ABSTRACT
The linguistic situation of the formerly Finnish-speaking, nowadays bilingual, Torne Valley (Tornedalen) in northern Sweden has been debated a great deal in Scandinavia. Especially during the 1970s, it also became known in the international literature on bilingualism as the area from which the debate on ‘semilingualism’ once emanated (cf. Hansegård, 1968; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1984).
