Master student Linnéa Backvall has won the Swedish-Finnish thesis competition
Linnéa Backvall, a Master’s student at Uppsala University, has won a Sweden Finnish essay competition organised by the Sweden Finnish Delegation. Photo: Kai Kangassalo.
Linnéa Backvall, a Master’s student at Uppsala University’s Department of Linguistics and Philology, has won a Sweden Finnish essay competition organised by the Sweden Finnish Delegation.
Backvall’s Master’s thesis examined the revitalisation of the Finnish language from the perspective of young people.
The jury’s motivation reads as follows:
“Linnéa Backvall’s English-language Master’s thesis ‘“As long as there are Sweden Finns then there should be a need”: A qualitative study of Finnish revitalisation initiated by the Sweden Finnish Youth Organisation’ is a thorough and meticulously conducted study on a topical subject – the involvement of young people in the revitalisation of the Finnish language in Sweden. The work is painstaking and comprehensive, confidently documenting key elements of language revitalisation alongside young people’s personal experiences. The jury would also like to highlight Backvall’s theoretical approach, through which she highlights experiences related to language revitalisation efforts using what is known as the COD model, developed by François Grin and Lo Bianco. This is also evidence of a theoretical ambition.”
About the essay competition
The essay competition of the Sweden Finnish Delegation awards the prize to Master’s and Bachelor’s theses on an alternating basis. The aim of the competition is to highlight new, evidence-based knowledge about the national minority of Sweden Finns, Sweden-Finnishness and the Finnish language in Sweden.
Anders Berndt