoke Kalo fluently but about 50% could understand it. People do not pass the language to their children well but there are reviving efforts and for many years there has been language nests in Rovaniemi, and in Helsinki Romani courses were established. In Finland the municipalities can establish Romani courses if enough people want to learn it, tough there has been problems with there not being enough resources.[4]

Kalo in Finland


Elsewhere

Grammar of Kalo

Dictionary

Wikipedia

References
  1. Finnish Kalo at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Kalo Finnish Romani". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. "Kielikello".
  4. "Romanikieli on vaarassa kadota". Yle Uutiset (in Finnish). Retrieved 2020-04-19.


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